Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Latest Posts

Will Low Income Americans Use Personal Health Records?

The Society for Participatory Medicine was well represented last week at the 14th  ICSI/IHI Colloquium. (ICSI is the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement, a small midwestern think tank that’s way too poorly known.) SPM members who presented:

  • Jane Sarasohn-Kahn of Health Populi gave the keynote for Day 2
  • Jessie Gruman, four time cancer patient and founding co-editor of our journal, gave an important breakout session, about which I’ll be writing soon. (Jessie is founder and president of the excellent Center For Advancing Health.)
  • Brian Ahier presented on the status of health IT, as Meaningful Use rolls out. (“You can’t measure the improvements that you gotta measure, unless you have computers keeping track of it.”)
  • I gave a half-day pre-conference workshop titled “Participatory Health: Reshaping Patient Care.” I’m told the workshop had 40-50% higher registration than usual: interest in participatory medicine is strong.

An unexpected bonus was that right outside the workshop door, a poster presentation addressed some questions people often ask about patient participation and online health records:

  • Will patients with problems actually use a PHR (personal health record)? (Many observers say PHRs are a non-starter, a pointless exercise.) 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…

Read more »

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…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

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…

Read more »

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…

Read more »

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…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles