Join my live Q&A on “Patient Design” with The Medical Futurist – Tuesday noon ET

This is going to be fun: a live, unscripted, free-for-all “ask me anything” YouTube event on the subject of Patient Design. At noon ET on Tuesday, March 21, just go here. Or go there now and click the little “Notify me” button at bottom left. There’s no registration required, but you can sign up here on EventBrite for reminders.

The host is “The Medical Futurist,” Bertalan Meskó, in Budapest. I’ve had a long history of collaborating with “Berci” (his nickname); my first blog post about him was 13 years ago yesterday, he endorsed my 2013 book Let Patients Help, and I’ve lectured at his course at Semelweiss University.

Our session tomorrow springs out of our recent paper in JMIR, Patient Design: The Importance of Including Patients in Designing Health Care. See the summary below – this culture change is challenging but inevitable. Again, here’s the link to the live event. (No registration required.)

Ask yourself, seriously: is this nuts?? (No, it’s not.)

What could patients know about designing healthcare??

The answer is that this is exactly the same question that plagues and undermines every part of life when paternalism starts to collapse. We will discuss this and much more.

If you want to jump-start your thinking, here’s the abstract of that paper, broken up into single lines for easier digestion. The shift has already begun and is inexorable. So think: how will this unfold? Who will resist? How will we produce the best new world together?

The paper’s summary:

• A paradigm shift is underway in the patient-clinician relationship,
  driven by irreversible changes in information access,
  • Yet the model under which clinicians are trained, care is conducted, and care delivery is designed has not changed significantly even though we call it “patient centered.”
• Humanity endured centuries in which even doctors had little idea what the patient’s problem really was.
  • Science slowly solved that, and for a century, only doctors could know what was worth knowing.
• Today, the rise of the internet and digital health has led to the end of that era.
  • We are already witnessing early signs of the era of participatory health:
    genuinely empowered people
    living their lives and managing their health
    according to their own priorities,
    in partnership and consultation with physicians as needed.
• This may feel like a threat to the physician’s sacred role, but it is no more so than when physicians adopted informed consent and then Shared Decision Making.
• In the 2010s, many pharmaceutical, medical, and health care companies started to use patient centricity as a mantra.
• We argue that to drive this paradigm change fully into existence, we need to shift “patient centricity”
  • from a relatively passive process, driven by industry needs,
  • into a far more active, collaborative process driven by both parties’ needs and preferences.
• To build this new world of practice and workflow, we simply must engage with patients as true partners.
• To achieve medicine’s new potential, it must be optimized around the wants and priorities of the ultimate stakeholder—the party that has the most at stake in how it all plays out: the patient.
• Patient design is the approach that can make it happen.