e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

By 12 Comments

“Let Patients Help”: Rockin’ the e-patient world at TEDx Maastricht

What fun THIS was. On the spur of the moment, people backstage convinced me to insert a few seconds of The e-Patient Rap, written by health IT blogger Keith Boone (@Motorcycle_Guy on Twitter). Keith, you rock!

Two wonderful things about this:

  • There were numerous patient speakers at this event. First time I’ve ever seen that!  That’s why I inserted a new slide at the start of my talk: “The Year of Patients Rising”
  • At the end of my talk, the audience joined in  (900 people!) in chanting: “Let Patients Help! Let Patients Help!”

See also the basement interview we did later that day, with Dutch medical association magazine Medisch Contact.

This TEDx event was organized by Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre. (Nijmegen is the oldest city in the Netherlands; in that country, “UMCs” are equivalent to America’s AMCs (academic medical centers).)

By 3 Comments

New video: “Over My Dead Body”: Why Reliable Systems Matter to Patients

Title slide. Click to play video.

Clicking the image (or this link) will download a small file (.asx Windows Media) that plays the video from AHRQ’s archive of the day. Slides aren’t included in the video; they’re here. (URL updated 8/22/15 due to AHRQ site reorganization)

About the talk: An hour long plenary address, June 2010. I don’t often get a full hour to speak, but when I do, I can really cover the landscape.

About AHRQ: The Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality is a terrific Federal agency that administers grants and contracts for health-related projects, including health IT. This was a high quality group of smart people who manage significant projects. [Read more…]

By 5 Comments

2011 Major Projects: Opportunities and Challenges

My first year full time in healthcare completed on February 28. It’s been terrific, and I’ve been left with a huge number of fascinating project ideas – too many to sort out by myself. So I’ll do the modern thing: discuss it on social media with my peeps! (That’s “people,” for you non-Web-2.0 peeps.)

Some of these are public service ideas, some are purely my business. The point is that there’s clearly an audience for patient engagement, and a big agenda has emerged. I’m open to all ideas for how to make every bit of this a reality in 2011. (Yes, this year!)

Discuss in comments, or contact me via my contact page.

Project 1: “A Million Errors Fixed” [Read more…]

By Leave a Comment

Patient Safety Awareness Week – speaking at Mass General

I’ll be speaking Wednesday at Mass. General Hospital in Boston. The public is invited; 1 p.m. in O’Keeffe Auditorium. (Go in the main entrance (White Building) on Fruit Street and ask.) This post is mainly about Patient Safety Awareness Week.

Every year the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) sponsors Patient Safety Awareness Week, to raise awareness of the many issues that contribute to patient safety – and the many ways healthcare sometimes falls short.  It’s a big deal: most people really don’t want to hear this, but thousands of people are accidentally killed in hospitals every month.

Most people don’t call it “killed,” but some do – what else do you call it when something is done by accident and a person dies?
[Read more…]

By 2 Comments

CNN’s “Empowered Patient”: The King’s Speech and other e-patient movies – pre-Web

CNN Empowered Patient title slideWhen “Doc Tom” Ferguson first spoke of e-patients in the 1990s – empowered, engaged in their care, etc – those pioneering patients tended to be online. But today almost everyone’s online, empowered or not. In fact being empowered is a separate issue. And today’s “Empowered Patient” column by CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen illustrates that, by highlighting three Hollywood movies about patient engagement, all pre-World Wide Web.

She called this week – she was doing a piece for Oscar week, and the King’s Speech struck her (correctly) as a story of an empowered patient. Excerpts from today’s piece, “The Empowered Patient” Goes To Hollywood:

[Read more…]

By 1 Comment

“How Patient-Provider Engagement Can Transform Healthcare”: Keynote at IHI Forum, 2010

I’m thrilled that the Institute for Healthcare Improvement has agreed to release the full video of the talk that Dr. Danny Sands and I delivered at the annual IHI Forum in December: “How Patient-Provider Engagement Can Transform Healthcare.”

Click the image to view it on the Videos page.

Thanks very much to the IHI for releasing this video for public viewing, so it can be viewed freely by patients, providers, payors and policy people everywhere. Their commitment to the cause of patient engagement is showing!