Society for Participatory Medicine
e-patients.net blog
practice variation
e-patient stories, e-pts resources, found on the net, practice variation, shared decision making
What Do ‘Engaged’ Patients Do?
Member Eve Harris wrote another great blog post for KQED – Public Media for Northern California. It is about one woman’s personal decision on how to treat her breast cancer. A short extract below: Basila is strong evidence that individuals react differently to their treatment choices. The new healthcare buzzword is the engaged patient, generally referring to [...]
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A “de-marketing strategy”
J.R. Schmitt tipped me off to a fascinating article published in 1997 (!) about a “de-marketing strategy” for the use of general anesthesia in dentistry in the UK: De-marketing: Putting Kotler and Levy’s Ideas into Practice, by Steven Lawther, Gerard B. Hastings, and R. Lowry (Be patient – you have to zoom and scroll to [...]
Read Moremedical records, practice variation, pts as teachers, reforming hc, shared decision making, Why PM
HBR blog: “The trouble with treating patients as consumers”
Edited a few minutes after the original post. Over on the Harvard Business Review blog a post yesterday is stirring up discussion. I hope well-informed SPM members can help shed some light in the comments there, citing as many specifics as you can. (As I compiled the paste-ins for this post, I was struck again [...]
Read Moregeneral, practice variation, shared decision making, Why PM
Your Medical Mind: New book on *your* medical decision making process
In the past year I’ve come to see medical decision making as one of the key crucibles in which participatory medicine plays out. We’ve blogged several times about shared decision making (SDM), and by its nature it requires participatory thinking. A new book was published this week that adds substantially to my thinking: Your Medical [...]
Read Moregeneral, policy issues, practice variation, reforming hc, shared decision making, Why PM
“Who Can Fix Health Care?” Al Mulley’s talk at TEDx Dartmouth
Stop what you’re doing, as soon as possible, and spend 20 minutes watching this. It’s the most powerful short talk I’ve ever seen about health care. Our e-patient white paper is titled “e-Patients: How they can help heal healthcare.” In this talk from March’s TEDx Dartmouth, Al Mulley, MD, MPP doesn’t use the word e-patient, but [...]
Read Morefound on the net, practice variation, reforming hc
NYTimes: Smaller hospitals often perform double CTs unnecessarily
Engaged patients and families, alert: the NY Times reports (here) on a form of unwarranted practice variation that has been exposing elders to excess radiation. Many smaller hospitals have been needlessly exposing their Medicare patients to double CT scans on the same day – one with a contrast dye, one without. Some do it on [...]
Read Morepolicy issues, positive patterns, practice variation, pt/doc co-care, shared decision making
BMJ posts expert roundtable audio on Salzburg Statement and Shared Decision Making
The BMJ (British Medical Journal) has posted a three-part downloadable podcast about the Salzburg Statement. Part 1: History and current status of shared decision making. [26:04] Part 2: Vision of the future, and barriers to getting there. [23:31] Part 3: Informed doctors, informed patients. [35:48m] The participants were: Fiona Godlee, editor in chief, BMJ Angela Coulter, [...]
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The discovery of practice variation: follow the data
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. Sherlock Holmes, in Scandal in Bohemia I’ve been reading Jack Wennberg’s new book Tracking Medicine, which is about his lifetime of work in understanding the reality of how medicine is [...]
Read Morehc's problem list, practice variation, shared decision making, Why PM
Practice variation and shared decision making on CBS Evening News
In December we posted about practice variation and shared decision making (SDM), a field of research originated at Dartmouth decades ago and best known as publisher of the Dartmouth Atlas, which describes the amazing amount of unexplained variation in how many doctors prescribe what, in different areas of the country. For me personally this has been [...]
Read Moree-pts resources, practice variation, shared decision making, understanding statistics, Why PM
“Practice variation”: an essential e-patient awareness topic
This is the first of the follow-up posts I hope to write from participating last week in the Salzburg Global Seminar titled “The Greatest Untapped Resource in Healthcare? Informing and Involving Patients in Decisions about Their Medical Care.” One of our purposes on this site is to help people develop e-patient skills, so they can [...]
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