Power to the Patient!
Today my oncologist, Dr. David McDermott, generously spent 48 minutes answering questions from the ACOR.org kidney cancer patient community. Here’s the recording, including some notes on terms used in the discussion.
Note: it was neither possible nor appropriate for the doctor to comment on specific detailed cases, so the discussion was about issues rather than details.
These audio files will open in a separate window. Blog experts, see note at bottom.
I was honored (okay, thrilled) to attend last week’s Salzburg Global Seminar on healthcare, titled “The Greatest Untapped Resource? Informing and Involving Patients in Decisions about Their Medical Care.” (I mentioned it last month, writing about a historic Salzburg Seminar in 1998.)
This time more than fifty participants from fifteen countries met for five days to learn about SDM (shared decision-making) and related subjects, and discuss how we can change the culture of healthcare. I got the chance to address the group for 15 minutes one morning (that was fun!), and was invited to contribute thoughts for the blog of the British Medical Journal. “Doc Tom” Ferguson, founder of the e-patient movement, wrote several things for the BMJ, so I decided to tie this event to that precedent. The resulting post is here.
[Read more…]
A wonderful, little-known, but very valuable resource for improving health care is MITSS – Medically Induced Trauma Support Services. (They pronounce it “mitts” and it has nothing to do with MIT.) I’ve written about them several times on e-patients.net and on my own “New Life” blog; a good introductory post is here. They support everyone involved in medical errors – the professionals as well as the patient/victims.
They invited me to give the opening remarks at their annual fundraiser last month. (More about them below.) It was a privilege. Here’s my talk. The slides aren’t in the video, but if you’ve seen the other talks on this site, you’ve seen most of the slides.
In How Patient-Provider Engagement Can Transform Patient Safety I proposed a shared care plan, which the patient and family would be able to read. 
I just learned that Abington Memorial Hospital, outside Philadelphia, already offers a daily one. Click the image to see a PDF.
They have many anecdotes of medical errors that were avoided because the patient and family could see the plan, point out allergies, note things that didn’t get done during the day, etc.
How did they do this? Custom programming? Yes and no: it’s a report they created on their Eclipsys medical record system.
Wonderful! This is one example of the great potential of health IT, to leverage information for better care. Let patients help.
Hospitals, can you do the same? The people at Abington are happy to share.
Read Abington’s press release about the “CARE Plan” (Communication, Access to info, Resources & Education), for which they won a 2008 Magnet Prize.
Sunday I wrote about a landmark paper, “Healthcare in a Land Called PeoplePower: Nothing About Me Without Me.” Here’s the next in this series. It starts:
“Physicians often complain that patients are non-compliant; they do not do what they are told. This resistance perplexes doctors. They can write prescriptions for patients, but they cannot control what the patients do with the prescriptions. … To cajole or threaten has little effect. Rapport and education have likewise had little impact. Patients continue to disobey.
The paper is “The Patient’s Right to Decide,” by Warner Slack MD. It was published in the British journal Lancet – in 1977.*
He continues: [Read more…]
The first in a series about past papers that I think are important as we create the future of healthcare.
I’m preparing to participate next month in a seminar on shared decision making (SDM). SDM is the general issue of patients sharing actively in decisions about their care, as opposed to physicians and hospitals making the decision without asking.
The seminar’s full title is “The Greatest Untapped Resource in Healthcare? Informing and Involving Patients in Decisions about Their Medical Care.” The first phrase alludes to an expression made famous by Charlie Safran MD, of Beth Israel Deaconess, when he testified in 2004 to the House Ways & Means Committee’s subcommittee on health: “the most under-utilized resource in our information systems – the patient.” I recently learned it was first said years earlier by his colleague Warner Slack MD. Both of them were early mentors to Dr. Danny Sands, my primary physician.
Bluntly, these guys have been working for decades on empowering and enabling patients to be engaged in their care, and it’s a thrill to be connecting with them and moving the ball forward. I’ve met with all of them this year, and they shared copies of some of their writings. This is the first: “Healthcare in a Land Called PeoplePower: nothing about me without me.”
[Read more…]