This blog post was originally published on the British Medical Journal’s web site. What follows is intercepted pseudonymous correspondence between a patient and a GP as the patient tries to persuade the GP to use Patients Know Best’s system so that she can consult online. Dear Dr Today, Can I ask you to accept the invitation [...]
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It was with great pleasure that I read the UK government’s “Equity and excellence: liberating the NHS” white paper. It enshrines the principle of patient-controlled medical records with wonderful phrase “nothing about me without me”. 2.1 The Government’s ambition is to achieve healthcare outcomes that are among the best in the world. This can only be [...]
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Cognitive surplus One of the great pleasures of living in London is that a friend can email you (in this case from Salamanca) and say: “Hey, did you know Clay Shirky, a world famous internet guru, is speaking at LSE in 60 minutes?”—and you can drop everything, go, and be thrilled. I knew about Shirky [...]
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Last week, over lunch with a few friends, we discussed how excited we are by the UK’s new government. Some really interesting people are in power, with two young dynamic leaders at the helms of the Conservative and Liberal Democrate parties. Then they issued their policy document, The Coalition: our programme for government. On page [...]
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Watch how few people use stairs at the beginning of this video. And then watch what happens when they make the stairs into a piano. This reminds of Rajiv Mehta’s description of his work on Zume Life in the PKB podcast. It’s not particularly helpful to point out to people that why you’re not doing [...]
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“Can a patient invite another patient to look at their record?” This question really made me pause. The answer is definitely “yes”, because each patient using Patients Know Best is able to invite anyone they want to look at their records. But when we initially designed the platform the assumption was that patients would use [...]
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William Heath from Mydex pointed out to me that both Labour and the Conservatives supported the principle of patient-controlled medical records: We will explore how to give citizens direct access to thedata held on them by public agencies, so that people can use and control their own personal data in their interaction withservice providers. Labour [...]
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On Thursday 8th of April, we held an education event at the Royal Society of Medicine. The speakers included Dr Richard Smith, our Chairman, and me, Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli. Richard, as former editor of the British Medical Journal, spoke about the important of and evidence base for using new technology to allow patients to manage [...]
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Every day hundreds of thousands of doctors and patients around the world discuss the benefits and risks of drugs. You might think therefore that we know how to communicate the information well, but the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the Food and Drug Administration agree that we don’t. Indeed, the EMA logically thinks that before [...]
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The differences between rural and urban China are stark. Beijing, Shanghai, and other major cities are filled with new buildings, best illustrated by those built for the Olympics, whereas rural China has as many as 300 million people living on under a dollar a day, more than any other country. Indeed, China can be described [...]
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Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
Dr Richard Smith