January 1, 2012 By e-Patient Dave 3 Comments

Looking back, looking ahead, part 1: early speeches

Janus looking backward and forward, from Wikipedia — Image: Wikipedia

Well, it’s January, Janus time – the Roman god of beginnings and transitions. He looks back, he looks ahead… he’s amazing!

Soon I’ll post about 2011 and 2012. But first: while putzing with my website today I revisited some way back content, which sets the stage even better for looking ahead. So, a quickie to start the year:

Video oldies – three short talks from the start of my public speaking about healthcare.

I just found video of the first talk I ever gave (18:03) at a healthcare business conference – e-Patient Connections, Oct. 2009. It’s amazing to go back there and see what we were looking ahead to, back then.
- The Society for Participatory Medicine had just been formed, and its journal had just launched its introductory essays.
- Two years later, two dozen e-patients were brought together at the event to create an e-Patient Bill of Rights.
Six weeks later, December 2009, was this Quantified Self talk (14:43) at Wired headquarters in San Francisco.
- I loved relating with the tech geeks at QS; it was the first time I dared show the spreadsheet where I’d tracked my tumor sizes.
- btw, socializing after this event I asked Matthew Holt of Health 2.0 for a bit of start-up advice. He never gave me a penny, of course :-), but his advice worked out.
Three months later, March 2010, was this impromptu 10 minute interview with the then-enigmatic Dr. Anonymous. (He’s since uncloaked himself: Dr. Mike Sevilla at Family Medicine Rocks.)

December 26, 2011 By e-Patient Dave 3 Comments

2010, 11, 12: Patient engagement rising, right into The Media Lab’s January hackathon

As 2012 starts up, I have a feeling that patient engagement’s time is here. The movement is credible and has become tangibly real. Consider these 2011 tidbits:

In January Time had its first article about a googling patient who helped a doc nail the right diagnosis.
In April, TEDx Maastricht was the first TED event to be heavily patient-centered, with many presentations by e-patients and empowering physicians
July’s e-patient tour of Spain, resulting in the Spanish translation of the e-patient white paper
In the government section, the US Department of Health & Human Services had a four-city road show about consumer engagement – “Putting the ‘I’ in Health IT”
In August the “SCAD sisters” were featured in the Wall Street Journal and have since become internationally famous
September:
- The twenty-patient e-Patient Bill of Rights pre-meeting at e-Patient Connections
- The first e-Patient Boot Camp, presented as a Master Class in the Netherlands at UMC St. Radboud
In October the Mayo Clinic held its first e-patient day – with five unknown e-patients (not just the usual cast of stars)
December’s news of mega-blogger (and new cancer patient) @Xeni’s rude awakening to the poor state of health IT, and the need to take the reins ourselves: one of her scan CDs contained images that were rather obviously “some dude’s.” (On Twitter she referred to it as “the #ghostpenis.”) Then she had a horrid first MRI experience, which led quickly to the start of a “My First MRI” patient training initiative.
- In a matter of days she became a full-fledged engaged patient, thoroughly on top of her data – within a week she was helping docs read her scans on her Mac, because they couldn’t view them on their own machines
- She ditched the rude MRI shop and got her next one in a much nicer place.

There’s more, but suffice it to say, 2010 looked nothing like that. e-Patient is finally beginning (just beginning) to show up in the mainstream. And 2012 looks to be stronger.

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December 16, 2011 By e-Patient Dave Leave a Comment

Register now: e-Patient Boot Camp’s American debut

Registration is now open on EventBrite!

New York City – Friday, January 27.
Hosted by Edelman – the leading independent global PR firm

Boot Camp graphic. Click to go to Boot Camp page. — e-Patient Dave lecturing at FutureMed, at Ray Kurzweil's Singularity University, NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, May 2011

Patient engagement is reshaping healthcare. Learn how. Learn why. Learn what to do.

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December 5, 2011 By e-Patient Dave 12 Comments

The AHRQ Academy for Integrating Mental Health and Primary Care

Update, 2014: The finished (and still growing) Integration Academy website is here.

I’m en route today to New Orleans for a meeting about adding something back in to primary care that used to be there, a long time ago: care for behavioral and mental health issues. The project is to unite mental health with primary care.

It’s worth explaining why this is being fixed, and why I’m involved. First, please watch this presentation by Ben Miller of the University of Colorado, an expert voice in the field. It describes the NIAC (National Integration Academy Council), a new project of AHRQ, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. This New Orleans trip is for a meeting of NIAC, of which Ben is a leader and I’m a member.

NIAC is the steering committee for AHRQ’s Academy for Integrating Mental Health & Primary Care:

The AHRQ Academy for Integrating Mental Health and Primary Care on Prezi

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December 4, 2011 By e-Patient Dave 4 Comments

The e-patient conversation moves onto the big stage: HuffPo

At TEDMED this October I found myself trading tweets with @DrPatriciaFitz, a new name to me. We met, and I learned she’s the Wellness editor for The Huffington Post – which is about the biggest baddest high-publicity blog in the universe.

She was already familiar with participatory medicine and my TEDx talk. We talked, and then she invited me to blog for them! I was thrilled, because as Wikipedia says, “The Huffington Post has an active community, with over one million comments made on the site each month.”

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November 30, 2011 By e-Patient Dave 4 Comments

Happy birthday to my first blog – now four years old!

I’m a day late on this, but happy birthday to The New Life of Patient Dave – the blog I started in 2007, at Thanksgiving, eight weeks after the docs said “It looks like you’re gonna make it.”

Man, talk about Thanksgiving.

So I gave thanks.

My first post, 11/29/2007, thanked my hospital: Thank you, Beth Israel Deaconess!
My next, 12/4, thanked my surgeon. (Somehow I’d left him out of the first one.)
On 12/9 I thanked my insurance company. (Yes, I thanked my insurance company – Harvard Pilgrim, at the time.)

And in between, I mused about two things that foreshadowed the future: a sense that I wanted to be more effective in life than I had been, and analyzing a misuse of statistics in reporting: [Read more…]