I learned two important lessons in a statistics course I took in college: 1) don’t play the lottery; 2) be skeptical of statistics, especially nice-looking charts and graphs. Yes, I did grow up to be a major purveyor of statistics, but I think it’s a good thing that my first instinct is to be skeptical […]
E-patients with Agency (or Attitude?)–Susannah Fox
What are the social and psychological factors that affect how someone is treated — or even their health outcomes? This question has popped up in my reading and in my work quite a bit this week, so I wanted to share what I have learned from three leading thinkers: Peggy Orenstein, Dr. Jeffrey Lin, and […]
Patriotic Participation–Susannah Fox
[Don’t miss yesterday’s related post about the founding heroes of patient empowerment.] Something important is afoot in the land when people are able to access and share “industrial strength” information instead of being satisfied with the “consumer strength” information previously offered to them. In the political arena, 39% of internet users (29% of all adults) […]
Pez Dispensers = Inspiration–Susannah Fox
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.
Participatory Medicine at NIH–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 talk about participatory medicine: 35 minutes of our findings; 45 minutes of discussion. It was a blisteringly hot […]
Data and Insights on Minority Populations–Susannah Fox
The Pew Internet Project‘s sample sizes for health surveys have been too small to do in-depth analysis on race/ethnicity and economic status. One challenge is that a significant portion of the respondent pool refuses to answer the household income question (the refusal rate can be as high as 20%). So we use education levels as […]
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