Power to the Patient!
Updated a year later with different video link.
Today I turn 64. So let me introduce to you the act you’ve known for all these years: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, performing “When I’m 64”:
Notes about the song:
I have such conflicted feelings about this. Another brother’s death, as the circle of life continues. It. Just. Feels. Wrong.
Having survived my own near-death seven years ago, I celebrate being alive whenever I can. So it hit me like bricks last May when my younger brother Steve died, and again in December when my best friend Dorron died. These were the first unexpected deaths I’ve ever experienced close to me.
And they were both eight years younger than me. Incomprehensible. It just doesn’t make sense, a life ending with eight years less experience??
And then two days ago I learned that another brother, Ken, age 62, has died unexpectedly. So now our six siblings are down to four.
I just freakin’ don’t know how to process this. I don’t like it, I’m not rational, of course it’s not rational, it grabs the brain at a far more primitive level than logic can ever address. I’m rereading my post about Steve’s death, and boy is it on target. Death has been around a lot longer than human thought has, and it’s apparent to me that we as social creatures are constituted to not like it, and get upset when one of our tribe disappears.
Ken, like Steve, smoked and drank. Nothing like having some public health statistics step up and kick you in the face.
A quick note to DC policy people:
There’s a shift in the wind, and you may want to join what I think is an important conference this Thursday and Friday. The National Quality Forum, an independent organization that defines quality measures for industry to use, is having its annual conference and membership meeting.
As regular readers know, I’ve often said that medicine is the only industry I know where quality isn’t defined by the customer, the patient, the ultimate stakeholder. That’s starting to change: NQF is now actively engaged in shifting to make patient point of view a core part of the process.
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A new website launched last month. I’m not involved with the organization, but I almost wish I were, because what I’m seeing is what I hope we’ll see everywhere, for every medical need.
The site is InquireHealthcare.org, a project of the non-profit Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute (HCI3). It’s the first time I’ve seen a new term that I love: “consumer-patients.”
(Some activated consumers hate the term “patient” and some activated patients hate the term “consumers.” My own views are in the glossary of Let Patients Help. Here I want focus on what you get when you mix the best of both – because that’s what they’re after on this site.)
It’s got three things I’ve never seen combined: shopping tools, self-assessment tools, and community activist tools. How’s that for a toolbox to create change? (Again, I wish I were bragging about my own work, but I never heard of them until they launched.) Specifically:
Note to email subscribers: I’m not sure which of today’s posts you’ll get first. If you haven’t seen today’s other post, about my July Blue Button speech, please see it below. It’s an important declaration about the future of health IT.
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Last weekend I started something I hope to continue: a weekly post summarizing things I’ve written on other blogs. I’m doing this to keep in touch with subscribers here, as I reach out through other channels.
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Last month I blogged that a “lost speech” had finally surfaced. It was my closing speech at an event last July, and said why this moment (this year, this series of conferences) is an essential turning point:
“The event was a conference conducted by our Department of Health & Human Services to educate and encourage software developers about the “Blue Button Plus” initiative. … which is really important for the future of health IT, and not just in America; this innovation initiative will change what patients and families are capable of.”
And I said:
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