Patient Information

The boundaries between the physician - patient relationship have always been difficult as the relationship is based on trust, intimacy and the ability to share information from both sides of the desk.  This relationship has grown more complex due to the rise of social media engagement.  Physicians are being friend-ed, followed and reviewed across the digital channel like crazy, placing the doctors that care for them in difficult positions regarding the confidentiality of their patients who often don't think about the impact of their digital-buddy request.

Similarly, due to the ease of digital communications, the commonly time-stretched doctor also faces temptation to use quick communication methods to reach their audience, in lieu of a more professional path.  No-one really wants their test results Tweeted to them! These examples of digital doctoring to be avoided are covered in the guidance.  Protecting patient privacy and confidentiality is stressed as the main area for focus when using social media.

The UK NHS has launched a series of patient decision support apps for a range of common diseases to help improve patient education and understanding

How’s your health literacy? Literacy, in this instance, doesn’t only mean can you read and write—are you literate. It means can you read instructions on a bottle of medicine, can you listen to a he...

Our paper-based approach to health care delivery is fraught with potential errors and inefficiencies. A handwritten prescription can result in an accidental overdose. If the patient is referred to ...

Engaged patients – those who actively seek to know more about and manage their own health – are more likely than others to participate in preventive and healthy practices, self-manage their conditions and achieve better outcomes.

The family physician, a dying breed, already replaced by better paid second- and third-line technical specialists then proactive laboratory-based preventive measures based on schedules to screen fo...

I went to the funeral of a 73 year old man who died of metastatic prostate cancer. He was one of my first patients and we had developed a friendship over the years.

If you visit a doctor’s office or hospital and you usually see stacks of manila folders with labels on them and loads of paper inside When a doctor wants to research more about a patient, it can take a while to sort through the file and decipher handwritten notes.  Electronic health records are fast becoming the new normal for record keeping in the health field.  But what does e-health mean and who has access to your information once it is uploaded?

The internet has fundamentally transformed the way I practice medicine, challenging the doctor-patient relationship.  I see examples of this every … Read More

WebMD explains what to do when your doctor doesn’t listen to your concerns and how to find a new doctor for you and your family.

Yes, writes Peter Houston, but you don’t have to do it all yourself.

You probably have bigger calls on your time, but have you given much thought to social media? Not in the abstract corporate communications sense, in a you-the-CEO sense? There has been a flurry of reports over the last six months about the C-suite’s engagement with social media. Some hail the arrival of the social CEO, others ask “Where are they all?”

The cheerleaders for CEO participation say it makes total sense for corporate leadership to take to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the rest to spread the good news — or fight the bad news — about their businesses. While it might be tempting to leave social media to the PR and marketing folks, you could be missing a trick. BRANDFog, promoting social media for CEOs, says in its 2012 CEO, Social Media & Leadership Survey that 82 percent of employees are more likely to trust a business whose leadership communicates openly through social media.

IBM’s Global CEO survey concurs: the best performing companies are “30 percent more likely to identify openness – characterized by greater use of social media platforms – as a key influence on their organizations.”

The IBM study, based on 1,700 face-to-face interviews with CEOs and public sector leaders from around the world, explores how corporate leadership is responding to the complexity of what IBM calls the connected economy — increasingly interconnected organisations, markets, societies and governments. It highlights the importance of social media in communicating with both employees and customers. Finding that 16 percent of the CEOs surveyed use social media to communicate with customers, it trumpets expectations of a threefold increase in adoption of social media channels in the coming five years.

“Patient activation” is the new buzzword threatening to replace “patient engagement” – long before many patients have actually been, you know, engaged. 

Apparently, we no longer bother to to wait for our terminology to take on meaning before we feel compelled to replace it. 

As it stands, neither term has much meaning or basis in reality. The basic idea, however, is that shared decision-making between doctors and their patients yields better treatment compliance and results. This requires a level of health literacy that’s sorely missing today. 

It’s a noble goal, but will remain elusive as long as payment schemes fail to incorporate measures of patient engagement that impact how much doctors and hospitals are paid. 

Many Americans are still uncomfortable with the idea that their doctors are often more interested in making money than helping their patients. The idea that some are even willing to imperil their patients’ safety by needlessly putting them in dangerous hospitals to protect themselves from potential lawsuits is abhorrent to a public that continues to have a high degree of trust in the medical profession. 

This high level of trust is often misplaced, however, as I’ve described in Our Healthcare Sucks and in previous posts (see here, here and here). These posts address hospital billing practices that pad the bills that many patients will have to pay themselves (i.e., they’re not covered by Medicare or private insurers). They also address scurrilous practices by physician oncologists treating cancer patients more aggressively with toxic chemotherapy drugs to fatten their incomes. 

Is this really trustworthy behavior? Or are we truly a nation of suckers? 

And will patient engagement or patient activation make any difference in this grand disconnect between our healthcare perceptions and reality?

Read on..