Gilles Frydman at e-patients.net (where the Greenes and I also blog) has posted a consideration of the term participatory medicine and the evolving sense of its meaning. Gilles starts with his own definition:

Participatory Medicine is a model of medical care actively involving the patient (or the patient's caregiver as appropriate) as an integral part of the full continuum of care.

It requires:

• a patient enabled by information, software and community
• equal access to all the clinical and scientific data related to the patient and,
• a well defined shared decision-making process.

The idea of an empowered patient participating in a healthcare process that was previously completely in the hands of the doctor, with access to information that in the past only doctors could easily access, is inherently political. It's about the democratization of knowledge, and there's growing interest in the concept, also described as "Health 2.0," defined by Ted Eytan as "participatory healthcare."

Enabled by information, software, and community that we collect or create, we the patients can be effective partners in our own healthcare, and we the people can participate in reshaping the health system itself.

I've talked this week about changes in political participation engendered by expanding adoption of revolutionary web-based technologies for connection and communication. Healthcare, like politics, is being transformed by the web. Patients are finding robust sources of information about their conditions and sharing knowledge in patient communities. More medical professionals are leveraging the Internet, too, and physicians are beginning to acknowledge the potential for partnership with their patients.

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