Adding Health Advice to Online Medical Records – in the NY Times

By STEVE LOHR     Published: October 6, 2009

The national health care debate right now is all about giving more people affordable access to doctors and hospitals. Yet the vast majority of health care decisions — 80 percent or more, experts say — are really made by individuals, instead of medical professionals, whether choices are about diet [...]

New patient info handouts available on MedlinePlus

Today, MedlinePlus released a new version of the A.D.A.M. Medical Encyclopedia that includes approximately 400 new Patient Instruction pages, covering pre-operative information and instructions, discharge instructions, self-care instructions, and questions to ask your doctor.
The Patient Instruction pages are available in both English and Spanish, and you will be able to find them in the MedlinePlus [...]

From PEW: The Rise of the e-Patient-Trends in the Use of Digital Technology for Health Purposes

From NPR: How The Modern Patient Drives Up Health Costs

by Alix Spiegel
The doors to the clinic had been locked for over an hour, and the last light in the sky was quickly fading when two eyes appeared in Teresa Moore’s office window, followed by a sharp knock and a glass-muffled plea to be let in: It was a patient.
Moore walked the halls of her [...]

Participatory Democracy, Participatory Medicine

from the Pew Internet & American Life Project
by Susannah Fox
Apr 17, 2009
More than half of the entire adult population in the U.S. used the internet to get involved in the 2008 political process. Blogs, social networking sites, video clips, and plain old email were all used to gather and share political information by what Lee [...]

From the Seattle Times: Patients looking online for second, third opinions

These days, online visitors with health concerns are doing more than entering the name of a condition in a search engine. They’re also connecting with millions of other patients.
By JOHN SCHWARTZ, The New York Times

Reliance on the Internet is so prevalent, said the report’s author, Susannah Fox, the associate director at Pew, that “Google is [...]