e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
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...
Job openings at ONC for State HIE
Claudia Williams at ONC has job openings for "a couple of talented folks" to add to the high-energy team, to work on State HIE. Details: (HIE is Heath Information Exchange. The State HIE program is described here.) Claudia says: -------------- "Here are the critical...
Caremark, Prescriptions and Personal Information
A friend of mine, Ms. S., recently had an unsettling experience with a company called Caremark (the parent company of pharmacy CVS), whom she fills her prescriptions through. She was reordering a prescription refill she buys through the mail, and needed to pay for it....
E-patients, Cyberchondriacs, and Why We Should Stop Calling Names
New concepts need gimmicks. Proven concepts do not. The phenomenon of using the internet to gather and share health information is now mainstream. It's time to change how we talk about it, revising and maybe even retiring certain terms. Carlos Rizo and I invite you...
“Are You Safe?” patient safety awareness video
Today I'm participating in a workshop, "Engaging Minority Communities in Safer Healthcare," organized by MITSS (Medically Induced Trauma Support Services), a Boston non-profit I've written about before. The current speaker is Lisa O'Connor, VP of Nursing at Boston...
A Troubled Trifecta: Peer Review, Academia & Tenure
We welcome Peter Frishauf as an author on our blog. Peter is on the Editorial Board [brief bio] of our Society's Journal of Participatory Medicine, and as described below, has already authored some important material on this subject. His first post here is triggered...
“Blogs are the foundation in a world of streams”
Fascinating post by Louis Gray, reflecting on the transient nature of much of social media.
“Why Can’t Medicine Be Like Car Talk?”
Trisha Torrey sums it up niftily on her Patient Empowerment Blog at About.com.
