December 2nd, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Health Policy, Opinion
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Here’s the bad news: We will not benefit from the health care services, drugs, tests and procedures available to us unless we pay attention, learn about our choices, interact with our clinicians and follow through on the plans we make together. And that “following through”part? We have to work at doing that every day, whether we feel sick or well, energetic or tired out. And if we can’t do it, we’d best find a spouse or parent or friend or social service agency who can step in to do the things we can’t manage.
OK. For some people, this is not bad news. This is how we think it should be: “Nothing about me without me.” For others, our personal encounters with tests and treatments and illness have taught us that this is just the way it is.
But for many of us, this news – should we have reason to attend to it – is inconsistent with our idealized vision of health care that, tattered as its image might be, will step in, take over and fix what ails us. Most of us, after all, are mostly well most of the time and our exposure to health care is minimal.
Efforts to improve the effectiveness of health care and contain its cost have produced Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
November 20th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
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Adults who received care from a medical home in 11 Westernized countries were less likely to report medical errors and were happier with their care, according to a new Commonwealth Fund international survey.
The 2011 survey included more than 18,000 ill adults in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It included people who reported they were in fair or poor health, had surgery or had been hospitalized in the past two years, or had received care for a serious or chronic illness, injury or disability in the past year. The vast majority had seen multiple physicians.
A medical home was defined as patients reporting a regular source of care that knows their medical history, is accessible and helps coordinate care received from other providers. Results were published in Health Affairs.
Sicker adults in the U.S. were the most likely to Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
November 16th, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Opinion, Research
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It is completely understandable if you associate the term “cancer survivor” with an image of glamorous, defiant Gloria Gaynor claiming that She. Will. Survive. Or maybe with a courageous Lance Armstrong in his quest to reclaim the Tour de France. Or perhaps it is linked for you with heroic rhetoric and pink-related racing, walking and shopping.
Phil Roeder from flickr.com
I never call myself a survivor because when I hear this term, I recall my experience following each of four cancer-related diagnoses. It has not been triumphant. It’s been terrifying and grueling. It hasn’t taken courage to get through the treatment. It’s taken doing the best I can. I am not still here because I am defiant. I am here because I am lucky, because I am cared for by good clinicians who treated my cancers based on the best available evidence, and because on the whole, I participated actively in my care. But mostly I am here because each successive diagnosis was made as a result of being followed closely with regular checks and screenings and because my doctors responded effectively to questionable findings and odd symptoms.
There are 12 million Americans living today who have been treated for cancer. Not only are we at risk for recurrences but, as Dr. Julia Rowland, director of the Office of Cancer Survivorship at the National Cancer Institute, notes, “Research shows that there are no benign therapies. All treatment is potentially toxic and some therapy may itself be carcinogenic. Today, people are living long enough to manifest the health consequences of efforts to cure or control their cancer.”
Who amongst our clinicians is responsible for helping us watch out for those consequences for the balance of our lives? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
October 18th, 2011 by Michael Sevilla, M.D. in Video
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In the video above, you’ll see a vid that I pieced together to give you my impressions of last weekend’s Kansas Patient Centered Medical Home Summit (Thanks to Tony Wood for the additional video). I know that I’m making it too simplistic a description, but PCMH is team-based care with many medical professionals with the physician the leader of the team and the patient at the center of the care. Check out a good description of PCMH from the TransforMED site.
Perhaps the best sessions of the Kansas PCMH summit were the ones with patients presenting. In the video above, you’ll hear segments of two patient stories. And you’ll hear Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Family Medicine Rocks Blog*
October 6th, 2011 by StevenWilkinsMPH in Opinion
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Irrational exuberance was a term once used to describe the stock market before the last crash. It also seems an apt description for much of the talk these days about empowered health consumers.
To be sure, patients today have unprecedented access to health information. Patient decision-support tool can be found on just about every provider, payer and self-insured employer website. Consumers can go to any number of websites to find quality data about hospitals, physicians and health plans. Personal health records (PHRs) promise to make our personal health data portable for meaning that all our treating physicians will be “singing off the same song sheet.”
That’s what the industry experts tell us. But what’s really going on? Here I will describe what I see as the top 5 myths about empowered health consumers. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Mind The Gap*
