e-Patient Dave

February 3, 2015 By e-Patient Dave 1 Comment

Daily Digest: Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Ready, set, DIGEST! Here’s today’s harvest of what we think is worth reading, participatory-medicine division:

Bob Wachter, who is one of the founders of the Society of Hospital Medicine and the hospitalist movement, has a great blog called Wachter’s World. Here’s the latest post, an interview with Andy McAfee, self-tagged “technology optimist” and associate director of the Center for Digital Business at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. It’s a terrific conversation about the intersection of tech and humanity, in medicine and elsewhere. “My Interview with ‘Technology Optimist’ and 2nd Machine Age Coauthor Andy McAfee“
One of our favorite primary care MDs, Dr. Peter Elias, is an SPM member who teaches regularly, and well, on many topics, including using technology tools to enable better doctor-patient communication. In this post, which is essentially a report from the front lines of family practice by someone who knows, Peter tells us why he keeps teaching: to achieve a state of what he calls reflective competence. “I teach to remain a learner“
Leonard Kish is a terrific writer and thinker on health IT. He’s the one who coined the phrase “patient engagement is the blockbuster drug of the 21st century.” Here’s his review of Dr. Eric Topol’s latest book. “8 Takeaways from Topol’s Latest: ‘The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands’”
Forbes.com writer Dan Munro put up a provocative post this morning, quoting something said at the Clinton Health Matters Initiative event last week in southern California. The title speaks for itself, and Dan’s take on it is solid. “Founder Of Oscar Health: ‘A Lot Of People In This Industry Are Just Evil’“
NPR Morning Edition had a great piece this morning about a group of patients literally going for a TKO on Parkinson’s. Our MedX friend Sara Riggare has been in what she calls “Parkinson’s fight club” in Portugal recently, so this resonated for us. “Fight Parkinson’s: Exercise May Be The Best Therapy“
For those of us on the healthcare beat, understanding science and research reports is critical. It’s also not easy, which explains why major media outlets get the science, and therefore the story, wrong sometimes. One of the best sources for news analysis on medical and health science stories is Health News Review. They had a funding challenge last year, and had to shut down for a while, but they’re back, and better than ever. Here’s their analysis of recent headlines about a nasal spray that’s targeted at treating Alzheimer’s disease. “Nasal spray shows promise as treatment for Alzheimer’s disease“
And today’s humor is an oldie but goodie from Allie Brosch, the cartoonist behind Hyperbole and a Half. Here, she shares the new pain scale she created, which we think is both (a) funny and (b) more accurate than the pain scale you’ll see in common clinical practice. “Boyfriend Doesn’t Have Ebola. Probably.“

February 2, 2015 By e-Patient Dave 2 Comments

Daily Digest: Monday, February 2, 2015

Welcome to a new feature: the Daily Digest, by my friend and fellow SPM member “Mighty Casey” Quinlan, of Richmond, VA. Her Facebook feed and Twitter feed are so constantly full of things I’d missed that I thought “Shoot, let’s post that!” So this month, Monday through Friday, she’ll post links to what she thinks are the best/hottest/most interesting healthcare, medicine, and bio-science stories that day. Here she goes:

Yeah, there might even be some humor, since we’re both fans of Gomerblog and ZDoggMD.

Today’s crop:

The human brain is a fascinating instrument. This piece from the NY Times’ Well blog looks at the impact price awareness has on the placebo effect. The outcome is both surprising, and not surprising at all. “Expensive Drugs Work Better Than Cheap Ones“
Are minute clinics, where patients can walk in for quick care on stuff like strep throat or flu shots, better patient experiences than care at a regular primary care practice? Geriatrician Dr. Leslie Kernisan had the opportunity to compare two of her own experiences, which she shared on The Health Care Blog: “A Tale of Two Sore Throats: On Retail Clinics and Urgent Care“
How far would you go for medical care? Would you go all the way to Thailand? Morgan Spurlock, the guy behind “Supersize Me,” now has a CNN series called “Inside Man,” where he looked at the rise of medical tourism in the face of rising U.S. healthcare costs. “Surf, sand … and surgery? Inside the world of medical tourism“
Our friends at Symplur, the healthcare data visualization gurus, asked and answered a great question on their blog recently about patient communities and New Year’s goals. Christopher Snider posted this, and it’s a great read. “Looking Forward to Looking Back – How Do Patient Communities Approach New Year’s Goals?“
Connected health and quantified-self have gotten a lot of ink, both physical and virtual, over the last few years. With the rise of self-tracking tools, from Fitbit to AliveCor to Scanadu, patients with chronic conditions and early-adopter tech mavens are monitoring their physical status with more and more granularity. Can connected health penetrate the “actual medical practice” membrane? Here’s a list from The Doctor Weighs In blog: “Five Accelerants to the Adoption of Connected Health“
Because we mentioned humor, and Gomerblog, and ZDoggMD in our intro, here’s a three-fer: a post about Turntable Health, ZDoggMD’s new comprehensive care clinic in Las Vegas, on Gomerblog. It’s not a new post, it dates from May of 2014, but it is definitely worth a read for the laughs. NOTE: this post is SATIRE. “Big Pharma and Mega Hospitals ‘Scared Beyond Belief’ of Tiny Las Vegas Health Clinic“

That’s it for today – check back tomorrow, we’ll have a fresh list of must-reads for you!

January 26, 2015 By e-Patient Dave 8 Comments

NEHI Patient Engagement Fellowship

There are stages of any movement, and make no mistake, the shift to participatory medicine is a social movement, a full-bore cultural movement. It’s a change in roles, a change in expectations, a change in beliefs about the validity of a new party’s perspective – in this case, the patient’s.

I’m fond of pointing out milestones, the turning points in our movement. One was the founding of the Society for Participatory Medicine in 2009. Another was when patient voices started to be invited to speak about patient issues in Washington policy meetings. Another was when the Institute of Medicine said in 2012 that a cornerstone of medicine must be “Patient/Clinician Partnerships” with “Engaged, empowered patients.” Then the OpenNotes project, the BMJ editors announcing their Patient Advisory Panel, the founding of the Patient Voice Institute last year … all are signs of the movement maturing and gaining acceptance in the establishment.

Today I’m thrilled to announce a small but significant step in another dimension: NEHI, the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation, has offered me a Fellowship in Patient Engagement – a part time six-month project, advising them about patient perspectives.

Here’s NEHI’s vision map – click it to visit their site. And note what’s at the top of the circle: Evidence, Action, and Policy Impact. My kind of people!

Now the work starts. May this be the start of many such initiatives in many organizations that focus on improving healthcare!

For the record, here’s the 55 minute video of my keynote at NEHI’s 2013 annual meeting … as it says at the outset, this was a new approach: a new beginning and a new ending.

http://vimeo.com/76960537

Thank you, NEHI, for your vision, and let’s do this thing!

January 19, 2015 By e-Patient Dave Leave a Comment

Exponential technology is reaching medicine. No, really.

I’m going to do something unusual (for me) – drop a video in here and not try to explain much about it. It’s about the future but don’t have any particular prediction, except that things are going to be changing really fast, as in scary fast. So you might want to loosen up your thinking. (I’m not affiliated with any of this; these are my own thoughts.)

Fair warning: this will look like lunacy, and I won’t get into big arguments about it here. You might want to watch this a minute at a time, perhaps pausing every time the whiteboard gets erased – it’s too much to take in all at once.

This is also the world depicted by my friend and colleague in Budapest, Dr. Bertalan Mesko (aka @Berci), who calls himself a “medical futurist.” Unusual, huh? Well, you can’t look at today’s medical reality (as amazing as it is) with the same mindset as you can with the “exponential” mindset.

Why do I think this is valid?

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January 17, 2015 By e-Patient Dave Leave a Comment

Opening the ICU doors to family: report from Virginia Mason

Screen capture of article top — Click to view article PDF (open access)

On Twitter tonight I learned from Dr. Sachin Jain of a November article that should be of interest to all of us who want to work toward full patient and family engagement in all aspects of medicine. To be sure, the changes we’d like are not always simple, and one example is expanding family access to the ICU.

Virginia Mason Medical Center (VMMC) is widely known for being far far more patient-centered and quality-oriented than most medical institutions – including, in this case, even the really challenging parts. I hope I don’t get in copyright trouble for pasting too much in here, but the whole article is Open Access (no charge) so have a look, under the heading “Problem: Despite tradition, genuine need to open doors”:

Over time we became more aware that this traditional model was badly disconnected from the needs of our patients. The Institute of Medicine emphasized that families serve as a healing influence by providing comfort, connectedness, energy, self-esteem and wisdom; there is little or no evidence to indicate that the practice of family member presence is detrimental to the patient, the family or the health care team. Indeed family member presence during invasive procedures or resuscitation should be offered as an option to appropriate family members.

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January 6, 2015 By e-Patient Dave 4 Comments

Speaker Academy #21: Interview at Mayo with @Chimoose on the value of patient voices

This is the latest in the Speaker Academy series, which started here. The series is addressed to patients and advocates who basically know how to speak on a subject but want to make a business out of it. I’ll try to be clear to all readers, but parts may assume you’ve read earlier entries.

Academy cadets, I hope this entry will be useful in one of our key tasks: conveying to potential clients that there’s genuine business value in hearing a capable speaker present the patient’s perspective.

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