When you have a doctor's appointment, and she makes some notes and later formalizes them for your medical record, would you like read them? There's been debate over the years about whether patients should read the notes that doctors write about them and their health issues -- in academic circles,...

At Health 2.0 in Paris last week, I said: "Data on its own is useless. It's all about conversations." Let's dig into this a bit more.

I'm a strong believer in evidence-based medicine. We must learn from successes and failures, in particular those that come in the form...

Thanksgiving is a time to be with family and to remember and share how much we care about one another. A conversation we don't typically have with mom, dad, brother, or sister is about our wishes at the end of life. As a doctor, I've witnessed many tragic occasions where...

Last week a special conference called TEDMED happened, which brought together thought leaders in health and technology, as well as leaders from many fields which at first glance might surprise you.

We saw the future of health care in discussions about robotic limbs, over-the-counter DNA testing, and...

Today I'm proud to share that a special online journal has launched: the Journal of Participatory Medicine. The simple goal is to learn what methods really work for patient-doctor collaboration, and in doing so transform the culture of medicine.

Why is this important? It turns out that doctors can't...

My wife, my children, and I are all patients at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF). I am grateful for the world-class care that we all receive there, and I continue to refer many friends and colleagues there.

We recently received a mailer from PAMF, addressed to my wife and...

Like many other doctors, patients, and President Obama, I've been thinking about Atul Gawande's brilliant piece in the New Yorker on the root causes of spiraling health care costs in the U.S. One aspect that has not yet been given enough air-time is what role patients should play in...

Gone are the days where you should believe what your doctor tells you simply because he or she is a doctor. Medicine can be complicated, and it changes all the time: new drugs, new resistant bugs, and new scientific studies that teach us that sometimes what we once thought was...

We have a critical last-mile problem in the healthcare industry: getting from a doctor's prescription to a patient regularly taking her medication. The "last-mile problem" usually refers to the challenge of laying the final stretch of wire or cable to each individual home when providing telephone or internet service. Healthcare...