e-Patient Dave

February 1, 2014 By e-Patient Dave 5 Comments

Video of my AMIA keynote is live

In November I posted about how fun my opening keynote was at AMIA, the American Medical Informatics Association. See that post for tweets from the event and discussion. It was great fun – a conference of 2,000 information science geeks – people who understand data, especially what it’s for and why data quality is important! Boy does it save time when you start from a common view.

This week AMIA’s Jeff Williamson got me the video of the speech. Here it is, with Dr Danny Sands introducing me. (He’s one of the revered figures in the association; they’re also the ones who published his 1998 article on doctor-patient email.) See notes below about what makes this talk different from others. Dr. Sands starts by noting that it was 50 years since JFK’s assassination.

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January 28, 2014 By e-Patient Dave 12 Comments

Speaker Academy #16: Getting paid (being businesslike about cash flow)

Cash is King image from Image: mobilepaymentsworld.com — Image: mobilepaymentsworld.com

Update 4/11/2014: Substantially expanded the section “submit bills electronically”
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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 give a speech 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.

This post is about cash flow – an important part of being responsible for ourselves financially. In earlier posts we discussed getting agreement from your client on the value of your message and the need to get paid: Ratty Boxers, A turning point for patient voices, and Speaker Academy #15: The Contract. This post is about managing how the cash actually gets to you, because many hearts have been broken along that road.

1. For a small business, cash is king

One of the most common causes of small business failure is running out of cash. So if you want to build a business, even a small one, it’s your responsibility to be businesslike about cash flow. On About.com, Scott Allan put it this way:

Cash (Flow) Really Is King

One of the most important lessons entrepreneurs have to learn, often painfully, is that cash really is king. I’m not talking about paper money — I’m talking about cash flow. Simply put, it doesn’t matter how much money is coming in the future if you don’t have enough money to get from here to there.

Don’t plan to spend money you don’t have yet.

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January 25, 2014 By e-Patient Dave Leave a Comment

Prize-winning Consumer Reports app seeks study participants: Hip or Knee Replacement

For U.S. residents –

I spoke last month at a health price transparency conference in Washington, sponsored in part by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In a side session we saw presentations by the winners of the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge for shopping tools. Consumer Reports won first place for shopping apps for their Hospital Advisor: Hip & Knee app. (The link has their demo video.) It’s a fabulous tool for comparing prices and quality for hip and knee replacements.

Now they’re expanding the data behind the app, so they want information from us. Team member Chris Baily sent this request – feel free to share widely:
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January 18, 2014 By e-Patient Dave 8 Comments

e-Patient request: adverse events from Xarelto?

Latest in a series of e-patient requests.

A good friend overseas writes that due to a fracture and other conditions she’s on Xarelto, a drug to prevent blood clots. (Here’s the drug’s page from the EMA, “the European FDA.”) The drug is causing serious issues with her blood and liver enzyme numbers and may be discontinued next week. Meanwhile she seeks e-patient advice in addition to everything she’s already found.

Her questions:

Are there any reports of adverse events from patients on the drug?

Is there anywhere online to discuss the drug with patients who are on it?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

(Via e-patient buddy @Stales, here also is the FDA’s info PDF on the drug, and the drug’s page from PubMed Health.)

January 11, 2014 By e-Patient Dave 7 Comments

Site’s links and menus are temporarily broken. (Thanks, Bluehost.) What to do.

Update two hours later: this is fixed. See the resolution and further thoughts in the comments.

This seems to me to be a great example of a process that wasn’t designed reliably, so all kinds of things could be done per the plan yet the result still didn’t work. I’d like to work with them to define a better process. (We need to have the same approach to system failures in healthcare!)
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By the end of this weekend things should be back to normal, but right now links to this site’s pages are broken. The site is mangled due to a bad migration of my site to web hosting company BlueHost.com. (I’m naming them because every step I took was as directed by them, and because their techs assured me this wouldn’t happen.)

Specifically, the home page URL www.epatientdave.com is working, but the links to pages within the site are broken. So, for instance:
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