Society for Participatory Medicine
e-patients.net blog
found on the net, general
Florence Nightingale, passionate statistician
A tip of the twitter-hat to @TimOReilly for this, from Science News: When Florence Nightingale arrived at a British hospital in Turkey during the Crimean War, she found a nightmare of misery and chaos. Men lay crowded next to each other in endless corridors. The air reeked from the cesspool that lay just beneath the [...]
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“I can buy a damn good amputation…”
Paul Grundy MD, of IBM, chair of PCPCC, is interviewed in the current Crain’s Benefits Outlook, a business publication about employee benefit programs. This quote alone is worth the price of admission: I can buy a damn good amputation for my diabetic, but what I can’t get is a good system in place to prevent [...]
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“The Evidence Gap”: Pharma impedes patient access to better treatment
A lot of effort and study is going into improving healthcare and untangling its cost structure. So methinks it’s nearly criminal when someone blocks adoption of a treatment that’s better, especially when it’s also less expensive. Case in point, from yesterday’s NY Times: The Evidence Gap: The Minimal Impact of a Big Hypertension Study The surprising [...]
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Engage With Grace
The following post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace Team. Here’s an image of the slide, and below is the post that many are sharing today. (The original PowerPoint slide is linked within the post.) Please see comments at end.
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Reducing Disparities, Spreading Improvement
Josh Seidman asks a very good question that goes toward our discussion of spreading improvement and the digital divide, “If [targeted] interventions… have been shown to have an enormous impact on the health of these populations, maybe Ix and related initiatives can be applied to a wide variety of challenges that underserved populations face — [...]
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Illness in the Age of ‘e’: A case study in participatory medicine
Last month, the Connected Health Symposium at Harvard Medical School saw a first: a full-length case study in participatory medicine, described concurrently by both the patient and his physician. The physician was our own Danny Sands MD, and the patient was our e-Patient Dave. It was “a remarkable story,” as Matthew Holt said on The [...]
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No *other* conflict of interest, huh?
What’s wrong with this picture? While continuing to search for information regarding the collective statistical illiteracy issue covered a couple of days ago, I found a brand new article in the New England Journal of Medicine. As an exercise I decided to reorganize some of the paragraphs of the article, bringing to the top a couple [...]
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Lies, Damn Lies And Statistics: Collective Statistical Illiteracy
Everyone knows the supposed origin of the phrase. But as you can see here it goes back to Medicine: “Look at the dozens of operations by me this year without a death,” says the operator. His less enthusiastic neighbor thinks of the proverbial kinds of falsehoods, “lies, damned lies and statistics” and replies “reports of large [...]
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Making sense of health statistics
Cross-posted from my own blog, with a late p.s. from this morning’s paper When John Grohol read my post the other day about evidence-based medicine, he steered me to a paper worth reading: Helping Doctors and Patients Make Sense of Health Statistics. (Update Dec 15 2010: that link is broken; this link works.) This is [...]
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Your Health Information at Your Fingertips
Nancy B. Finn is a journalist with an expertise in the implementation of digital communications in health care and shared this story about personal health records: I was recently hospitalized. Fortunately I did not have to go through the emergency department but was admitted directly to a room. When I arrived, the nurse assigned to [...]
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