Friday, January 28, 2011

Soliciting contributions: "Healthcare professional as e-patient" series

I am contemplating a series of posts arising from my own recent experience as an e-patient to help the broader e-patient community navigate the stormy medical waters with a bit more comfort. I am looking for other healthcare professionals who have had their own experiences as an e-patient that may be instructive for non-healthcare professionals as patients to contribute to the series. Namely, I am most interested in helping people establish better communication lines and channels with their healthcare providers. I am not looking for a comprehensive description of every aspect of your encounter, but rather one specific point that may be particularly instructive. If you have more than one to share, that is great too, we can do that as well. No bitching or moaning, just lessons that we can all learn from.

Issues I would like to touch upon range from how to bring out risk-benefit balance to how to feel OK about confronting your physician with dissenting information to how best to communicate (not everyone is good on e-mail, for example), given our individual styles and time constraints.

I think contributions from healthcare professionals may be very valuable, as we can see both sides of the coin, so to speak.

Would love feedback from both, healthcare professionals and e-patients on what would be valuable. If you are interested in contributing, please, either let me know in the comments section or e-mail me at healthcareetcblog@gmail.com. If you have an idea for a post, please, be very specific about what your theme is, as I will make decisions based on how relevant it is to what I am envisioning.

This is jut a thought at this point, but seems like there may be something to it. Looking forward to your ideas.

3 comments:

  1. Here's a start - from March 2009, a post on doctors who are e-patients themselves. I called 'em "d-patient" :-) Let's hear it for the d-patient e-patients.

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  2. btw, be sure to see the many additions in comments, too.

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  3. I am a physician who is a throat cancer survivor. As an Infectious Diseases physician I had extensive experience in otolaryngological illnesses. However, when I was exposed to new, different, and challenging experiences as a neck cancer patient, I had to deal with these as a patient --- not as a physician.
    Since my diagnosis I devoted much of my time to bridge the gape between physicians and patients. I had written a book about my experiences and several articles on my experiences in the hope of generating greater awareness by health care providers to the challenges faced by cancer patients in general and head and neck one in particular. These can be accessed through my blog at http://dribrook.blogspot.com/ .
    I will be happy to post on this site on topics such as physician's attitude and preventing and discussion of medical errors.

    Itzhak Brook MD

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