Is Your Healthcare Practice Patient-centered?

March 12, 2010 · Filed Under Why PM, medical records, trends & principles · 20 Comments

Yesterday I was at a monthly TelePresence meeting of the Person Centered Health initiative, a group that started in Canada that’s closely aligned with the Society for Participatory Medicine. At this meeting, some expressed concern that the memes of “person-centered health,” “patient-centered healthcare,” “participatory medicine,” and the like are becoming so overused as to become meaningless. That is, practices and healthcare organizations are claiming to espouse these principles, when in reality they don’t practice that way. Put another way, they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.

That’s just plain wrong. You shouldn’t get away with pretending to be patient-centered, any more than you should get away with pretending to be in love. So let’s get specific. Read more

Tags: Appointment Requests, Clinician, Concrete Examples, Education Tools, electronic medical record, EMR, Entertainment Systems, Health Initiative, Healthcare Organizations, Healthcare Practice, Healthcare System, Internet Connected Computers, List Of Attributes, Memes, Modern Entertainment, Multi Faceted, Patient Centered Care, Patient Family, Patient Services, Services Education, Stakeholders, Wireless Access

#WhyPM?

October 13, 2009 · Filed Under Why PM, patient networks, positive patterns, pt/doc co-care, trends & principles · 10 Comments

Note: if you do not use Twitter an explanation of this post’s title may be in order. #WhyPM is the Twitter hashtag we have been using collectively to announce the launch of the Journal of Participatory Medicine and to mention topics of interest from the Journal and the Internet.

So what is Participatory Medicine?

Simply put “Participatory Medicine (PM) is a model of medical care acknowledging the central role of the e-patients in medicine and requiring their active participation and engagement, because health professionals can no longer do it alone.”

As we put the finishing touches to the Journal of Participatory Medicine, it is ever clearer that various stakeholders have different views of what constitute participatory medicine. In particular, our different backgrounds are shaping how far we accept the central role of the engaged and networked patient in the brave new world of PM.

Using various social media, I have tried to iteratively refine the initial definition crafted in Feb 2008. The Wikipedia definition remains the single most quoted definition, but I have come to believe we should provide the much simpler one, above. As Alan Greene, MD commented in the crowdsourced definition of PM: “The ‘participation’ in Participatory Medicine isn’t just a patient participating with a doctor, but a patient participating in improving his or her own health, in constructive collaboration with a network of others with the same goal.”

Tags: Alan Greene, Brave New World, Clinicians, Constructive Collaboration, Finishing Touches, Health Professionals, Health Symposium, Initial Definition, Launch, Medical Care, Medicine, Nbsp, Own Health, Participation, Patient Advocate, Stakeholders, Twitter, Wikipedia

“No political power center for regular people”
in health reform

June 23, 2009 · Filed Under e-patient stories, hc's problem list, news & gossip, policy issues, reforming hc · 14 Comments

Aliya Sternstein writes for NextGov, a site devoted to “technology and the business of government.” We spoke last week for her piece about the White House’s use of social media. There are some people who, when you speak with them, the conversation goes to new places. This was one of those times.

Tags: Aliya, Aux Barricades, Blogs, Conversations, Core Problem, Craig Stoltz, Craw, Everyday People, Health Care Reform, Health Data, Health Records, Health Reform, Healthcare Performance, Interested Players, Klepper, Michael Painter, New Thoughts, Parallel Universes, Patient Rights, Performance Inc, Public Health, Rig, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Stakeholders, White House, Wood Johnson Foundation, Zillion