Talk:E-patient

Article
Article primarily cites the author's own writing, as far as I can see. ErikNilsson (talk) 06:24, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

This is sheer non sense. It cites the work of a group of experts who prepared a document funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The external links are to peer-reviewed publications and to the Pew Charitable Trust publications! From what I am gathering Erik Nilsson does not have a clue about the impact that online social networks have on tens of millions of patients in America alone. His edit should be reverted!

kosherfrog (talk)

--- I agree that the citations are legitimate, peer-reviewed publications, and should remain as citations for e-patient. Kosherfrog, you appear to indicate above that some of those cited articles are articles you have no involvement with. If so, my apologies: that's not how it appeared to me. However, the article would be improved in any case with broader references.

As regards to my ignorance of the impact social networks have on patients, that might be true, but it does not follow from my comments and wouldn't matter anyway: the greater or lesser impact of the phenomenon of social networks on medicine has no bearing on whether or not a particular article meets WP's standards.

As it happens, I do have a clue about the impact of online social networks on patients in America. But as I said, that doesn't matter. ErikNilsson (talk) 16:27, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Erik, Since you appear to be an expert in WP standards, can you explain how you decide that the entry about P4 Medicine is legitimate, while it address a totally unproven, non existant and futuristic look at medicine, and the e-Patient entry doesn't meet the WP standards? The fact that: 1) one of the 4 links on the P4 Medicine entry is to your own p4medicine.com blog and 2)your company is directly involved in the design of tools for the first 3Ps or P4 Medicine (Trademarked) has, I am sure, no bearing at all on your opinion:-) I believe that we are getting close to request an arbitration about your edits, both here on the e-patient entry and on the particpatory medicine entry I created yesterday.

kosherfrog (talk) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.22.245.42 (talk) 16:42, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Metapoints:

1. I am not an expert in WP standards, but I suspect I may be more knowledgeable a week from now.

2. I don't know how the arbitration process works, as I've never been involved with it before, so I don't know how to go about that or what effect it would have, but if you think it would help, please do request arbitration.

How did I decide that P4 Medicine, an admittedly speculative concept about the future of medicine, was a legit subject for a WP article, yet I complained about the articles you wrote? I'll answer each part separately.

1. P4 Medicine is a concept that is used by (a small yet significant group of) people to discuss the future of medicine. P4 Medicine speculates about the future of medicine, but the WP article does not speculate on the future of the term P4 Medicine. (Or it shouldn't, and what I wrote didn't.) You can find many examples of this in WP. For example, there is a WP article on time travel. Time travel is speculative, at best. However, the article on time travel does not speculate, but reports the history of the concept of time travel, as well as current thinking. (The article has been flagged for citation and cleanup, but never mind.)

As I said elsewhere, I do not think the current P4 Medicine article meets WP's quality standards, and I think your box is justified. The most problematic parts of the current article were not written by me, but I can't say that my original article is without problems.

2. You wrote: "your company is directly involved in the design of tools for the first 3Ps of P4 Medicine (Trademarked) has, I am sure, no bearing at all on your opinion:-)" Certainly, my company's work in systems biology piques my interest in these topics. However, I have no interest in the trademark in "P4 Medicine." In fact, I think it's a counterproductive idea and an incredibly weak mark, but I'm not a lawyer, and sometimes lawyers do things that make no sense to the rest of us. Moreover, although it probably doesn't matter much one way or the other, the commercial interests of my company are probably best served by as much noise as possible surrounding these concepts, so vapid boosterism would probably be more useful than my attempts at helpful criticism.

3. I think the articles you wrote belong in WP. I just think they should be better. Better, certainly, than the current P4 Medicine article, which as you allude, breaks important WP rules and has wretched, fawning writing besides. It would be a good thing if e-patient, participatory medicine, and P4 medicine were all three better articles.

ErikNilsson (talk) 17:53, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Thank You, Erik, for the thoughtful response. I agree with you that the 3 pages require work and input from more people. But that is also due to the fact that the 3 concepts are not yet embraced by many people, either patients, health professionals or scientists. We are really talking about subjects that are just starting to pique the interest of the larger public. I expect that the next few months will bring in significantly more people able to edit, add and generally augment the content of these pages.

On a related note, the reason I created the entry on participatory medicine is quite simple: of the 4Ps, it was the only one without its own definition. A strange situation, considering that the Director of the NIH is now starting to use the term more regularly.

In conclusion, let's work together to make the pages about all these probably important concepts better.

kosherfrog (talk)

That sounds great. How do you want to proceed? ErikNilsson (talk) 20:22, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I like your idea of cross editing the 3 pages. I will start by gathering additional information about P4 Medicine. And will probably expand on the possible connection between Participatory Design and PM, although the connection should be as valid between any social network generating collective intelligence and PM. We have all experienced how it is much more difficult to transform the medical world than almost any other professional environment. That shouldn't stop us from writing about the impact of the internet, one of the main disruptive technologies of the moment, on the relationship between patients and health professionals, IMHO. It may be a good idea to create a section titled "Controversy", similar to what can be found in the "Crowdsourcing" entry, for example.

kosherfrog (talk) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.22.245.42 (talk) 20:54, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. I'll follow your lead and look forward to seeing your edits.

We are posting to 3 different talk pages. Let's use just this one for now regarding edits to all three articles, just to keep things less confusing. ErikNilsson (talk) 22:33, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

OK Kosherfrog, I made some changes to Participatory Medicine. I'll do more this weekend. Let me know what you think. Have a nice weekend! ErikNilsson (talk) 18:16, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Importance Assessment
Based on the scale for importance assessment, I fail to understand why Whatamidoing chose a low-importance. Let me quote the scale: "Low Priority: Article may only be included to cover a specific part of a more important article, or may be only loosely connected to medicine. Subject may be specific to one country or part of one country, such as licensing requirements or organizations. This category includes most of the following: very rare diseases, lesser-known medical signs, equipment, hospitals, individuals, historical information, publications, laws, investigational drugs, detailed genetic and physiological information, and obscure anatomical features."

There is a growing body of research on the importance of e-Patients, due to the fact that a significant and constantly growing number of people around the globe use Internet resources to help them be better informed and manage one or more medical condition, for themselves or for somebody else. The article is definitely related to Medicine, although this is a big paradigm shift in medicine. But I don't see in the assessment rules any reason why a paradigm shift should be evaluated of low-importance. Kosherfrog (talk) 23:06, 13 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I rated it based on the overarching criteria: the likelihood of an average reader reading it.  The page gets very little traffic.  Therefore it is lower priority for improving it than a popular page.  You can contest the rating at here if you want.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:51, 25 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I am wondering if you have seen any increase in traffic for this page over the past year. Kosherfrog (talk) 12:35, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

e-Patient vs. e-patient
The upper case and lower case "P" were being used without any convention or pattern. I have altered this in the text using standard English grammar. In a place where a word might be written with an uppercase first letter (e.g. at the beginning of a sentence), I have made it "e-Patient"; where a word might be written with a lowercase first letter (e.g. within a sentence), I have made it "e-patient". I have left the case in the references, as I have assumed that those have been done correctly. Kmasters0 (talk) 10:28, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

e-patient = internet patient = internet-savvy patient??
To user Mytcsy,

I see you are involved in "the e-patient movement" and in contributing to the article. Two of your recent edits to the article have the following (substantial and good) edit summaries:
 * (Removed definition language indicating that e-patients are solely about internet use in medical research. The movement is much larger than just "patients who search online" - and not all internet-using patients are e-patients.) 25 August 2013, where you removed "(also known as Internet patient, or Internet-savvy patient)"
 * (E-patients ARE NOT internet-patients. As a member of the movement, I know we're working hard to end that phraseology.) 1 September 2013, where you again removed the same parenthetical

I do not understand your insistence on this, nor what "the e-patient movement" is all about, nor what is wrong with the term "internet patient". (As far as I can see, I am both :) )

I hope that you will clarify my/this confusion below. (And that others may join in the conversation!)

Thank you, Hordaland (talk) 18:48, 1 September 2013 (UTC)