e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

Search Results for: suffrage

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New hashtag: #PatientsUseAI!

These are exciting times for patient empowerment and all of medicine! Knowledge is power and generative A.I. is causing an explosion in it. Patients and families are finding that AI tools like GPT-4, Claude.ai and Gemini can profoundly improve their ability to be informed, empowered, and engaged in their care. Participatory medicine!

The other day Grace Cordovano, the extraordinary board-certified patient advocate, spoke a sentence that opened new worlds: “People need to realize: Patients are end users of AI.” Presto: new hashtag #PatientsUseAI, and an awareness campaign that’s starting right now.

Look at all the ways we’re already using AI to get work done:

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“Why We Revolt”: podcast episode 5 – why we should call for careful and kind care

Episode 5 is live! “Why We Revolt” – the patient’s side of the call for better care, with Victor Montori

Special request: What would you like to hear about, on my podcast?

I start this episode by asking for your feedback. Most important, one friend wrote saying he’s not looking for lecture-length radio shows – he wants quick tips, answers to questions. How about you? Are you loving it? Telling friends about it? If not, I’m missing my mark – let me know via the Contact page!

And now, about this episode – [Read more…]

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Dear John: I still want to download my records! Gimme My DaM Data!

Let us start by reviewing our anthem: “Gimme My DaM Data – it’s all about me so it’s mine,” by the magnificent Ross Martin MD and his wife Kym, multi-cancer patient whose care has been affected by lack of access to her health data. “DaM” is Data About Me, Kym’s more-polite version of my cussing. Read on for why this is newly urgent.

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It’s time to adopt a good working definition of empowerment.

Source: dave.pt/worldbankempowerment1
Source: dave.pt/worldbankempowerment1

A major theme of my work last year was that it’s time to create a science of patient engagement (see blog posts) – a rigorous inquiry into what patient engagement is, what factors (parameters) increase it, which ones diminish it, develop some hypotheses that researchers can test. This was the theme of my visit to the Mayo Clinic as Visiting Professor in Internal Medicine in March and my tenure as NEHI’s Patient Engagement Fellow.

A science needs practical definitions. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions notes that until a field has an agreement on what a concept means, the practitioners in the field literally have nothing in common to talk about. I’ve seen that myself, when people talk about empowerment but the field goes nowhere.

It’s time for definitions.

Fortunately, a useful definition of empowerment exists.

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Recognize this voice of social change: New Hampshire’s pioneer suffragist

Ricker full portrait

I’m making a career out of changing the culture of healthcare and I want your help on another cause: honoring a pioneer of women’s rights in my state, New Hampshire.

A couple of weeks ago on New Hampshire Public Radio I heard this segment (text and five minute audio), about Marilla Ricker, who said this – in 1910:

“I’m running for Governor in order to get people in the habit of thinking of women as Governors…
People have to think about a thing for several centuries before they can get acclimated to the idea. I want to start the ball a’rolling.”

Not unlike our efforts to have healthcare think of patients as valid contributors in participatory medicine, right? It seems to take forever! But Ricker couldn’t be governor; heck, she couldn’t even vote.

My state’s League of Women Voters and Women’s Bar Association have legislative approval to have a portrait of Ricker painted and hung in the State House – but New Hampshire being New Hampshire, permission is just permission, and they have to raise the $10,000 themselves. They’re more than halfway there – less than $5,000 to go.

HEY GUYS: Why is it that only two women’s groups are honoring this pioneer of fixing a massive cultural mistake??

Here’s what I want you to do. (“You” = any gender.)
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On this day in history: Susan B. Anthony was found guilty – of voting

Susan B. Anthony, ca. 1855 (
Susan B. Anthony, ca. 1855 (“plus or minus 10 years” – Wikipedia)

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” – Marie Shear, 1986. See other feminism quotes on the Wikiquotes page.

Recent speaking clients know that I often note the parallels between the patient movement and other cultural revolutions – the women’s movements, civil rights, gay rights, disability rights. (I mention disability issues less often, but it was disability advocate Ed Roberts who said in the 1990s, after years of struggle: “When someone else speaks for you, you lose.”)

As anyone who’s heard me speak knows, I don’t get overtly “radically” about it. But I’ve been at this long enough now that I do see patterns. And the patterns teach me that the way people see things now may not be how we’ll see them in the future … and it’s up to us all to speak the truth as we see it.

So when I returned from the week’s travels, my eye was caught today by Wednesday’s “This Day in History” in the Boston Globe:

In 1873, suffragist Susan B. Anthony was found guilty by a judge in Canandaigua, N.Y., of breaking the law by casting a vote in the 1872 presidential election.

The Feminist.org blog has a great post about it – here’s how they say they would have covered it, if they’d been around back then: [Read more…]