e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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Pricing policy

Updated Dec. 30, 2015. See the changes under the blue headings.

Prolog and principles

In 2013, in A turning point for patient voices and Prices must have integrity, I laid out my thinking: a professional price policy must make sense, and the rules must be real – fair to all clients and consistently enforced.  Re “making sense,” I’m an evangelist – an activist with a cause – so my price policy offers ways for clients to earn discounts by furthering the cause.

Update as 2016 starts: As the seventh year of this work starts, three things are newly clear, different from any past year:

  • The time has come to reach out to the public, including community health workers.
  • Nursing is turning out to be a great role in healthcare for making patient engagement a clinical reality. Nurses spend much more time face-to-face with patients and families.
  • The time has also come to get our claws into the world of medical education curriculum, so we start growing the next generation of doctors and nurses with patient empowerment “baked in” to their thinking.

As you’ll see, those three factors are reflected below. Here is the policy, fully aligned with my values as an activist for the “Let Patients Help Heal Healthcare” social movement.

1. Full price.

Event organizers, call or write for my current speech pricing. As my testimonials page shows, I deliver.

2. Add a Promoted Public Event: 25% discount (new for 2016)

It’s time to start engaging the public (ordinary citizens) in patient engagement – teaching people the rationale for (and the how-to’s of) being engaged, activated partners in their health and their care.  So, if I’m doing a speech for you, I’ll do a second speech open to the public (and tuned to them), if you will handle the logistics and get it promoted in the local media … and I’ll knock 25% off the price of your speech. (Note: a particularly great target for these events is community health workers.)

Yes, I’ll do two speeches for less than the price of one. In essence I’m buying your help in spreading the word to the general public.
[Read more…]

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Prices must have integrity

Yesterday in A turning point for patient voices I said that the market for patient voices is maturing, leading to a need for two new initiatives:

I said today I’d present the pricing policy, but first I need to establish a foundation:

Prices must have integrity

I’m no student of formal pricing theory, but I do know this: Some list prices are real, and some are cheesy – fake prices that nobody actually pays:

  • Some list prices are inflated so the real price can be advertised as “40% off!!”
  • Some list prices are a starting point for negotiation (e.g. car sales)
  • etc.

Why do some marketers play these games? Because consumers tend to like thinking they got a discount. That’s fine with me, but it’s not my approach. I prefer to deliver value and charge accordingly. Prices must have integrity, and discounts must be based on rules that you actually enforce.

Why it matters

[Read more…]

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A turning point for patient voices

Patients Included badge

In February I announced that after three years of struggle I’d reached breakeven. This has made new things possible – for instance, an office outside the home. It also makes possible a new policy for pricing my speeches.

This is a significant moment, so I’m breaking this into two posts: today the background, tomorrow the new policy.

Prologue

It’s been an uphill climb. Like many before me I’ve had many requests to donate my time: “We’d love to have you speak, but we don’t have any money” (or hardly any).

I’ve had to insist on being businesslike so I wouldn’t go out of business. This led to some interesting discussions, e.g. my most-commented post ever, on this site: “Should consumers be regulated?”

I want to do everything I can to foster the growth of this movement, both by changing the business climate and by helping others step in. So there have been issues to think about and manage, both on the business dimension and in the progress of the “movement,” if I can call it that.

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“You can ask to see or get a copy of your medical record & other health information”

Updates:

  • Feb 1, 2017: fixed some expired links.
  • July 19, 2015:
    • This has turned into by far the most-viewed and most-commented post ever on this site. This year alone it’s averaging 1,000 views a month.
    • A few weeks ago the HIPAA authority Deven McGraw, who’s mentioned three times below, was put in charge of this issue at the Office for Civil Rights. Hooray!
    • Last Friday (7/17/15) the New York Times ran an important related article, Hipaa’s Use as Code of Silence Often Misinterprets the Law
  • Sept 12, 2013: See new section on Resources for Action at bottom.
  • July 20, 2013: see attorney David Harlow’s comment below about a Federal exception for lab data, though state law may still protect you.

________

OCR's HIPAA Rights flyer (PDF)
OCR’s HIPAA Rights flyer (click to download PDF, 456k)

I’ve been infuriated recently by two “gimme my DaM* data” episodes where providers told me “No – you can’t have the report. We only send it to the doctor.”

That’s illegal.
It’s a Federal civil rights violation.

I am legally entitled to my medical record,
and you are entitled to yours.

Refusing to give it to you
subjects them to
Federal civil rights penalties.

Yet so many doctors and hospitals simply don’t know this. In my case, two independent shops recently said no – a lab and a radiologist – leaving me powerless. Well, I don’t take well to being powerless. So I acted. On Twitter today I said:

This feels ironic: a radiology shop is refusing to give me the radiologist report. Anyone have a link to “Docs MUST give pts their data”?

Within minutes I had responses from my excellent peeps [Read more…]

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Wanted: an “issue tracker / diary” tool

1799 gout illustration by James Gillray, public domain, Wikimedia
1799 gout illustration by James Gillray (Wikimedia) (Click for NY Times gout article where I found this)

This is a rough software idea that anyone is welcome to take and make a product out of, if it doesn’t exist. Or maybe someone will say, “JEEZE, Dave, I’ve been trying to tell you for years that this is what we DO!”

Any vendor with such a product is welcome to say so, commercially with links, in the comments.

I want an easy tool – ideally an app with matching website – that helps me keep track of recurring symptoms and what I’m doing about them.

At 63, I have a number of things going on that probably won’t amount to anything, but when conspicuous out-of-the-ordinary symptoms persist, I’d like to keep track of them. At the moment it’s my feet: in March I started having intermittent pain that comes and goes. (See An encounter with the Swiss medical system.) Back then it appeared to perhaps be gout (it felt like that picture.) But now it seems not to be.

Pain gets your attention, and quickly trains you to want to manage it. Last week a mild episode started, and this time it hasn’t cleared up by itself. Then the other morning I woke up with swelling and burning pain. It was so bad that I wondered if I have a recurrence of my cancer, in the form of bone mets (metastases).

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Speaker Academy #4: Cognitive dissonance

Aesop's Fox and Grapes from WikipediaNext in the series Speaker Academy, which started here.

After a day off for Trevor Torres’s Q&A on selling, we resume with the third of Randi Oster’s takeaways from our phone conversation.

Randi’s an experienced business person with speaking experience, so her #3 observation is not necessarily what a newbie would prioritize. But it’s an important point, as you’ll see. I’ve heavily edited Randi’s notes. Randi, thank you for your work; your words per se aren’t here, but this lesson exists because of your work:

Competent patients can cause cognitive dissonance. The speaker must deal with it.

“Cognitive dissonance” is a geeky psychological term; all you really need to know is this: