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What’s your health care dream?

  #whatifhc in #TheWalkingGallery   Note: This is two posts in one — scroll down to read Regina Holliday’s point of view. From Susannah Fox: For me, Twitter is a free-wheeling space where people dance with ideas. Anyone is welcome to jump into...

The Rise of the e-Patient

Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project,  presented this wonderful overview of the Project’s health findings at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, CA, on January 12. The Rise of the e-Patient View more presentations from Pew Research...

.5 x .5: Deconstructing Margolis

As often happens, a Susannah Fox post has led to lingering questions. This time I’ve figured out what I want to say.:-) Last week, in a side note on her World AIDS Day post, she inserted this: … Let’s review the basic math of health services delivery in...

This year it’s … Occupy With Grace

As in 2009 and 2010, this year too we donate our top post at Thanksgiving to the Engage With Grace movement, encouraging people to participate in this very important discussion, at the time of year when we’re most likely to be together with families. Because it...

Contacting Us & Contributing Content

We eagerly invite guest posts by members of our Society (not non-members), per the guidelines below. Contact information Blog curators: blog _at_ participatorymedicine.org Volunteering: volunteer _at_ participatorymedicine.org General information about our Society:...

A “shopping for healthcare” blog

Anytime Susannah Fox tweets “I am fascinated by…,” I stop what I’m doing and click. Today it’s this: “I am fascinated by this healthcare costs blog: healthcaresavvy.wbur.org Thanks @agropper @WBUR @stephenjdowns.” It’s...

NOT an e-patient: freaks out at the first search result

An SPM member [name redacted – wishes to remain anonymous :–)] emailed this, with the playful subject line “A New e-Patient”: (Click the image to go to the high-res on the comic’s site; © Copyright 2011 King Features Syndicate, all rights...

What I learned at Health Foo

Just in case anyone is curious: my notes from Health Foo, a meeting held last weekend in Cambridge, MA. It’s long, so skim for the 9 lessons if you want a shortcut. What: Foo Camp is an unconference, constructed on the spot by the people who show up, with just a...

Shared Decision Making in the News

Media coverage of the challenges we face in making good treatment decisions often focuses on and sensationalizes medical errors, catastrophes and risks.  So it was great to see this impressive TV news clip circulated by Gary Schwitzer of HealthNewsReview.org in his...

Regina paints Susannah’s jacket; Susannah replies

On the evening of June 7th, SPM member and extraordinary painter Regina Holliday is leading a “Walking Gallery” in Washington, in which dozens of us will wear jackets on which she’s painted one of her visual allegories about healthcare today. She...

What if information spread more quickly than a virus?

On March 11, the White House hosted an event to mark National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. The event was livestreamed from whitehouse.gov and is archived on YouTube: I have written before about the unique nature of conferences concerning...

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...

IHI releases video of SPM’s keynote

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) has generously released the session video of the keynote that SPM president Dr. Danny Sands and I delivered at the IHI’s annual Forum in December. At this event the IHI did two extraordinary patient-oriented things:...

February retrospective on e-patients.net

Researching recently I wound up looking at where we were two years ago – February 2009, just as the Society for Participatory Medicine (SPM) was forming. Fascinating to see what topics were live then and are still relevant today – this community has...

“The Difficult Science”: series by Kent Bottles

Kent Bottles MD is one of the best healthcare thinkers I’ve met. Yesterday he completed a two-part tour de force on The Health Care blog titled “The Difficult Science.” Here are part 1 and part 2. This is about “how do we know what we think we...

“A lot of shackling lives in language”

What do we (patients) call ourselves? This is a deep subject that’s been debated a lot. (If I were Susannah Fox I’d toss in a dozen worthy links here:), but I’m short on time. Please add some in comments.) There is indeed power in the words we use,...

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