Avery Comarow's blog on USNews.com is my personal find of the week. I once worked with Avery, so I know he tells it like it is, and he's tackling an important topic. Check out his take on the CMS Hospital Compare page: Hospital Deaths Go Public.

From ScienceRoll: "Jan Martens at Medblog.nl ... mentioned Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald who should be considered one of the best examples of e-patients in the world. See why..." Hey Jen McCabe Gorman, what is it with the Dutch?

Check out the Diabetes Mine Design Challenge winners for examples of how e-patients can help heal health care, as we like to say around here. I'm especially taken with the Pez dispenser-inspired Maximum Slide gadget, but then again I may just be charmed by the comic book presentation of their idea.

The Reasonably Well blog is authored by Julia Schulia, a patient of Sjogren's Syndrome, a progressive autoimmune disease. She read the e-patient white paper (have you?), and she gets it. Welcome to the family!

A really interesting evaluation of 500 medical stories from the press covering treatments,tests, products & procedures is available at PLoS.

This should be required reading for anyone interested in the power of e-patient groups, since these groups very often debunk improperly reported news.

Orly Avitzur, a neurologist and e-Patient savvy doc, is now a medical editor at the Consumer's Union/Consumer Reports. She's written an excellent short review of some of the important developments in what we've come to call participatory medicine that can be found at the Consumer Reports Health Blog. I recommend it.

A tip of the e-hat to Dr. Ted for this *splendid* reading for people involved in EMR/PHR:

SEEDIE: Society for Exorbitantly Expensive and Difficult to Implement EHRs.

Don't miss the sub-pages.

Over on the Inkwell, our own Jon Lebkowsky is interviewing Clay Shirky, author of "Here Comes Everybody."

My favorite quote so far: "The places where experts matter
and flourish are places where it is expertise, rather than authority
(which is to say knowledge and experience, rather than imprimatur and
access to public expression) that give them their voice."

What patients really want: an introduction to the e-patient" cites our own Dr. Danny Sands in his video editorial on Medscape.

If you have doubts about the impact of social media on health care, please read this 2005 post on The Health Care Blog about a grandmother's campaign on behalf of her grandson. There's a lot of heart (and snark) in the comments.

Maybe it's just me, but this one's a little astounding.

According to Paul Levy's blog, a Perspectives column in the New England Journal of Medicine "suggests that doctors enhance their relationship with patients when they deal with [them] in a polite manner." Well, that's a start!

Seriously, it seems primitive, but I'm glad to see a publication taking seriously the idea of treating us consumers like people who deserve respect and common courtesy. It's a step toward getting everyone in the care community to treat us as humans who need care, not jostling. (Disclaimer: I'm a patron of the author's hospital, which has almost always treated me well.) --e-Patient Dave

Ted Eytan's April 16, 2008, iHealthBeat column lays out the benefits of providing real-time, secure access to health records: "As our profession understands the benefits of patient partnership better, more medical groups are discovering that there aren't compelling arguments for keeping patients' information secret."

"A well-educated patient is easier to treat. A badly educated patient is very difficult to treat."

This and other choice quotes you'll find in, How to deal with the digitally empowered patient, a four-doctor roundtable discussion hosted by Scott V. Haig, MD. an Assistant Clinical Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Columbia University. It was published in the April 2008 issue of Orthopedics Today.

Check out this interview with Matthew Zachary, founder of ImTooYoungForThis (cancer resources for GenX and GenY).

Want to know who wants to be your next personal health record (PHR) provider? Check out this great run down of the current players in the PHR market, along with some insights into what motivates them to be the company between you and your personal health information.