July 31st, 2011 by Edwin Leap, M.D. in Health Policy, Opinion
No Comments »
Last night I was contacted by a physician in the local urgent-care. I like him, and we made polite, but brief, conversation. ‘So, are you guys busy?’
I gave him the status report. ‘Well, yeah. We have about 25 people waiting to be seen the waiting room is full and every patient room is full. Also, we just received a gun-shot wound to the head by EMS.’
‘Wow, sounds terrible! So, here’s what I need to send you…’
What he sent was, in fact, reasonable. A young woman with signs and symptoms of meningitis (who was treated earlier in the day for and upper respiratory virus…with Amoxicillin, of course.)
She needed a lumbar puncture, which I performed and which was negative.
But I had this thought. I could probably have said, Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at edwinleap.com*
May 29th, 2011 by DavedeBronkart in Research
1 Comment »
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*
