e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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The power of “consultative speaking”: keynote at Leapfrog Group’s annual meeting (Speaker Academy #29)

This is the latest in the Speaker Academy series, which started here, but it’s also intended for my potential speaking clients.

I do what I call “consultative speaking.” It’s precisely comparable to consultative selling, in which “the emphasis is on what the potential customer wants and needs.” In one sense, I learned this in industry when I worked in marketing – every speech to any meeting has to be focused on the audience’s interests and concerns, or they’ll dive into their emails. In another sense, I learned it from Kent Bottles MD, who said that he always asks clients, “What outcome would make you say that I really knocked it out of the park?” Today, thanks to Kent, with every speaking client I have what I call a “home run call,” and build my speech around that.

Today I’ve uploaded the video of a speech I did in December for The Leapfrog Group‘s annual meeting.

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The value of sharing data: What healthcare can learn from oncology

2017 Future Health Index cover
Click to go to the report’s web page

Again this year I was thrilled to be invited by Philips to participate in their Future Health Index project. This is among the most visionary annual healthcare overviews in the world. The full report – a 100 page PDF – is available free here.

Each year they’ve also asked me to submit a post for the project’s blog. Here’s my submission this year, touching on why oncology is ahead of most specialties in this area: the field decided years ago to align for patient benefit!

Let’s all do everything we can to help healthcare achieve its potential! Sharing information is part of that.

The value of sharing data:
What healthcare can learn from oncology

Decade after decade, innovations change the future of care. Microbes, anesthesia, surgery, transfusions, public health, radiology, penicillin, genomics … each development produced a quantum shift in what clinicians can achieve and in patients’ lives.

I wrote an article for the Future Health Index last year, Could data make you live longer?, which lists six different ways I as a patient can be empowered by better data flow. Similarly, it turns out one of medicine’s next great frontiers is not biological but technological: the ability for clinicians to share relevant patient data with others.

In this innovation, oncology is ahead of other specialties: the 2016 Future Health Index report found that 71% of oncologists across 13 countries share patient data electronically, while only 63% of other clinicians do.

Why? What can we learn from this?

A big factor is that oncology as a profession decided nearly a decade ago that electronic data sharing is core to their work, and spoke up about what they need.
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Evolution part 3: February 2009 – the stage is set for an earthquake

Third in a series of retrospective posts, reviewing the ten years since my cancer and how my shifting perspective has altered what I’ll be doing from now on. I’m generally doing one post per year, but so much happened in 2009 that it’ll take several.

By the way, I added new items on my 2008 entry – things that later became important: an award I got for using data in my day job, and meeting @TedEytan. 

Forming the Society for Participatory Medicine

SPM handshake logoAt the annual “friends of Tom” retreat (Doc Tom’s friends) that I mentioned last time, that gang of crazies decided the time had come to become a medical society. In addition to deciding on a mission (patient-clinician partnerships) they talked about officers, and said “It won’t do to have this society run only by doctors, of course.” I think it was Gilles Frydman (founder of ACOR, where my patient community lived) who said it had to be a doctor-patient team. They looked around and pointed to the only pair in the room – Danny and me – and said we should be co-chairs.

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Evolution, year 2: 2008 – the e-patient movement and starting to speak

Last month I started a ten part series of retrospective posts, reviewing where I’ve been and how my perspective has significantly changed what I’ll be doing from now on. The first post, on 2007, was when I was diagnosed as nearly dead and got better; this is 2008.

I’d started my old blog at Thanksgiving 2007. Two months later, in January, my life took a sharp turn when I discovered e-patients. Here’s how the year unfolded.

January 24: Google Health

In hindsight this is amazing, but my tenth blog post ever was about the announcement of Google Health: What’s next, Google Health??  I said it’d be a cold day in hell when I’d trust Google with my health data. 13 months later that would change radically, which would change my life.

January 23-28: The e-Patient White Paper and “e-Patient Dave”

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Do you understand your healthcare costs? See what New Orleans is finding.

For years I’ve blogged about the difficulty of shopping responsibly for healthcare. Well, late last week some big news broke – big enough that I did an overnight makeover of my home page and added a new page to my site. This is the first chance I’ve had to blog about it.

The news is that the work of my longtime friend Jeanne Pinder at ClearHealthCosts is finally getting the widespread attention it deserves: in New Orleans, award-winning investigative reporters at both Fox 8 TV and the Times-Picayune newspaper have dug right in and started using the ClearHealthCosts software system both to report the insane price variations and, importantly, let the public submit more to flesh out how much is known.

Fox 8 reporter Lee Zurik fired the first salvo, a 7-1/2 minute long segment – which, as you know, is a huge length of time for an evening news piece. Then Times-Picayune investigative reporter Jed Lipinski posted his separate piece – see screen capture above.

Here’s my page on the series with links to both pieces and all my past posts: Cracking the Code.

More to come, and here’s hoping many cities follow. We, the suffering consumers, danged well deserved to know where our money is going, and we deserve to know what our options are, before the bill arises.

 

 

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From theory to bedside: how paradigms affect practice

One of my best collaborators through the years has been editor Susan Carr. She “gets it” and always has, and she has the very special set of traits of a good editor-in-chief: she knows what her readers will value and she knows how to guide an article idea through the development process.

Both traits are essential help for an activist (like me) who wants to help people see things differently. To do that work, you can’t stand outside a conversation and throw rocks at it – you have to get inside and understand the conversation, see things as they do, and then point out from their perspective a new way of looking at things.

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