e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
The discovery of practice variation: follow the data
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. Sherlock Holmes, in Scandal in Bohemia I’ve been reading Jack Wennberg’s new book Tracking Medicine, which is about his...
Peer-to-peer Healthcare at the White House
It's hard to say this without sounding like I'm bragging, but that's not going to stop me: I'm going to the White House tomorrow to talk about Pew Internet Project's latest research on peer-to-peer healthcare. The White House Office of National AIDS Policy is...
Making Strides Toward Improving Health Literacy Online
This is a guest post by Jessica Mark, healthfinder.gov and Outreach Program Manager, Health Communication and eHealth Team in the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services We all struggle with complex health...
New JoPM Commentary: “Healthcare: A Human Rights and Economic Justice Issue”
JoPM has just published Healthcare: A Human Rights and Economic Justice Issue, a commentary by SPM member Kathleen McCaffrey Friedman. Drawing on her experiences as an empowered patient, Friedman argues: "It ultimately falls to us, the patients, to frame health care...
Too Many Doctors?
I don’t hide the fact that I am a dyed in the wool liberal. I read, and agree with, pretty much everything Paul Krugman writes. But, it’s rare for me to discover the kind of synergy between my Krugman-inspired ire over economic policy and politics generally and the...
Should More Doctors Participate in Social Media?
I've heard this sentiment more than once... "Doctors should participate more in social media. They should be Facebooking and Twittering and Tumblr-ing far more often than they do!" Houston Neal makes the case again over at The Medical Blog, suggesting that because...
NPR’s Talk of the Nation: Patients Seek Moral and Medical Support Online
Yesterday (March 3), NPR's popular program "Talk of the Nation" covered something we discuss often: how e-patients find information and find each other, online. Featured guests were Pat Furlong, mother of two boys with a rare disease, who started an online community,...
IHI names patient activist Dale Ann Micalizzi as 2011 co-chair
Noted patient activist Dale Ann Micalizzi, founder of Justin's HOPE (blog), has just been named co-chair of the 2011 Forum of the Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI). The IHI Forum is a major international healthcare event, with over 5,000 people attending and...
Jackie Fox: Why I Joined the Society for Participatory Medicine
This is an unusual contribution in our series Why I Joined. As we've observed (August 2008, February 2009, February 2011) that language can be important in social movements, because as words change their meaning, messages can get crossed, and what a speaker meant may...
Rare Disease Day 2011: “Raise Your Hand To Help Millions of Americans”
Again this year, as in 2009 and 2010, we're pleased to highlight Rare Disease Day (February 28), with a post from Wendy White of Siren Interactive. Here's last year's prolog: One profound shift in healthcare enabled by the internet is the Web’s ability to be a common...
Practice variation and shared decision making on CBS Evening News
In December we posted about practice variation and shared decision making (SDM), a field of research originated at Dartmouth decades ago and best known as publisher of the Dartmouth Atlas, which describes the amazing amount of unexplained variation in how many doctors...
Healthcare Out Loud
Last fall, at the e-Patient Connections conference, I gave a sneak preview of some survey results which are set to be have been released on the Pew Internet site on Monday, Feb. 28. I hoped to spark new ideas for a savvy, plugged-in audience and I ended up surprising...
