Society for Participatory Medicine
e-patients.net blog
general, hc's problem list, trends & principles
Health 2.0 & The Widening Digital Divide: A Call to Action
Too many years witnessing the same thing. First in the ACOR system. Then in many conferences about eHealth, e-Patients and now Health 2.0 and the Connected Health symposium at Harvard Medical School. Why is an entire segment of the US population almost completely absent from the fast evolving world of Health 2.0 and Participatory Medicine?
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Participatory Medicine, Connected Health
The Center for Connected Health’s 2008 Symposium was held in Boston on October 27-28, 2008. I gave a talk entitled, “Participatory Medicine: How User-Generated Media are Changing American Attitudes and Actions, Online and Off.” As always, the conversations I had with people after the speech were the best part of the event. Lena Sorenson, RN, [...]
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Wall Street Journal goes e-Patient
Where have we heard this story before? A friend of mine slipped on the sidewalk recently and broke her hip. She had surgery in one of the best hospitals in the country. But it [wasn't their staff, it] was her grown daughter who noticed that she was having an adverse reaction to a pain medication. [...]
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How can we have informed patients, if hospitals won’t inform?
This post is prompted by a horrid subject: how do we as a society deal with one of the worst possible events – a death in our healthcare system? The immediate topic is a 37 year old woman who died last week at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). An article in today’s Boston Globe [...]
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Placebos & the Doctor-Patient Relationship
As the BMJ noted in its survey of physicians’ use of placebos this past week, the placebo effect is a powerful treatment. Judith Graham’s “Triage” blog examines this phenomenon and reminds us that it’s not the pill that’s causing the effect, but the attention to patient concerns: “In other words, it is the communication of [...]
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A Glimpse of American Healthcare of the Future (My Talk at Health 2.0)
Thomas Jefferson had a radical notion: When the people are well-informed, they can be trusted to govern themselves. This powerful idea worked to end our rule by the King, but at the time it didn’t apply to slaves; it didn’t apply to women. It STILL doesn’t apply to patients. I like that he used the [...]
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Connected Health Symposium 2008
An East Coast contingent of the e-patients group will be in Boston on Monday and Tuesday, speaking and listening at the Connected Health symposium. I’m going to present the Pew Internet Project‘s latest data on social media and how the participatory Web is creating opportunities for participatory medicine. Danny Sands and “e-Patient Dave” deBronkart will [...]
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“How to Take American Health Care From Worst to First”
What do we think of THIS?? An op-ed piece in the NY Times:Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland Athletics, suggests using baseball-style number-crunching to improve healthcare, with Newt Gingrich and John Kerry co-authoring the piece. Some snips: “Remarkably, a doctor today can get more data on the starting third baseman on his fantasy baseball team [...]
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Quality of Care & e-Patients
JAMA has an interesting Patient Page on quality of care. The definitions of e-Patients and Participatory Medicine mention or point to quality of care. Are we talking about the same thing? NOT AT ALL! If the patient page of JAMA represents the official position of the organization, which is almost certainly the case, we see [...]
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41% of Adults are “Activated Patients”
The Center for Studying Health System Change has released another information-packed report, How Engaged Are Consumers in Their Health and Health Care, and Why Does It Matter. The researchers created a “Patient Activation Measure” and apparently 41% of adults are what we might call e-patients (empowered, equipped, etc.).
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