The New York Times Well blog launched a new section yesterday called “Patients and Doctors Start Talking.” In yesterday’s premiere column, surgeon Pauline Chen explains that she hopes her new blog can become a vehicle for helping consumers and clinicians to mutually “bridge the gap between patients and doctors and remedy the disconnect.”

Chen points out:

“In 1966, a Harris Poll found that almost three-quarters of Americans had ‘a great deal’ of confidence in their health care leaders. That number has steadily dropped over the last four decades, so that today only slightly more than a third feel the same way, the same poll shows.”

Chen is absolutely right that we need creative solutions for remedying the problems with the clinician-patient relationship, and I think that an online community is a good vehicle for generating discussion. I hope that it ulimately addresses many of the issues that have been raised on this blog under the Patient-Clinician Relationship heading.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Health 2.0 Space, 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.