Participatory Healthcare: a new text for our movement

Participatory Healthcare: A Person-Centered Approach to Healthcare Transformation, edited by Jan Oldenburg with Associate Editor Mary Griskewicz, could become the defining textbook of our field – the new cornerstone of our movement.
Ten years ago “Doc Tom” Ferguson was working on our founding document, the “e-Patient White Paper” e-Patients: How they can help heal healthcare, when he died unexpectedly. His followers finished and published it in 2007, then formed our Society and Journal in 2009. For years since then I, for one, have felt the White Paper needed to be updated with a broader body of anecdotes and – perhaps more important – with a conceptual framework around which we and all of medicine could organize our thoughts and advance our movement. This is that book.
Essays and anecdotes
Editor Jan Oldenburg says she wondered if it should have been two books, but I’m glad it’s not, because the two sections are distinct yet usefully and potently cross-linked.
Section 1 is eight essays by recognized leaders in different aspects of medicine, from clinical practice to economics and health IT, highlighting new models of care, acute and chronic, in-hospital and out, involving patients and caregivers in innovative ways. Section 2 is an equally important set of 27 real world stories of patients whose cases and outcomes were clearly altered by the presence or absence of a participatory approach.
Each section is important for a different reason. The ess...

Source: Society for Participatory Medicine - October 11, 2016 Category: Journals (General) Authors: Dave deBronkart Tags: Newsletter book review e-patient movement e-patients Health Costs Source Type: news