Over on the e-patients.net blog this morning, Gilles Frydman addresses two things relating to our government and the world of e-patients. First, the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ) has a public service campaign, urging consumers to embrace participatory medicine and providing guidance for engaging in dialog with their clinicians.

AHRQ has done a lot of good things in this arena, including promoting information therapy among its best practices for improving consumer experience with care (and CAHPS performance). Here’s an excerpt:

One way to facilitate patient education and behavioral change is to give patients access to pertinent and specific evidence-based information that they can use to educate themselves and make better decisions about their behaviors, their health, and their health care. Ideally, this strategy takes advantage of the electronic infrastructure emerging in many health care settings, but computer access is not necessary.

While there are several information products available to clinicians, one of the most prominent examples of this strategy is Information Therapy (Ix™), a strategy that aims to overcome many of the barriers that prevent health care consumers from feeling sufficiently informed and empowered to manage their health.

I’m hopeful that AHRQ’s work on these types of efforts will move the dial, though it’s hard to determine their impact thus far.

Gilles also addresses David Leonhardt’s NYT Magazine Obama interview that I described on Monday, though we had a little different reactions. Gilles responds from the perspective of a certain portion of consumers living with rare conditions, though not necessarily from the more general consumer perspective.

To put the President’s remarks fully in context, here’s the set-up for Obama’s response — the question that David asked him:

You have suggested that health care is now the No. 1 legislative priority. It seems to me this is only a small generalization — to say that the way the medical system works now is, people go to the doctor; the doctor tells them what treatments they need; they get those treatments, regardless of cost or, frankly, regardless of whether they’re effective. I wonder if you could talk to people about how going to the doctor will be different in the future; how they will experience medical care differently on the other side of health care reform.

I think that what is interesting is that — with this framing — David is asking a policy question, but inviting a response put in consumer terms.

Obama begins his response with the policy answer that fits in with what I, Gilles, AHRQ all believe, “First of all, I do think consumers have gotten more active in their own treatments in a way that’s very useful. And I think that should continue to be encouraged, to the extent that we can provide consumers with more information about their own well-being — that, I think, can be helpful.”

But Obama then shares his own personal experience from his perspective as a patient and a caregiver.  In fact, he deliberately adds, “I just speak from my own experience…” to be clear.

On this particular point, I personally don’t think any of us should tell a patient/caregiver that their view of how to interact with their clinicians is wrong.  Even if that patient happens to be the most powerful person in the world, in that moment, he is still a patient or caregiver.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 10:15 am and is filed under Behavior Change, Decision Support, Engaging Consumers, Inside the Beltway, 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.