Dan Hoch (of BrainTalk fame) is up at The Health Care Blog with a great post today about the role medical societies can play in advancing participatory medicine.

In it, he makes six recommendations for medical societies to help promote participatory medicine. I agree with everything he wrote, and would add two more things.

First, medical societies can provide tools their members that facilitate the delivery of information therapy (Ix) and participatory medicine. Hoch actually alludes to it earlier, based on what his own medical society (the American Academy of Neurology) has done to promote patient pages, and other forward-thinking societies have already taken steps in this direction.

Most physicians want to prescribe information to their patients to facilitate more collaborative care, but they don’t have systems in place that fit that work into the process of care delivery. If one of their most trusted sources (their professional society) can make it easy for them to do the right thing, they will probably jump at the chance.

Second, as medical societies are promoting private- and public-sector reimbursement changes to better align incentives to provide high-quality care, they can make the case that participatory medicine, Ix, and related care support should be rewarded.

Along with Hoch’s suggestions, medical societies that do this can play a critical role in advancing the practice of participatory medicine and Ix.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Participatory Medicine, Patient-Clinician Relationship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.