The Health Care Blog

Regina Holliday's mural for Fred

By Matthew Holt Regina’s story has been on THCB before—Fred’s Life & Death at 73 cents a page. But you may not have seen the mural. (From NPR)
November 12, 2009 in e-patients, Electronic Medical Records | Permalink | Comments (0)

Regina Holliday: Fred's life & death at 73 cents a page

By Matthew Holt If you ever wonder why the efforts to make it easier for patients and families to get information and be treated as equals in their care by the medical care system matter.... If you need convincing that...
October 24, 2009 in e-patients, Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Technology | Permalink | Comments (6)

Health 2.0 Tools: The power of Twitter

By Matthew Holt The power of Twitter is real kids, and not for what you think. Used properly Twitter is an information filter. Exhibit A is what happened to the Von Schwebers who run PHARMASurveyor. They were a huge part...
October 23, 2009 in Conferences, e-patients, Electronic Medical Records, evidenced-based medicine, Health 2.0, pharmaceuticals, Technology | Permalink | Comments (5)

Why Standards Matter (1): The True Meaning of Interoperability

By DAVID C. KIBBE and BRIAN KLEPPER Americans are generally skeptical of words that otherwise intelligent and articulate people can't pronounce. "Interoperability," like nu-cu-lar, is one of these. After a while, these words can take on a mystique all their...
August 22, 2009 in Brian Klepper, David Kibbe, e-patients, EHR, Electronic Medical Records, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Dream of Reason

By BRIAN KLEPPER and DAVID KIBBE The dream of reason did not take power into account...Modern medicine is one of those extraordinary works of reason...But medicine is also a world of power. -Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine,...
June 22, 2009 in Brian Klepper, Consumers, David Kibbe, e-patients, Electronic Medical Records, Policy, Policy/Politics, The Industry, Transparency, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (8)

An Open Letter to the New National Coordinator for Health IT: Part 3 -- Certification As The Elephant in Health IT's Living Room

By DAVID C. KIBBE and BRIAN KLEPPER In the first and second parts of this series we talked about how and why there is no universal definition for the term "EHR." Instead there is a legitimate, growing debate about the...
May 8, 2009 in Brian Klepper, David Kibbe, e-patients, Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Obama administration, Online Communities, Policy, Policy/Politics, Quality, Technology, The Industry, Transparency, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (20)

Health Affairs is all about IT

By Matthew Holt Most of the Health care geek squad is in DC as I write, at a press conference conducted by Health Affairs which has an entire issue out today about IT in health care. Here’s the table of...
March 10, 2009 in e-patients, Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Technology | Permalink | Comments (6)

Google Health sharing--simple but potentially important

By Matthew Holt Today late afternoon PST Google flipped the switch on an important change/add to Google Health. Recently they’ve been adding more and more little features, such as printing & graphing, and in the last month getting CVS retail...
March 4, 2009 in Consumers, e-patients, Electronic Medical Records, Google, Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Physicians, Technology | Permalink | Comments (11)

Should the FDA relax in the search for new cures?

By Matthew Holt Over at DiabetesMine #1 health blogger Amy Tenderich has very important post. She and several fellow travelers are appealing to the FDA to strike a balance between safety and progress in allowing new diabetes treatments. The FDA...
January 9, 2009 in e-patients, FDA, Health 2.0, Patient Safety, Pharma, pharmaceuticals | Permalink | Comments (1)

ePatient Dave & his doc Danny Sands speak out

By Matthew Holt One of the most remarkable people I’ve met this year is Dave deBronkart, better known as ePatient Dave (fourth from left on top of the e-Patients.net blog). Dave has had a remarkable recovery from cancer and has...
December 18, 2008 in Consumers, e-patients, Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Technology | Permalink | Comments (2)

Fact or Fiction: Electronic health records save money

Note by Brian Klepper: Today the actuarial consulting firm Milliman is convening a town hall meeting in Seattle focused generally on health care reform, but specifically on Electronic Health Records (EHRs). The larger Seattle metropolitan area is a hotbed of...
December 1, 2008 in Conferences, e-patients, Electronic Medical Records | Permalink | Comments (24)

Health 2.0's impact on the digital divide

By Gilles Frydman For too many years, I've witnessed the same thing. First, it was in the ACOR system. Then it occurred in many conferences about eHealth, e-Patients, and now Health 2.0 and the Connected Health symposium at Harvard Medical...
November 11, 2008 in e-patients, Health 2.0, Online Communities | Permalink | Comments (7)

e-Patient Dave tells his story

By Matthew Holt In the Connected Health conference at Partners I sat in on a great session in which e-Patient Dave (Dave deBronkart) and his physician, Danny Sands described his use of listservs, the Internet, email and BIMDC’s PatientSite and...
October 28, 2008 in Conferences, Consumers, e-patients, Health 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (7)

Microsoft Healthvault: Coke, Pepsi or Intel Inside

By Amy Tenderich This post appeared originally on DiabetesMine. When Microsoft launched its HealthVault application last year — the first major commercial Personal Health Record (PHR) system on the open web — the Wall Street Journal reported that “Consumers are...
October 15, 2008 in e-patients, Health 2.0, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1)

Matthew gets the kicker quote

By THCB Staff A New York times special section today includes a story about going online for health information. John Schwartz quotes all of our favorites, including Susannah Fox, Clay Shirky, Benjamin Heywood of Patients Like Me, Trusera and ACOR....
October 1, 2008 in e-patients, Health 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The health search future

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn Over the past couple of weeks, the eHealth world learned that RevolutionHealth engaged Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, to help assess the company's 'alternatives.' The early talk was to raise capital, but the tenor seems to have...
September 15, 2008 in e-patients, Health 2.0, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (5)

An international perspective on Medicine 2.0

By Neil Versel I'm here at the Medicine 2.0 Congress, a very international meeting put on by Dr. Gunther Eysenbach of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, a project of the University Health Network and the University of Toronto. The...
September 5, 2008 in Consumers, e-patients, Health 2.0, Technology | Permalink | Comments (3)

Adam Bosworth speaks about Google Health, Keas and everything

By Matthew Holt After a long period of time I’ve finally wrestled Adam Bosworth to the floor and forced the microphone to his mouth. Adam of course is the software guru (he’s one of the originators of XML) who went...
September 3, 2008 in Consumers, e-patients, Electronic Medical Records, Google, Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Online Communities, Technology, User Generated Content | Permalink | Comments (2)

Keep tabs on your digital footprint

By Susannah Fox Is it "disordered" behavior to Google your doctor? An article in JAMA suggests that doctors should be on their guard. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently published an article about how doctors should be aware...
September 1, 2008 in Consumers, e-patients, Physicians, Susannah Fox, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hello Health open for business

By Matthew Holt Hello Health, the clinic that Jay Parkinson has been promoting for a while, is open for business. If all the patients are as happy as the first patient, success is assured! The deal is that they’ve gone...
August 25, 2008 in Concierge medicine, e-patients, Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Physicians, primary care, Technology | Permalink | Comments (13)

Who'd be a pollster, eh

By Matthew Holt HSC says that the number of Americans going online for healthcare goes way up: In 2007, 56 percent of American adults—more than 122 million people—sought information about a personal health concern from a source other than their...
August 22, 2008 in Consumers, e-patients, Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Technology | Permalink | Comments (4)

Personal genetic companies back in service

By Sarah Arnquist Two direct-to-consumer genetic testing firms, 23andMe and Navigenics gained approval from California regulators this week to continue providing clients access to and interpretations of their personal DNA. The NY Times reports this morning that, "The licenses, granted...
August 20, 2008 in Consumers, e-patients, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (3)

Health IT policy: the fur is flying

By Matthew Holt Some fur is flying in the rarefied world of health IT policy geeks this morning. Health Affairs has three articles. The first from Markle’s Carol Diamond, writing with Here Comes Everybody author and Internet guru Clay Shirky,...
August 19, 2008 in Consumers, e-patients, Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Policy, Policy/Politics, RHIOs, Technology | Permalink | Comments (11)

Viagra prescribed more safely online than in regular practice?

By Matthew Holt Really? Can this be true? Well so says a bunch of academics writing in the Mayo Clinic’s journal. They looked at records of questionnaires taken and prescribing decisions made by a licensed, regulated online pharmacy called KwikMed...
August 8, 2008 in Consumers, e-patients, Health 2.0, Pharma, pharmaceuticals, Technology | Permalink | Comments (8)

Three-quarters of Internet users seek health info

By Susannah Fox The Pew Internet Project released the latest estimate for the e-patient population: 75 percent of internet users. Here are some details from the survey. My colleagues recently updated our top three trend charts: Who's Online, Internet Activities,...
August 7, 2008 in e-patients, Susannah Fox, Technology, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (9)

CollabRX aims to make drug development faster and cheaper with power of Internet

By Sarah Arnquist Harnessing the collective power of patients needing new treatments and therapies to speed up and lessen the cost of the development process drives a new venture called CollabRX. Jay M. Tenenbaum, Collab RX founder, learned he had...
August 1, 2008 in e-patients, Health 2.0, pharmaceuticals, Technology | Permalink | Comments (3)

Medicine meets Wiki

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn There's a new wiki in the health social media town, Medpedia. Among the most popular online sources for health information is Wikipedia. Millions of people search Wikipedia daily for insights into medical conditions, drugs, and procedures. Medpedia...
July 24, 2008 in e-patients, Health 2.0, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, Technology | Permalink | Comments (2)

Using professional societies to advance participatory medicine

By Daniel Hoch Dan Hoch is a neurologist based at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. An early developer of online resources for patients, Dan helped found Braintalk. Professional medical societies are not quite like...
July 22, 2008 in Consumers, e-patients, Personalized Medicine, Physicians | Permalink | Comments (6)

How patients get the best care

By Susannah Fox What are the social and psychological factors that affect how people are treated -- or even their health outcomes? This question has popped up in my reading and in my work quite a bit this week, and...
July 11, 2008 in e-patients, Susannah Fox, Technology | Permalink | Comments (3)

Universal access to high speed Internet

By Sarah Arnquist Achieving universal Internet access may happen well before we see universal access to health care -- at least if the advocacy group Internet for Everyone has its way. The Mercury News reports that a "broad coalition of...
June 26, 2008 in Consumers, e-patients, Health 2.0, Technology | Permalink | Comments (4)

Internet expert fields questions on participatory medicine

By Susannah Fox I always suspect that audience members have as much to share as I have to say. So when Mary Madden and I received an invitation to speak at the National Institutes of Health we created a participatory...
June 26, 2008 in e-patients, Health 2.0, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1)

Podcast with Marston Alfred, founder and architect of SugarStats

By Jen McCabe Gorman Marston Alfred, founder and chief architect of SugarStats.com chatted recently with me about his relatively new, Web-based program that allows diabetics to track their health statistics online. Alfred described SugarStats as a portable PHR specifically for...
June 10, 2008 in e-patients, Health 2.0, Online Communities, Personalized Medicine, Podcasts | Permalink | Comments (0)

E-patients can and will revolutionize health care

By Susannah Fox By taking advantage of new online health tools, e-patients and health professionals now have the ability to create equal partnerships that enable individuals to be equipped, enabled, empowered and engaged in their health and health care decisions....
May 30, 2008 in e-patients, Health 2.0, Online Communities, Personalized Medicine, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (18)

Analyzing the benefits of PatientsLikeMe social network site

By John Grohol Two research papers were published this month on the Health 2.0 Web site, PatientsLikeMe. PatientsLikeMe is arguably the only "real" health social network online today, because it allows patients to share actual data that matters with one...
May 30, 2008 in e-patients, Health 2.0, Online Communities | Permalink | Comments (5)