e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

By 6 Comments

Speaker Academy #18: Client Honor Roll – great and valued business partners

This is the latest in the Speaker Academy series, which started here. The series is addressed to patients and advocates who basically know how to speak on a subject but want to make a business out of it. I’ll try to be clear to all readers, but parts may assume you’ve read earlier entries.

In #16 I said “For a small business, cash is king.” This is especially true for patients who are trying to build a small business in speaking, with no financial backing. In this post I want to “spotlight the spotless” – my clients who have honored our partnership by paying every single invoice within the agreed time of 30 days. Thank you!! A couple of foonotes before we start:

  • Date range: This is for events starting January 2013 and ending April 2014. (This May’s events haven’t reached 30 days yet.)
    • I hope to dig back earlier, but before 2013 I was in survival mode and my records were sometimes not accurate. Meanwhile, clients – if you remind me that you paid promptly I’ll be glad to include you – just let me know!
  • Special honor: Some clients are so great that they’re in a special category – they paid on-site or EARLY! (And they reimbursed my out-of-pocket expenses promptly.) So I’ll start with them:

[Read more…]

By 1 Comment

Patient Voice Institute launches

PVI logo

On May 14, PVI founder Pat Mastors  closed the Health 2.0 “HX Refactored” conference by announcing PVI. See the hxr2014 Twitter archive here.
_______

As regular readers know, I’ve been running a series called Speaker Academy, to share with other patients some of my methods as a voice of the patient. I do this because

  1. The audience for patient voices has expanded dramatically in the past few years. Conferences and policy meetings need more patient voices.
  2. Medicine (the profession and the policy world) need to hear from more diverse voices
  3. Hundreds, if not thousands, of patients and family want to be effective voices in fixing or transforming healthcare.  But wanting to do something is a far cry from being effective at it. We need to develop professional skills among patient voices.

And that’s what’s behind the launch today of the new Patient Voice Institute, “gathering and sharing the wisdom of patients.” Check out the rich set of information on the website.

Patients Included badgeThis is a logical next step, a maturing of, the excellent Patients Included initiative started by @LucienEngelen at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands. He’s the crazy Dutch innovator who produced the TEDx conference where I and many other patients gave speeches.

“Never forget that a small group of
thoughtful, committed people
can change the world. Indeed,
it’s the only thing that has.” – MargaretMead

Conceived and brought to life in just a few months by Pat Mastors and Diane Stollenwerk, with copious work by Diane’s colleague Emily Henry, PVI intends to bring professionalism and a reliable brand to the world of incorporating patient voices in medical work.

[Read more…]

By 4 Comments

Patients are the ultimate stakeholder. HRO should partner with us!

hro_bannerLast month I posted that I’d be participating in the 8th international conference on High Reliability Organizing (HRO). Today I participated in a breakout session where the moderator decided to “flip” the session, and start with Q&A, making the whole session audience generated on the fly. Woohoo!

I threw together a set of slides, which I started to present as time ran out. Here’s the whole set. It’s not a speech – it’s a set of topics that just ends.

I learned a ton at this event, from people who’ve worked on preventing disasters in other industries (aviation, firefighting, nuclear energy, etc). I hope to say much much more later about what I learned – this presentation was to people in HRO who aren’t familiar with the “patient as partner” idea.

One major new buzzword I picked up is situational awareness. I know aviation and military people are familiar with it – you can’t possibly perform reliably (do the right thing) in a situation if you don’t know what the situation is. But somehow, almost everywhere in medicine, clinicians too often disregard what patients and family are trying to tell them. We need to transform this – all of us.

Here are the slides. This evening I tweaked the slides – I’d said “most” organizations when I meant “few.”

For more on the conference, here are the Twitter analytics and transcript. The hashtag is #HRO2014. (I was chatty yesterday but not today.)

 

By 3 Comments

“Patients + Providers + Technology = Engagement” (Guest post by Patti Brennan)

Patti Brennan
Patricia Flatley Brennan, PhD, RN, PhD – University of Wisconsin Madison, School of Engineering

This is a real pleasure – a guest post by Patti Brennan (@PattiFBrennan), one of the people I admire most in the world of improving healthcare through patient engagement. I first met her through Project HealthDesign, one of the best programs sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: “Rethinking the Power and Potential of Personal Health Records.” I’ve also shared a panel or two with her at industry events – not nearly enough to suit me, though. :-)

Last year Project HealthDesign completed. One of its key subject areas was “ODLs” – observations of daily living. Here she explains the idea and lists some exemplary work she’s seen.

This guest post (I added some boldfacing) is long overdue – I’m just too busy for my own good sometimes! Thanks for this honor, Patti.

============

Patients + Providers + Technology = Engagement

There’s a growing group of patient advocates, people like Hugo Campos or ‘our own’ Dave deBronkart (e-Patient Dave), who are calling for patients to be active and equal partners in their health—and that’s a goal that as a nurse I wholeheartedly support. At Project HealthDesign, we have worked to encourage two-way conversations between patients and clinicians, with both parties held in equal status. Clinicians are the trained experts in health care, but patients are the experts in their own lives and their own bodies. We believe that when both parties work together, more can be done to improve health care than either can do alone.

The key to forging these relationships and creating successful partnerships between patients and providers is technology.

By 1 Comment

Speaker Academy #17: “Your message did not fall on deaf ears.”

Erin Moore profile picture

This is the latest in the Speaker Academy series, which started here. The series is addressed to patients and advocates who basically know how to speak on a subject but want to make a business out of it. I’ll try to be clear to all readers, but parts may assume you’ve read earlier entries.

A great moment just happened, and I say “great” because it brings together two big factors in the Speaker Academy series here:

  • If patient voices are a cornerstone of the future of medicine (as the Institute of Medicine says), they need to be actively supported in their participation. Otherwise, the future will be built on whatever scraps people find for free.

Well, Speaker Academy pal Erin Moore just knocked one out of the park. Speaking last week at two events in DC (for free), she had an occasion arise where she spoke effectively – in fact I’d say she knocked it out of the park!

Here’s a cross-post of her news, with permission, from her blog 66 Roses. Change agents, take note.
[Read more…]

By Leave a Comment

Web keynote: “Successful Engagement Strategies for your ACO”

This was Thursday, march 20. The archive will be available for viewing online, before too long.
Krames webinar screen grab Ma

Successful Engagement Strategies
for Your ACO

It’s sponsored by Krames Staywell (Twitter @KramesStayWell), a visionary patient engagement company. Why do I say visionary? Because they were the first company to ever hire me for an event. It was a private client meeting in Manhattan, June 2010.

I’ve long been saying that patient engagement will someday be seen as a real business with both commercial and social value; Krames Staywell was the first to act on it, and now we’re doing it again – in a world that’s vastly changed.