e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
The Patient Activation Measure (PAM): a framework for developing patient engagement
In any movement there's a stage of maturation, where aspirations get fleshed out with specifics. That time is arriving for participatory medicine. As patient engagement (aka consumer engagement) Â earns attention, the question increasingly arises: "Where do we start?...
“When I became a patient, I felt my identity slipping away.”
Participatory medicine requires an empowered partnership, in which patients express their wants and pursue their goals in partnership with providers who hear them and work together. And that's not just about the biology. In this powerful narrative, a hospital...
e-Patient Training via TED Talk: “Battling Bad Science”
We've often said here that when an e-patient wants to be responsible for treatment decisions, it's essential to know how to evaluate the research about each option. A common mistake is to trust, blindly, news reports about a treatment, or even to trust, blindly, the...
Conference Season: Patients and Caregivers Welcome
We are deep into the fall conference season. One of my favorite trends is the increasing rate of inclusion of patients and caregivers at health care events, on stage or in the audience. The California HealthCare Foundation was a pioneer in this regard. Patients 2.0,...
e-Patient Dave corrects a “troll”
e-Patient Dave deBronkart is profiled in Technology Review, and at his own site responds to a "troll" whose comment on the Technology Review piece is dismissive of his e-patient experience.
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...
