e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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Newest speech video: SAS Institute health analytics – business / tech / data conference

SAS speech video page screen capture

My videos page has recordings of various speeches. Here’s the latest – and, some are saying, my best. It was a month ago in Cary, North Carolina, at a big event conducted by SAS called “Health Analytics: From Big Insights to Big Breakthroughs.” It’s 56 minutes long.

Here’s the direct link to the video. If you’re not already registered on that site, you may need to register here.

Not all the slides are shown in the video; here’s a copy of them on Slideshare. Slideshare’s display software is pretty weak compared to what I do with PowerPoint :-) so some of the layouts display wrong on their site, but you can get the idea.

Don’t miss Peter Diamandis’s talk that day

Near the beginning I mention it. Here’s the link.

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Seven days to go; 81% there! Please back Regina’s film project!

Please click this image, watch the two minute video, and donate what you can.  This is THE famous Regina Holliday, who has been called “the Rosa Parks of healthcare.”  You’ll see why.  A humble but immensely strong woman who has become the leader of a movement made almost literally with her bare hands.

This modest $10,000 fundraising project (very little for a film) is one week away from completion, and has less than $2,000 to go.  As I said on Facebook when it was $2500, let’s find two $1,000 donors and dozens of $20 ones!

Click it and read. Get your name in the credits, if you’ve got the scratch!  (If you have one of these jackets, you must donate; even if you don’t and you just love supporting a great new future, pitch in!  I did.)

Screen capture - click to donate

Incentives include a shirt, a copy of the DVD, and all the way on up to Regina coming to your company or club and doing a speech or even a lecture!

And she might even paint for you.

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Weird trick for patient-centered care: Care what matters to patients

Image source: FreeDigitalImages.net, by digitalart

It seems these days internet ads get high click-through rates if they start with “Weird trick.” I’m game. For patient centered care, the weird trick is to think about this:

Listen to what matters to patients (ask them),
and decide that it matters to you.

You’ll see things from their point of view,
and you’ll become patient centered.

I know it’s weird, but think: when patients tell you something’s bothering them, do you say “Sorry, there’s nothing we can do about it”? That’s the hallmark of being disempowered. Or do you do something about it? Or as your team to see if you can?

For instance, noise: I just learned that some hospitals are letting people put up a Do Not Disturb sign! Hard to imagine? It’s in a great Wall Street Journal piece yesterday by Laura Landro.
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So, what is this “patient centered” thing?

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Make it EASY to manage my pillbox!

Blue Button logo

Vote us up! (Alicia Staley and me)
Click to visit our proposal on the site, register if you need to,
and use one of your votes for this awesome idea!

(Or all three of your votes. :-) It’s allowed.)

Have you ever seen the set of pills that have to be managed for a person with a slew of prescriptions?  It’s nuts. What’s even more nuts is that with all we pay for healthcare and computers in this world, there’s no software anywhere that makes it easy to do the right thing. Let’s change that!

(I’m not complex at the moment (at least my prescriptions aren’t), but when I was sick I sure was. Farther down is the true story that gave me this idea.)

This is my submission for the “Blue Button CoDesign Challenge” that was sprung on us last Monday by the good folks at Health & Human Services, who are doing this radically modern thing – unusual for government, eh?  They came up with a fascinating challenge and are opening it to the public, with prizes! For details you can check out the challenge site.

Here’s my proposal. Over the weekend I’ll flesh out this blog post with more details, but for starters Friday afternoon, here’s the big idea:

Build me a Blue Button enabled tool that….

… makes it easy to manage our frickin’ prescriptions and take the right pills at the right time!

My doctors’ computers know my prescriptions and when I’m supposed to take them, right? So do the pharmacies. And computers can mash up all kinds of information from different sources, and organize it, and display it clearly, right? So why do they make ME figure out when I should take what?

Let’s have an app that can read all my prescriptions, and organize them into times of day. Even better, it could print out my pillbox and add pictures of what goes in each square. Why not?? Isn’t that what computers do – make complex information easy??

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“Chaos, behind a veil of secrecy”: Show me the cash flow

April 2016 update
April 2017 update

Original post here was June 2013. Or, jump to the Nov 2015 update below.

Latest in my series Let patients help, cost-cutting edition

I’ve blogged several times about the greatest truth I’ve learned about the business of medicine. It’s the title of a 2006 Health Affairs article by Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt: The Pricing of US Hospital Services: Chaos, Behind a Veil of Secrecy.

The cost chart at right shows what’s happened since Reinhardt’s paper appeared, in the middle of the chart. It’s what you’d expect if slush is flowing around with nobody watching.

Today I was reminded that it ain’t just hospitals. :-)
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Last week I got my annual checkup. There were two separate problems in my hospital’s appointment system, so I ended up leaving too late to get the simple lab work my doctor had ordered; I said I’d get it done at a local lab.

Today I visited AnyLabTestNow, a chain with a local office. I called ahead, and for walk-in self-pay, it’s $49 for the chemistry panel I needed (Calcium, CO2, etc) and $49 for the cholesterol, total $98. And a $10 off coupon, on the site! Just $88.

Or not.

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We the old(er) are getting REALLY old. And numerous. Think about it.

Forbes.com logoEight weeks ago on Forbes I noted an article I’d found that said half of all humans who’ve ever been 65 are alive today. (Actually the source said 60-75% of all 65+ people ever. But I’ll settle for half.) In less than two years that demographic bomb will include me.

Think about that.  There are 3x more people alive today (7 billion) than at the start of the baby boom (2.3 billion, 1946).  Combine it with the reality that because medicine is awesome, people who in those days would have died (e.g. me) are living much longer. Lots of old people coming. Zombie fields of old people. (We’re not “getting old” until much later, but there are a lot of us.)

Case in point: here are  the 34 obituaries in today’s New York Times.

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