e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Pandas, Lobsters, and Health Care
Joe Kvedar asks an excellent question in his post, The Next Phase of Connected Health: Connected Personalized Health: What are the best variables to consider when taking connected health programs from pilot to scale? He imagines a matrix with three axes: severity of...
Mobile, Social Health at the National Library of Medicine
Update: The NLM released new widgets on July 14, along with a redesigned MedlinePlus site. (Read @eagledawg's take on these new tools, as well as her response to this post.) Speaking to the senior staff of the National Library of Medicine last week was like going...
Why Kent Bottles, MD joined the Society for Participatory Medicine
Yesterday's post "Why Gary Schwitzer joined" sparked a lot of discussion, online and off. Why not turn it into a series?? The next to submit is Kent Bottles MD, president of the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (ICSI). He's deep, as his blog posts suggest,...
Why Gary Schwitzer joined the Society for Participatory Medicine
Correction: the email address for volunteering has been updated to volunteer@participatorymedicine.org We've written many times about Gary Schwitzer and the excellent work he does at Health News Review. Last December I said reading health news carefully is a vital...
Maggie Mahar on Doctors & Patients Sharing Information
Prolific, unsinkable Maggie Mahar commented today on the Century Foundation's HealthBeat blog about Paul Levy's "Yes, Patients Can Help Their Doctors" introduction to my forthcoming book. Among other things she pointed out, correctly, that not everyone wants to be as...
Collaborative Care Technology Working Group forms to accelerate improvement in primary care, patient participation
Did you know that a major aspect of the Affordable Care Act (aka the health reform legislation) was significant funding to revamp primary care? I'm embarrassed to say I didn't. There's $10 billion (with a B) in funding for research in the first ten years on new models...
First anniversary of our Declaration of Participation. Please renew!
How fitting for the Fourth - a year after our Declaration (see below), I just received my renewal notice for the Society for Participatory Medicine. Here's a Doctor's Channel interview, posted a year ago today, in which Society co-chair Alan Greene MD draws an analogy...
In the UK, over-50s getting online faster than anyone else
Over 50s lead dash to the internet: "The latest figures on new internet users in the UK have shown that people aged 50 or over made up the largest social group to join last year"": more than half of new users. As the article says, "Don't knock silver surfers." (Thanks...
Healthcare.gov goes live: terrific site on health coverage options
This week the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) introduced Healthcare.gov, a consumer information website mandated by the Affordable Care Act (aka the health reform bill). A video of the introduction meeting is here. The site is fabulous; HHS Chief...
Chilmark: “Where is the consumer in HIEs?”
As we adopt new technology NOW is the time to think strategically: "As I make my next move, where do I end up? How am I positioned for the next step?" Patients have a lot at stake in adoption of Health Information Exchanges (HIEs). Chilmark Research has posted a good...
Hm: Because of viewing my visit notes, I did something better.
Earlier this month I wrote that the OpenNotes project had kicked off. It's important - if you haven't read about it, please click that link. My primary physician and I are participating, but candidly I didn't expect to get much out of it: as I told a friend, "I'm not...
“You’re 100% alive or 100% dead at any given moment”
A recurring training topic on this blog, originally for e-patients but also for clinicians and policy people, is understanding statistics. (See posts in that category.)Â Not only are statistics often misinterpreted; even when they're correctly understood, patients too...
