e-Patient Dave

November 7, 2016 By e-Patient Dave 23 Comments

Dear John: I want to download my records.

Dear Dr. Halamka,

I want to download all my data from my 14 years as a patient at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. What button should I push?

In June you said on your blog (left, top) and on MedCity News that no patient has ever asked for that, but your tech support says you don’t have a way to do it (see red outline).

Tech Support said I should call Medical Records. I did, and they said they can’t deliver things electronically. So where is the link you say nobody has ever used?
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September 19, 2016 By e-Patient Dave 5 Comments

Medicine is flipping. Join Eric Topol and me at MedCity ENGAGE to discuss

Click to register with FOUR hundred dollars off (better price than early-bird) with promotion code EPDAVE — Click to register with FOUR hundred dollars off using promotion code EPDAVE.

If you’re, frankly, a visionary who sees that the power structure in medicine is flipping, I urge you to come to La Jolla next month.

MedCity News, one of the best health IT publishers, is hosting its annual “ENGAGE” conference. The mighty Eric Topol is speaking the first morning, and I’m doing the closing keynote on day 2. (I call him mighty because that’s what I think about his vision. So sue me.:-)

Register with promotion code SpeakerReferral and get $500 off, so your cost is only $395. That’s a heck of a good price for this list of speakers – even better than the $300 early-bird discount shown above.

Here’s why this event is unusual: [Read more…]

September 16, 2016 By e-Patient Dave 2 Comments

Join us for #HCLDR Tweetchat “Emergence of e-Patients” Tuesday 8:30pm ET

HCLDR blog post screen capture — Click to visit the original post on the #HCDLR blog

If you’re a fan of healthcare improvement, or of the e-patient movement, or social movements in general, and if you know anything about tweetchats in general or the #HCLDR tweetchat in specific, mark your calendar for next Tuesday night, 8:30-9:30 ET. I’ll be that week’s guest, and it’s going to be wild and wooly and intentionally mind-bending.

In short, ten years ago the e-patient movement was getting born – well, it already existed, but it was beginning to get noticed, and with social movements getting noticed makes all the difference.

What’s this “emergence” thing?

Emergence is a scientific principle that I’ll say more about over the weekend. Click the photo above to go to the HCLDR blog post to learn more about it in this context. In short, ten years ago the e-patient movement was like individual birds, and emergence is when new behaviors emerge in flocks of something.

Things are changing. Please click and learn. We’ll have more to say afterward.

August 24, 2016 By e-Patient Dave Leave a Comment

Welcome to the new site!

In recent speeches I’ve increasingly used my favorite line about not dying: “If you live long enough, things change!”

So it is with this website. As I said the other day, it started seven years ago. At first it was just a blog with a couple of extra pages added, supporting my growing business as a keynote speaker. The blog lived, fittingly, on the home page. But if you’ve just come here directly, look at the menu – this blog’s now on a page of its own.

Why? As I’ve said this year, my work is evolving. After 500 conferences and policy meetings I’m doing more authoring now, more work in academic medicine, more work advising and speaking for corporate clients, large and small. I still love speaking best (nothing’s more fun than a standing ovation), but after seven years it’s time for the blog to move off the home page, to make room for the three dedicated “rabbit holes” a visitor can jump down, one for each of the types of work I do: speaker, author, advisor.

So welcome! Look around, and leave feedback in comments. Here’s to new tomorrows!

August 4, 2016 By e-Patient Dave 2 Comments

Big steps forward for my client Antidote (née TrialReach)

In September 2016 TrialReach rebranded itself Antidote, to shift focus away from the “solution” (the clinical trial), focusing instead on the patient’s need: “I have a problem, and I need an antidote.”

For the past several years my business has been diversifying – in addition to speeches, workshops and policy meetings, I’ve spent an increasing amount of time as an advisor to startups. One of my favorite clients, the most successful so far, is TrialReach, about which I’ve written before, when they raised another round of financing in 2015, and this year on their blog, reporting on Vice President Biden’s extraordinary speech about his son Beau’s cancer death last year, particularly the family’s search for information that might have saved Beau’s life.

In Beau’s case it was not to be: his glioblastoma is a nasty form of brain cancer. Yet still, Biden spoke of the several ways the doctors’ and families’ efforts to try everything possible were frustrated by factors in academic medicine and publishing that hindered the flow of information.

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