Empowered patient. Consumer driven healthcare. Transparency. Access to their full medical records online. Review the latest news and you’ll discover more books and articles recommending patients be advocates for themselves. The pitch? The only way to get the best care is to be thorough, informed, and always asking questions.
This perspective is understandable because advocates have observed a healthcare system that provides inconsistent quality, too many preventable medical errors, and overtreatment resulting in unnecessary injuries and deaths. Even I’ve written a book saying the same thing, and I hate to write.
The public is urged to take charge of their health and their healthcare. When they have a problem, ask the doctor questions. Do research. If they need a procedure, shop around to get the best deal. Adopt good habits. Eat more fruits and vegetables. Stop smoking. Maintain a healthy weight. Exercise regularly. These will improve health and be less costly in the long run.
But is this what Americans really want? Do they want to be empowered patients? Can they be empowered patients? Frankly, no. Read more »
There’s a conversation brewing over use of the term “e-patient.” The online health revolution is over, it’s been suggested. Web use, after all, has become so widely adopted that the term “e-patient” may have more historical meaning.
Dropping the “e” might indicate that we’ve arrived. I’m not so sure. Perhaps the revolution we thought was going on never entirely took off. Or maybe it’s all about how you define the revolution.
Here’s what I see: Day in and day out, over weeks and months, hundreds of patients visit my clinic. I talk to them candidly about the tools they use and how technology and community is changing how they see their problems. I do the same with friends and family members. And like it or not, they’re a lot closer to “e-Patient 1.0” than many of us would like to think. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*
A neighbor of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer about the same time my wife was being treated for lung cancer. I saw my neighbor the other day for the first time in several years. I asked her how she was doing. She said great. In turn I asked her how her PET/CT exam looked. PET/CT scans are often done to make sure that one’s cancer hasn’t spread. My wife gets one every year.
My neighbor told me her doctor never told her she needed one, that mammograms would suffice. She went on to say a friend had also recently asked her if she had a PET/CT as well. “Maybe I should ask my doctor,” she told me. That was the same response she gave me the last time I raised the subject two years earlier: “I should ask my doctor.”
So Why Don’t People Ask More Questions?
My neighbor is not alone when it comes to asking their doctor questions. In an earlier post, I cited research which found that patients ask their doctor an average of two important questions during the office visit. According to researchers, there are five reasons why people don’t ask their doctor questions. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Mind The Gap*
Today [Aug 28] I’m participating in the workshop “Engaging Minority Communities in Safer Healthcare” organized by MITSS (Medically Induced Trauma Support Services), a Boston non-profit I’ve written about before.
The current speaker is Lisa O’Connor, VP of Nursing at Boston Medical Center. She just showed this four-minute safety awareness video, produced by Quantros. Much of its content will be familiar to our readers here (the frequency of medical errors and hospital acquired infections), but I’m posting it because of its good, concrete, specific actions every patient should know.
The part with specific actions for patients starts around 2:30. (My highlights are below.) Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*
In case you haven’t seen it, a list of the 100 Most Powerful People in Health Care was [recently] published. In thinking about this list I realized that, in reality, these people had little to do with my patients’ health care delivery. So how did they became the most powerful people in health care?
Quite simply, they are not the 100 most powerful people in health care, but rather they are the 100 most powerful people overseeing the funding of health care — at least for the moment. In as little as 11 months, many of the people on this list will be gone or have moved on to their next money-making venture.
So who are the most powerful people in health care? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Empowered patient. Consumer driven healthcare. Transparency. Access to their full medical records online. Review the latest news and you’ll discover more books and articles recommending patients be advocates for themselves. The pitch? The only way to get the best care is to be thorough, informed, and always asking questions.
