e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Jessie Gruman’s “Lessons from the Year of Living Sick-ishly”
Regular readers know that last year Jessie Gruman of the Center for Advancing Health was treated for her fourth cancer. (Knock it off, willya??) (Diagnosis post here...
JoPM: A Doctor’s Remedy for Long Waits
A new article in the Journal of Participatory Medicine tackles the problem of long wait times at doctors' offices, a leading cause of patient dissatisfaction. "Waiting Room Remedy: Doctor Pays for Delays (The Doctor's Perspective)" by Pamela Wible, MD offers a...
HBR blog: “The trouble with treating patients as consumers”
Edited a few minutes after the original post. Over on the Harvard Business Review blog a post yesterday is stirring up discussion. I hope well-informed SPM members can help shed some light in the comments there, citing as many specifics as you can. (As I compiled the...
Ileana Balcu: The marriage of HIT with quality, transparency and cooperation between patients and doctors
In the latest post in our Why I Joined SPM series, guest blogger Ileana Balcu shares her story of pain, searching, and finally healing, once she discovered the e-patient community. Follow her on Twitter at @yogileana. It was 2002 and I was happily pregnant. I thought...
GeekDoctor’s wife, newly diagnosed, gives Cancer 101’s Cancer Planner high marks
I just learned that the organization of SPM president-elect Sarah Krug, Cancer 101, has gotten what I consider a major acknowledgement. On his blog GeekDoctor.blogspot.com, John Halamka announced last month that his wife Kathy was newly diagnosed with breast cancer....
Star Tribune: Simple pharmacy change produces major quality improvement
We often note here that quality improvement in hospitals seems excruciatingly slow to happen, and engaged patients and families need to keep their eyes wide open, because sometimes a fix doesn't require being a genius. For instance, see the cartoon at right - from...
New Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine
From SPM member Ileana Balcu - A post that might be of interest to our group – about the importance of diagnosis – from a former president of Society of General Internal Medicine, Robert Centor. http://www.medrants.com/archives/6639 It includes a link to the Society...
Fred Trotter: “e-Patients: The Hackers of the Healthcare World”
SPM member Fred Trotter is a member of the open source / innovator community that knows "hacker" as a noble word - people who disregard how something was intended to be used (by its designers) and rearrange the parts to suit their needs. Today on the O'Reilly Radar...
Epic tale of Gimme My Son’s Damned Data! – by a doc *at his own hospital*
Followers of our "gimme my data" series will get a rough-edged refresher about current reality by the well-written and raw story of @WilliamDale_MD's Sunday post Medical Health Record: A Personal Journey Down the Rabbit Hole. A great narrative by a physician who...
Facebook as a source of healthcare value?? Item 2
As we work to re-engineer both the culture and the structure of healthcare, one question that constantly faces e-patients with uncommon or difficult conditions is: Where do I turn, to find genuine value? The traditional answer is "ask your doctor," and clearly that...
Monthly introduction to e-Patients.net, blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine
Follow us on Twitter (@S4PM), Facebook, and LinkedIn!  Here's how to become a member, individual or corporate. Our publications: Our blog is e-patients.net. Subscribe via RSS or email, tweets etc. Our open-access journal is the Journal of Participatory...
ACOR kidney cancer community wins 25th anniversary “Maily” Listserv award
It's fitting that our last post of the year should be about a patient community ... winning an award! ACOR's "KIDNEY-ONC" kidney cancer patient community was recently honored with the "Maily" Listserv Choice award in this, the 25th anniversary year of Listserv®...
