For physicians, the advent of the Internet brought about many terms and concepts they never had to worry about before. Suddenly, doctors had to think about EHRs or whether they should practice telemedicine. And what does ‘cyberchondria’ mean, anyway?
One such term that’s picked up steam over the past few years is e-patient, or patients who use the Internet to gather information and find cures for their health conditions. The “e” is commonly understood to mean electronic, which was true at first. But over time, it has come to stand for empowered, engaged, equipped, and enabled.
And what could possibly be so controversial about empowered, engaged, equipped, and enabled patients?
Well, when patients go off on their own to seek health information there are several problems they may encounter, such as faulty information about their condition. Physicians worry that patients will become too independent and stray from their physicians entirely, creating adverse effects on patient health.
In an alternate, more desirable scenario, e-patients, and physicians will work together to create healthcare harmony and better the overall health of the country. This means both physicians and e-patients need to embrace that the term e-patient came from under the umbrella of participatory medicine. In this model, patients and physicians work together as full partners focused on the goal of improving patient health.
The best and most well-known example of the e-patient/physician partnership comes from the country’s most famous e-patient, “e-patient Dave”. Born Dave deBronkart, e-patient Dave is a cancer-survivor-turned-e-patient evangelist who became the poster child for e-patient – physician collaboration.
In 2007, deBronkart was diagnosed with Grade 4 kidney cancer, a condition whose median survival time is about 24 weeks. The outlook was bleak. Sympathetic, his doctor recommended he become part of an online cancer-related community called Acor.org, where he met patients who gave him the contact information of physicians in his area who offer the high-dosage interleukin treatment that helped him beat cancer. deBronkart now travels around the country telling the story of how he and his physician worked together to save his life.
Of course, circumstances needn’t be so dire for this type of collaboration to occur. And like deBronkart’s doctor, physicians should encourage their patients’ transformation into e-patients. Doing this allows physicians to serve as a guide for e-patients, so patients don’t become independent to the point of doing harm.
But it’ll take physicians to become more educated about e-patient resources. This way, physicians can recommend online sources of information for their patients and keep them away from sites that provide faulty information. Furthermore, physicians should often strive to help guide the e-patient process by supplying relevant data through innovations such as patient portals, or even a few simple emails.
The rise of e-patients has the potential to be one of the best things to ever happen to healthcare, but it’ll take patients and physicians working in tandem to see it through.
