e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Wendy Station: A community lifts up a priest in need
SPM member John Novack, of the Inspire.com patient communities, submitted this guest post by Wendy Station about another online community -- another great example of patients engaging in their care, supplementing the value they get from their medical professionals by...
What I learned at Health Foo
Just in case anyone is curious: my notes from Health Foo, a meeting held last weekend in Cambridge, MA. It's long, so skim for the 9 lessons if you want a shortcut. What: Foo Camp is an unconference, constructed on the spot by the people who show up, with just a few...
How Facebook Saved My Son’s Life (Slate.com)
"Health is social," says SPM member Phil Baumann, RN (@PhilBaumann) at HealthIsSocial.com. Slate has a dramatic story of how a mother's Facebook network helped spot - rapidly - Kawasaki Disease, a rare auto-immune disease that the family's doctors had initially...
Are patients knights, knaves, or pawns?
Sachin Jain and John Rother's JAMA commentary, "Are Patients Knights, Knaves, or Pawns?" is an article that begs to be shared. The first time I read it I had to stand up, I was so excited -- how can I design a survey to capture these questions?! was my first thought....
JoPM: A pediatric PHR, bidirectional with the EMR, where the family owns the data
I'm short on time so I haven't scoured this paper in the Journal of Participatory Medicine, but even from a skim I'll say it's important news from the front lines. Implementing an Interoperable Personal Health Record in Pediatrics: Lessons Learned at an Academic...
Information spreads like wildfire, right or wrong
I am as interested in the negative effects of technology as I am in the positive, so I recently dove into a book by Seth Mnookin: The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear, which focuses on vaccines. His summary of the Information Age challenge...
Healthcare Associated Infections: What’s an Infographic Got To Do With It?
The good people at GE and JESS3 have come up with an HAI infographic. It's pretty, and it conveys the horrible information that many of us already know -- healthcare associated infections kill about 100,000 people a year, and add $35 billion a year to our collective...
What happens when you ask Atul Gawande to join a Twitter discussion of his work?
Awesome short post by Twitter buddy AnneMarie Cunningham (Twitter @AMCunningham), a GP in Cardiff, UK. The post starts like this: "On Sunday afternoon I spotted Atul Gawande tweeting whilst watching the Wimbledon final... I thought I would let him know that in a few...
First Diagnosing Mole iPhone app
Well, it was bound to happen. Skin Scan is a new iPhone app that purports to analyze your moles for evidence of malignancy -- all in the application itself through its own proprietary algorithms. Just take a few photos over time, and it will analyze their patterns and...
Alpha Geeks in Health Care
Here's how tech guru Tim O'Reilly describes his work: So often, signs of the future are all around us, but it isn't until much later that most of the world realizes their significance. Meanwhile, the innovators who are busy inventing that future live in a world of...
“Father Knows Best”: Vint Cerf on what innovation really is
For those who like to look deep into the structure and causes of change, something fun is in process: an interview with Vint Cerf, with an explicit e-patient component. Cerf is acknowledged as one of the fathers of the internet. In my lifetime few people, if any, have...
Health Month, the game
I admit it: I'm not a gamer. But I am competitive. Plus I love micro-fitness challenges and I've read (and believe the lessons of) The Decision Tree. So when Jen McCabe described Health Month, I was intrigued. It's a game in which you choose the rules for behavior...
