Patient Centered IT

Just a quick wrap-up of what I experienced at Mozilla drumbeat. First of all: this was a non healthcare event. It was about open education, sharing, improvement and freedom of the web. Personally I hooked on a thread about web development skills and how one could enforce various skills, badges(certificates) to have a better web […]

Medical tourism is special in many aspects. Patients travel first to be treated. Main drivers for this behavior are quality and/or price. This makes medical tourism a real market scenario with real customers. Patient Choice The first remarkable thing about medical tourism is choice. Whatever the reason is that patient choice is often not possible […]

This post by e-Patient Dave documents some of the aspects of online communities for patient. Having all issues or (only even part of it) at hand still is not enough for mature judgements about the value of online communities. The problem is that a community is diversity. It represents far more diversity than traditional healthcare […]

This post with the story of Bill Claxton a patient suffering from a rare neuroendocrine cancer called carcinoid is amazing. It shows how a patient claims a patient centered approach and achieves to succeed. Success is owed to developing a surgical plan, and assembling a multidisciplinary medical team all done by himself. This is an […]

It may be intuitive for some people for others not. The more you know the healthier you live. A study  investigating the influence of health literacy on the occurrence of hypoglycemic episodes in diabetic 2 patients reveals a significant relationship: http://xnet.kp.org/newscenter/pressreleases/nat/2010/051910diabetes.html The following quote depicts one main aspect of health illiteracy in this study Serious […]

A recent post by ROB LAMBERTS in The Health Care Blog about the importance of primary care physicians made me rethink the relationship of patients, doctors and information systems. To me the role of family primary care doctors is undisputable. Part of the reason is given by ROB himself: The solution from an overall cost […]

This is a difficult issue. Facing economy in healthcare references some unsolved problems. If not unsolved then maybe only untreated or covered by daily practices which were not precisely developed with an economic perspective. Doing healthcare aims to literally take care of the health of the patient. Humanity may claim that the life and health […]

Very important findings from a study commented in Healthcare IT News emphasize the significance of careful application of Healthcare IT or Patient Centered IT tools. They are by no means a general purpose solution for anything what is wrong in healthcare nor a substitute for face to face encounters between patient and physician. In fact […]

A recent discussion in the Health Care Blog caught my attention: http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2010/02/by-matthew-holt—-the-not-huge-world-of-health-20-participatory-medicine-and—epatients-has-been-fretting-itself-about.html I support Mathtew’s view: So I’m bemused by Darthmed’s demand that “Health 2.0 – prove yourself quickly or step aside” Health 2.0 is part of a much larger societal process, and it ain’t going anywhere while there are sick people and while technology […]

With Patient Centered IT we try to document applications to put patients in control. This norwegian system for diabetes control shows this in an impressive way. http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/33376 “It would not been possible to develop this tool without involving people with diabetes over a period as long as two years,” This is the central issue. Whether […]