Society for Participatory Medicine
e-patients.net blog
Pew Internet
research issues, trends & principles
What’s the future for self-tracking?
Stephen Wolfram’s essay, The Personal Analytics of My Life, begins: “One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves.” A Pew Internet survey suggests we have a long way to go: a September 2010 survey found that 27% of internet users age 18+ track their own health data online. There [...]
Read Moree-pts resources, found on the net, trends & principles
Nancy Finn: Smartphone Health Care Apps Storm the Market
Guest blogger Nancy Finn reports on the popularity of health apps. She is the author of e-Patients Live Longer. The Pew Internet & American Life Project conducted a national telephone survey of 2,277 adults in May 2011 and found that 83% own some kind of cell phone. One-third of these cell phone users (35%) own [...]
Read Morepolicy issues, reforming hc, trends & principles
Are patients knights, knaves, or pawns?
Sachin Jain and John Rother’s JAMA commentary, “Are Patients Knights, Knaves, or Pawns?” is an article that begs to be shared. The first time I read it I had to stand up, I was so excited — how can I design a survey to capture these questions?! was my first thought. My second thought was [...]
Read Moregeneral, trends & principles
Peer-to-peer Healthcare: Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Obvious.
Here’s my simple definition of peer-to-peer healthcare: Patients and caregivers know things — about themselves, about each other, about treatments — and they want to share what they know to help other people. Technology helps to surface and organize that knowledge to make it useful for as many people as possible. An idea whose time [...]
Read Moregeneral, trends & principles
The Social Life of Health Information, 2011
Here it is: my 2010-11 yearbook! Will you sign it? That’s how I feel about this latest report from the Pew Internet Project and the California HealthCare Foundation: “The Social Life of Health Information, 2011.” It contains all the insights we’ve gathered over the last year on mobile health, the health information divide, and peer-to-peer [...]
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Map the frontier. Bring data. (More coming soon!)
The Pew Internet Project and California HealthCare Foundation will released our latest report on the internet’s impact on health and health care tonight at midnight (Eastern U.S. time). It is titled, “The Social Life of Health Information, 2011” (and for those following closely, that is a hint that we are updating trends we first measured [...]
Read Morepolicy issues, positive patterns
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 sexually-transmitted infections, but I didn’t expect to hear the same frank talk at a White [...]
Read Morepatient networks
Healthcare Out Loud
Last fall, at the e-Patient Connections conference, I gave a sneak preview of some survey results which are set to be have been released on the Pew Internet site on Monday, Feb. 28. I hoped to spark new ideas for a savvy, plugged-in audience and I ended up surprising even myself with some of what [...]
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A Health Information Divide
This post is first and foremost a thank-you note. Thank you to everyone who posted a comment, emailed me, or tweeted a suggestion in response to my request for input last July: Crowdsourcing a Survey. Six new topics came directly from those conversations. Thank you to Veenu Aulakh and the California HealthCare Foundation who provided [...]
Read Moremedical records, policy issues
What people living with disability can teach us
The Pew Internet Project recently issued a short report noting that people living with disability are less likely than other adults in the U.S. to use the internet: 54%, compared with 81%. The first question many people ask when they hear that is, Why? The second is, What can be done? The third is, or [...]
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