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Physicians Search For Best Treatment Plan Based On Outcomes Of Similar Patients In Hospital Records System, Not Medical Literature

Wow. Todd Park, Chief Technical Officer at HHS, ought to be jumping out of his skin with joy at this one.

This time, House, M.D. fans, it was lupus. The article “Evidence-Based Medicine in the EMR Era” published in the Nov. 10 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine might have read like a House television script, but it was a real-life glimpse of what the most optimistic health IT advocates are hoping will become commonplace in U.S. health care: Mining EHR data to arrive at treatment decisions.

In a Health IT Exchange piece (on TechTarget) EHR data spurs real-time evidence-based medicine, Don Fluckinger summarizes (and dramatizes, accurately) this early specimen of care being transformed – beyond the literature – by looking at past records. Faced with a 13 year old lupus patient with a complex problem (see article for details)…

In four hours, they did a retrospective study of similar patients in the hospital’s data warehouse…, and decided to move ahead with the treatment based on the previous results of 98 [similar patients] … The authors said they will never know if they made the “correct” decision, but they did know that — in absence of randomized trial research to support their decision — they acted on the evidence of the best data available, coupled with their experience.

“Our case is but one example of a situation in which the existing literature is insufficient to guide the clinical care of a patient,” the authors wrote. …

What are we waiting for, people??  Imagine if Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*

Fixing Healthcare: Bring Shared Decision Making To A New Level

Last week the New York Times reported that some health insurers have applied to regulatory agencies to push premiums sharply higher – usually double-digit increases, while citizens are suffering.  This falls on top of the 11 year history reported last year by the Kaiser Family Foundation: wages and inflation are up ~40%, while health costs and worker contributions were up 138% and 159%:

Kaiser Family Foundation slide on care costs

No wonder we feel squeezed. (Last week’s announcement comes on top of this history.)

This has enormous human impact. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*

EMR News From Australia Creates Enthusiasm In The E-Patient Movement

Big news from Down Under: the Sydney Morning Herald reports that a group of fifty consumer health advocates has unanimously backed an “opt-out” process for enrollment in electronic health records, reversing their previous position.

The issue is whether by default all patients have an EHR. “Opt-out” means you’re in by default – your records will be stored electronically – and you can opt out if you want. “Opt-in” means you do not have an EHR unless you specifically ask for one.

The group, the Consumer Health Forum, cites evidence from the neighboring country of New Zealand, in which Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*

Cartoon Shows A Common Misconception About The “E-Patient”

An SPM member emailed this, with the playful subject line “A New e-Patient”:

© Copyright 2011 King Features Syndicate. All Rights Reserved.

(Click the image to go to the high-res on the comic’s site; © Copyright 2011 King Features Syndicate, all rights reserved.)

Funny comic, but it’s a common misconception that “e-patient” = anyone who googles (or bings, or webmd’s, or…). Wrong. E-patients are empowered, engaged, educated etc – not mindless, and not likely to freak out at the first thing they read.

When you search Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*

The Surprising Life Saving Advantage Of Facebook

“Health is social,” says SPM member Phil Baumann, RN (@PhilBaumann) at HealthIsSocial.com.

Slate has a dramatic story of how a mother’s Facebook network helped spot – rapidly – Kawasaki Disease, a rare auto-immune disease that the family’s doctors had initially missed.

Her social network contains some medically knowledgeable people. (Do you have any docs, nurses, etc in your Facebook circle?) Note that friends’ availability is sometimes far greater than a doctor’s office.

Read how the diagnosis unfolded. And read what her family physician said, when she called from the E.R.:

“You know what?” he said, “I was actually just thinking it could be Kawasaki disease. Makes total sense. Bravo, Facebook.”

Then this, as the crisis wound down: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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