August: “retreat and think”

For the month of August I’ll be mostly offline, for a period of “retreat and think.” It’s not a full-bore vacation; I can still be reached for anything time-sensitive (see my Contact page) but I’ll be less active online.

This year has already been full of change – Ginny’s knee replacements, Visiting Professor at Mayo, the first Patient Engagement Fellowship, new publications, and most of all, rethinking what “patient” means (and could mean), per the book that made paradigms famous: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (right). Our movement is gaining traction, which means a change agent needs to rethink. This month is good for that (I’m only traveling to one event), so I’m going to dial back the dialog.

September will be amazing.

One reason to retreat now is that on August 28 the calendar flips from empty to packed.

Fittingly, the season starts with a trip to the Netherlands to work with

Lucien Engelen, the maniac change maker who decided in 2010 that his TEDx conference should be focused on patients (unheard of!), and invited a then-unknown Dave to speak, resulting in the TEDx Talk that changed my life. Consistent with his patient-centered thinking, he’s also the creator of the #PatientsIncluded movement (blog post; emblem at right): he refuses to speak at any conference that doesn’t actively support patients in being there.

I’ll do two events at Radboud University Medical Center Medical School: I’ll be a judge at their REshape Hacking Health 2015 hackathon, then I’ll speak at “Grand Inaugural Rounds” – a three-day head-spinning new way to welcome the medical school’s incoming class, exposing them to all kinds of innovation and changes in health(care) that will hit their professional life when they graduate.

That will be followed by a ten day speaking tour of Alaska (more on that trip soon) and five days at Stanford Medicine X, the most patient-centered conference in the world.

The big question for the rest of 2015:

If the best of medicine
depends on the best information,

and information flows freely now
(as shown at right),

how does that change what’s possible
and what’s necessary?

(See the fine print on that diagram – Lucien is one of its creators.)

For much more about the diagram and its implications, including a one minute animated version, see this February blog post at the time of my BMJ article, “From Patient Centred to People Powered: Autonomy on the Rise.”

The new world is real, but most patients and most professionals don’t know it yet. How do we break through our habitual thinking? That’s where The Structure of Scientific Revolutions comes in.

And that’s something to think about.