Power to the Patient!
A great, great man has passed away – a man I quote in half my speeches. I was privileged to know him enough to feel grateful about it, and especially grateful to have been able to visit him a few times in his final weeks. It’s Warner Slack, the one who famously said in the 1970s that patients are the most underutilized resource in healthcare.
There’s so much to say about him, but I’ll mostly let others speak, partly because it’s hard to know what to add. Here are a few things.
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No wonder people get tired of fighting to improve social attitudes. This one is so obvious, yet we keep getting asked the same outdated questions. What amazes me, though, is that this time the skeptical scoffing comes from uninformed innovators, not old-timers! Makes me want to bang my head on the desk.
Last week I posted here about my talk at the SIIM conference in DC, including the rousing favorable response from the audience on Twitter. It appears the popularity has aroused scoffing skepticism AGAIN: “What would patients even DO with their images?? They don’t know how to read them…”
Notice how that thinking presumes the only thing a patient could do with the image is try to play doctor! So I blogged a bunch of the stories patients told me on Facebook in response to my request. Have a look at the post and the fascinating range of stories people shared. How wrong the skeptics are, when they think a patient is trying to step into the doctor’s shoes. Some do in fact become good enough to spot things like a missed tumor(!) – but in most cases the patient does something that adds to what doctors normally do. Isn’t that interesting? Go read.
Twitter photo by Rasu Shrestha MD, MBA, Chief Innovation Officer at UPMC
There are lots of ways to measure the success of a speech. One is what the audience says on Twitter during the talk. I’ll let them speak for themselves, below.
I’ve started a podcast, and you can really help by giving it a rating and review on iTunes, as my friend Dr. Leslie Kernisan just did!
Fantastic much-needed information to help people get better healthcare ★★★★★
by Leslie Kernisan
I’ve long been an admirer of E-patient Dave’s commitment to helping patients and health providers work together better. Great to see him finally spreading the word about participatory medicine via a podcast! I’m a doctor and will be recommending this much-needed podcast to patients and others.
Why do I ask this? Because when people go searching for podcasts on iTunes (the mega-granddaddy of all podcast places), the best search ranking goes to podcasts with lots of good reviews. You can help!
Yesterday’s post contained a video, but that wasn’t apparent to email subscribers. The email system I use only sends the text, for some reason, and at bottom says “This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now“, which linked only to a graphic.
Stupid email system. I usually give instructions in the body of the post: “Email subscribers, click the headline to come online and see the video.” But I forgot – sorry; click here to view yesterday’s post (and see the video). I hope to get a better email system for the blog!
For the past several years a number of themes have repeatedly arisen in my work that aren’t widely discussed elsewhere, and I’ve wanted to make them available to wider audiences, so I’ve started recording occasional “slidecasts” – I play the slides on my computer and narrate. Here’s the latest. It’s a core topic in rethinking the patient-provider relationship: paternal caring, which is necessary in some situations, vs the increasing shift to patient empowerment, autonomy, and even emancipation – the removal of constraints.
I did this for my head & neck cancer patient friends in New Zealand, whom I met during my fellowship last fall. We’ve kept in touch on their Facebook group. On Thursday two of them, Maureen Jansen and Tammy von Keisenberg, are speaking about “health literacy” – a subject that’s misunderstood far too often, and which is often tied to discussions of whether patients should or can be independent to one extent or another. Food for thought.
Thanks once again to the sponsors and organizers of that fellowship: Spark Revera (New Zealand’s telecomms company, totally into the emerging world of e-health) especially @eHealthDoc Will Reedy MD, and Waitemata District Health Board, especially head & neck cancer surgeon David Grayson MD @Sasanof and its “i3” innovation center headed by Dr. Penny Andrew.