Power to the Patient!
Episode 4 of the Power of the Patient podcast is live here.
Want better control over your health costs? Investigative journalism has finally come to healthcare, and it’s winning prizes bigtime.
My guest Jeanne Pinder is a former New York Times editor whose company Clear Health Costs has just won the Edward R. Murrow award for investigative journalism, for their contribution to the “Cracking the Code” series in New Orleans. [Read more…]
I’ve just posted Episode 3 of my new podcast, “The Power of the Patient.” Click on over, and catch up on Episodes 1 and 2, if you’re new here. Here it is: What Everyone Should Know About Getting the Best Care, with Dr. Danny Sands.
At last! Been waiting months to do this. The deservedly famous Dr. Danny Sands, one of the pioneers of patient partnerships and the whole e-patient movement, shares his perspective in two ways:
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I was recently interviewed by PJ Mierau, founder of the PatientCritical coop in Canada, for his podcast. PJ came up with a new metaphor for how patients handle varying amounts of information, when their abilities or their capacity (due to illness) may vary: it’s a Web principle called “responsive design.” Below are some notes on that, and on patient co-ops. Here’s the episode, and here’s a rough outline:
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A great, great man has passed away – a man I quote in half my speeches. I was privileged to know him enough to feel grateful about it, and especially grateful to have been able to visit him a few times in his final weeks. It’s Warner Slack, the one who famously said in the 1970s that patients are the most underutilized resource in healthcare.
There’s so much to say about him, but I’ll mostly let others speak, partly because it’s hard to know what to add. Here are a few things.
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No wonder people get tired of fighting to improve social attitudes. This one is so obvious, yet we keep getting asked the same outdated questions. What amazes me, though, is that this time the skeptical scoffing comes from uninformed innovators, not old-timers! Makes me want to bang my head on the desk.
Last week I posted here about my talk at the SIIM conference in DC, including the rousing favorable response from the audience on Twitter. It appears the popularity has aroused scoffing skepticism AGAIN: “What would patients even DO with their images?? They don’t know how to read them…”
Notice how that thinking presumes the only thing a patient could do with the image is try to play doctor! So I blogged a bunch of the stories patients told me on Facebook in response to my request. Have a look at the post and the fascinating range of stories people shared. How wrong the skeptics are, when they think a patient is trying to step into the doctor’s shoes. Some do in fact become good enough to spot things like a missed tumor(!) – but in most cases the patient does something that adds to what doctors normally do. Isn’t that interesting? Go read.
Twitter photo by Rasu Shrestha MD, MBA, Chief Innovation Officer at UPMC
There are lots of ways to measure the success of a speech. One is what the audience says on Twitter during the talk. I’ll let them speak for themselves, below.