e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Map the frontier. Bring data. (More coming soon!)
The Pew Internet Project and California HealthCare Foundation will released our latest report on the internet's impact on health and health care tonight at midnight (Eastern U.S. time). It is titled, "The Social Life of Health Information, 2011" (and for those...
Participate in SPM’s glossary project: Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Alphabet Soup
Guest post by medical transcriptionist Kathy Nicholls, member of the Society for Participatory Medicine. This idea grew out of a discussion on the SPM members listserv. To join, see instructions at bottom. The world of health care is filled with abbreviations....
Society for Participatory Medicine Comments on ONC Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2011-2015
We e-patients are an impatient lot, and therefore we may not be big fans of the Five-Year Plan approach to creating change. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT released a draft federal health IT strategic plan in late March, via blog post (the plan...
Terrific example of patient-centered instruction (and thinking)
A vital aspect of participatory medicine is helping patients learn how to participate. This week I saw a great example of someone who's doing it right. Here's the story, including the patient aid for download. We hear a lot about "patient-centered": patient-centered...
Patient empowerment talk hits Israel
My friend Dorron Levy, who lives near Tel Aviv, alerted me to this blog post in Hebrew; Google's English translation here. It starts with CNN's Empowered Patient reporter Elizabeth Cohen, and moves on to discuss a recent conference organized by the University of Haifa...
Pioneers of patient engagement
Credit where credit is due. The Danish Medical Association's annual meeting is coming up in a few days. For the event's blog, they requested a post about patient engagement! I wrote about the pioneers at my hospital who for many years have been saying that patients...
“Not just a bucket of information — a platform with applications.”
Over on his eCare Management blog, Vince Kuraitis (Twitter) is running a little (so far) series on "Rebuttal to PHR Luddites." His discussion reveals that the term "PHR" (personal health record) means different things to different people; to some, it's a highly manual...
e-Patient Beware: Bad Data, Badly Reported
Here’s an interesting (though oddly titled) post by Jon Richman: Lies, Damn Lies and Pharma Social Media Statistics. It is interesting because it beautifully un-packs misreporting on a topic of great interest to e-patients. It is oddly titled because while the...
“Patients are not consumers”
Economist Paul Krugman, blogging at the New York Times, argues that patients should not be referred to as "consumers." Krugman says "The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just people selling services to consumers of health care — is, well,...
Powerful new “Doctor becomes an e-patient” story in Journal of Participatory Medicine
Two years ago we wrote "Let's hear it for the 'd-patients'" — doctors who become e-patients themselves. We said "D-patients prove that patient empowerment is anything but anti-doctor. Heck, sometimes it’s a doctor preservation movement." A new article in our Journal...
Heads-up on EMR usability discussion
On April 21 I've been invited to testify again on behalf of patients at a meeting organized by the Office of the National Coordinator for health IT. As we did here twice last year, let's discuss what the meeting should here. Here's the document they sent. Comments,...
ISO: Randomized Trials
I received an email the other day containing the following question: Are you aware of any randomized trials – in progress, or published – that examined the impact of social networking web 2.0, etc. on patient-level variables (e.g., improved rates of preventive health...
