e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Health Literacy series on “Engaging the Patient” blog
Emmi Solutions, a provider of great interactive patient education tools, is running its second health literacy series on their blog "Engaging the Patient."
Lab Results for All! Of Data Liberation, Participatory Medicine, and Government 2.0
On September 14, HHS released for comment draft lab results regulations that will, if finalized, effectively bathe the Achilles' heel of health data in the River Styx of ¡data liberación! Lab results will be made available to patients, just like all other health...
“Design and create a safe, decent, patient centered healthcare system.”
Yesterday the New York Times reported that some health insurers have applied to regulatory agencies to push premiums sharply higher - usually double-digit increases, while citizens are suffering.  This falls on top of the 11 year history reported last year by the...
Nancy Finn: Talking to your doctors and getting what you need
Guest blogger and SPM member Nancy Finn looks at ways to improve patient-physician communication. There has been a lot of discussion about patient/provider communication, partly driven by the move to electronic health records and the question of who has access to the...
Beth Austin: Choosing a doctor and other death-defying feats
Guest blogger Beth Austin shares her professional and personal advice on choosing the right doctor. She is the principal of Crescendo Consulting Group. I’ve spent a lot of time in my professional life knee-deep in articles on healthcare quality and medical...
Peer-to-peer Healthcare at Medicine 2.0
I was honored to give the closing keynote at the Medicine 2.0'11 Congress at Stanford. In preparation for it, I gathered all of the Pew Internet Project's recent research on social networks, smartphones, and health communications. Then I added stories from the front...
Your Medical Mind: New book on *your* medical decision making process
In the past year I've come to see medical decision making as one of the key crucibles in which participatory medicine plays out. We've blogged several times about shared decision making (SDM), and by its nature it requires participatory thinking. A new book was...
The unexpected power of storytelling
The Journal of Participatory Medicine recently published a new commentary, "A Skydiver Jumps, and an Online Community Exults," about the unexpected power of storytelling in a lung cancer support group. After sharing an uplifting story with her online group, Patricia...
Neel Shah: Using bedside stories to unmuddy the waters
Guest blogger Dr. Neel Shah is the Executive Director of www.CostsOfCare.org and a senior resident in the Massachusetts General Hospital-Brigham & Women’s Hospital combined residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology. Last year, the nonprofit that I direct launched an...
BMJ commentary: “Enlist the patients’ help”
Tessa Richards, assistant editor at the British Medical Journal, has posted a well reasoned commentary on the BMJ site, "Enlist the patients' help." I'm no expert on the UN's work here but what we seem to be seeing is, once again, paternalism: "We who know all...
Guest post: Overcoming “battle fatigue” in an online support community
Another post from the Inspire.com network of patient commuÂniÂties. This one's from New Hampshire resident Linnea Duff, an active Inspire participant who has Stage IV NSCLC (non-small-cell lung cancer). She blogs at Life And Breath. It's often been said that different...
The Green Button idea in practice
E-Patient Dave's post about the Green Button idea generated a lively and substantive discussion in the Comments section. The idea of making it easy for patients to anonymously share their data online for the benefit of research is apparently one whose time has come....