e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
What can surgeons learn from patients?
I'm going to be on a panel at the American College of Surgeons 96th Annual Clinical Congress on October 5 in Washington, DC. The session title is pretty provocative: To Tweet or Become Extinct?: Why Surgeons Need to Understand Social Networking and my part of it uses...
Journal of Participatory Medicine Releases New Content
The Journal of Participatory Medicine (JoPM), the online peer-reviewed, open access publication of the Society for Participatory Medicine, has released new content for its 2010 volume. The journal's mission is to transform the culture of medicine from a delivery...
Truth is stranger than fiction – and deceptive websites are all too plentiful
By Lisa Neal Gualtieri. (Her earlier much-commented post on this subject is here.) The Boston Globe reported this month on the sentencing of a former US Airways Express pilot, Stephen Sharp, "for selling a powdered drink mix over the Internet that he claimed was '100...
Informed Medical Decision-Making: the challenges of doctor-patient communication
You can't be well empowered if you hear advice wrong. That's why, in a participatory relationship, an essential skill is accurate handoff of information. The Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, catchily pronounced "fimdim," has been working for years to...
The Unwilling E-Patient: Learning to use my mother-of-a-patient voice
One of the essential enablers of participatory medicine is that the internet brings patients together with information and with each other. Sometimes those connections seem improbable, such as when an acute cancer patient finds much in common with patients who have a...
The Power of Mobile (Video)
The video of my Mayo Transform 2010 speech, The Power of Mobile, is now up on the conference site as well as on YouTube. It was an honor to be part of this event. Many thanks to David Rosenman and his team for inviting me!
NPR: Three Tips for Picking a Better Doctor
On Monday NPR's Scott Hensley posted: "Between the Internet and all the data insurance companies and the government collect on doctors, you'd think it would be a lot easier than it used to be to find a good one. But it's not." Sound familiar around here? See his...
Open Health Data is Here. Welcome To The Great Data Divide!
The New England Journal of Medicine's Health Policy and Reform just published an opinion piece about the first public release of online report cards regarding 221 of the 1,100 US cardiac surgery programs. The authors believe that this event will fuel the debate...
The Power of Mobile
Prepared for Mayo Transform 2010: Thinking Differently About Health Care (video now available). Ten years ago, I wrote the Pew Internet Project’s first report on the impact of the internet on health care, calling it “The Online Health Care Revolution.” Back then, the...
Dealing – together – with medical error
The Running A Hospital blog has another discussion of dealing with medical error. This time, the hospital has opened up an error of its own (a wrong side surgery) for examination by the Open School of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Sample comments: From...
Doctors Say One Thing, Patients Hear Another
The Boston Globe has a revealing article about a study published in Annals of Internal Medicine where patients thought that a heart stent would help prevent another heart attack. But doctors had only told patients that it would relieve future chest pain. How can such...
Hand Hygiene Saves Lives: video for hospitals to show newly admitted patients
At last weekend's MITSS patient safety workshop, some of us remarked out loud that it would be great to have a simple video teaching newly admitted hospital patients the importance of hand washing, and even showing them how to speak up to a staff person who doesn't...
