e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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Announcing “Let Patients Help,” with Dr. Danny Sands; introduction by Eric Topol

Book coverI’m thrilled to announce that my next book is available for sale:

Let Patients Help!
A patient engagement handbook –
how doctors, nurses, patients and caregivers
can partner for better care.

It’s concise – less than 100 pages – because I want people to READ it. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about medicine in recent years, it’s that the most useful advice is often concise.

Buy it here, on CreateSpace, Amazon’s self-publishing site:

Let Patients Help on CreateSpace

(CreateSpace requires creating a free account. It’ll be on Amazon in a while.)

It’s a book of lists:

  • Part 1: Ten Fundamental Truths
  • Part 2: Ten Ways to Let Patients Help
  • Part 3: Tip Sheets

As the subtitle suggests, this book is about partnership between patients and professionals. It tells why it’s valid and important for medicine to listen to patients, with specific how-to’s on making it a reality. A patient engagement handbook.

In keeping with that spirit, I managed to talk some really slick doctors into contributing:

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Video: “Telemedicine: A No-Brainer”

Email and RSS subscribers, click the headline to come see the video.

I’m speaking today at a meeting of the Northeast Regional Telehealth Resource Center (NRTRC). They’re 35 telemedicine providers Map of NRTRC's 7 stateswho cover a vast region – seven states including all of Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, Nebraska and Utah – which includes all the U.S. territory that legally qualifies as “frontier” because there are <6 people per square mile. In the twenty years some of these folks have been doing telemedicine, a lot has changed – it used to be mainly letting the doc see something from afar (remote video), but now things are evolving.

Check out this delightful video, winner of last year’s American Telemedicine Association competition. Brilliant messaging.

Watch for this to come to your family – not just if you’re in the industry, even if you’re in downtown LA. Why? Because as the video shows, people are realizing it’s not just remote seeing – it makes the whole danged process more efficient.

Prediction: as medicine becomes more of a competitive marketplace, some clinics will offer more convenience features like this, and customers (patients) will develop strong preferences for the chance to get their problem solved quick ‘n’ easy.

Topol examining his own heart with VScan handheld ultrasound
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Wall Street Journal picks up “Gimme My DaM Data” song!

Click to view the story & & the video

I just learned that “The Wall Street,” as cool people call it, reported last Tuesday on a session at the uber-hip South By Southwest conference (SxSW), saying this:

SXSW Reporter’s Notebook:
Who Rules the Data?

The full text requires a subscription, but here’s the relevant snip:

… Privacy is only one data concern. John Wilbanks, chief commons officer at research nonprofit Sage Bionetworks, began a panel on “health 2.0” by playing a song called “Gimme My Damn Data.”

While acknowledging the great possibilities of data for improving science and individual health, Mr. Wilbanks lamented the currently “broken” system where people can’t easily use data about themselves. “It is very hard to open-source your data,” he said. “It is owned by whoever has it—and it might be considered a corporate secret or private.”

The power of art in a cultural revolution:
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“Empathy”: new video from Cleveland Clinic

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” – Thoreau

Yesterday I spoke in Las Vegas at the Dignity Health Patient Experience Summit. They started with this four minute video, released recently by the Cleveland Clinic, titled “Empathy.” It’s so powerful that I found myself in tears, seriously, as I watched. It starts with those words from Thoreau.

I think without exception everyone who wants to improve medicine should watch this, including people on the patient side, the provider side, insurance, government, media, everyone. It reminds me of the “Walking Gallery of Healthcare” from Regina Holliday (Wikipedia) because it makes us conscious of the story that each of us carries around.

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The Big Ugly continues: “Hospital charges bring a backlash”

Here’s the next episode in what I’m starting to call “The Big Ugly” – a wave of suffering that will happen as the medical industry contracts, and everyone tries to find ways to maintain their income. Unfortunately when an industry shrinks, everyone can’t maintain the same income. As anyone knows who’s seen an industry die (like mine, typesetting; or steel in America, or what Detroit went through), it’s painful. Good people get hurt, and organizations fight for survival.

Medicine’s certainly not going to die – we need it – but the Institute of Medicine says (see links below) we have massive overspending, and when the overspending shrinks, that too will hurt.

Today’s Boston Globe has the newest item: Hospital charges bring a backlash:

Patients, angered by surprise surcharges that hospitals tack on bills for doctor visits, are increasingly challenging these fees — sometimes even refusing to pay.

Hospitals say the charges cover their overhead, but the fees are sometimes added to the bill even when patients are treated in offices miles away from the medical centers. …

The Globe published a story in January about a patient charged $1,525 in operating room and facility fees for a minor skin procedure. Yeah, the doctor charged $354 for her services, and the hospital (Lahey Clinic) added $1525 of overhead. Another patient is quoted as sounding like (amazingly) an empowered consumer:

“I am willing to spend my money for my doctor — I am getting expert care,’’ said the New Hampshire resident. “I am not willing to pay $500 to sit in a waiting room.’’

Watch for more stories of overhead charges, and more, as organizations gasp for air, and ask consumers to bear the burden. See other stories in the links below, like the chain that put its E.R. docs on quota.

What to do: [Read more…]

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“17 years for new medical practices to be adopted”: source

e-Patient Dave Slide - Balas IOM 17 year adoptionImportant update next day: see comment below by Michael Porembra (and my reply) with new source information and important data on changes in rate of adoption.

A tweet from South By Southwest by @DVanSickle led me to finally post this, which I dug up last spring with the help of the ever-awesome @TedEytan of Kaiser. It’s part of my presentation at the Kanter Family Foundation’s confab last May for their Learning Health System initiative. (Video of that speech is here.)

The issue is a statistic often quoted by advocates for improving medicine: “On average it takes 17 years for new practices to be adopted.” That’s pretty shocking – the idea that some docs may not know something important to your college-age kid, even if the info came out when that kid was in diapers!

The source turns out to be a paper published by the Institute of Medicine in their Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2000. I’ve been unable to locate the full text online; somebody (Ted?) emailed me a scan, from which I screen-grabbed the excerpt in this slide.

For more validation, here’s a Google search of the table’s title, and here’s a search of “Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2000″+Balas.

People always ask “Is it still true?”

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