e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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Extended – ends WEDNESDAY now! FREE download of “Let Patients Help!”

Let Patients Help cover
Click to visit the eBook download site

The current promotion below has ended but here’s a new one, through April 20.

Yes, this new patient engagement handbook, about which Eric Topol said “This book will unquestionably help many individuals become more active and fully engaged in their health care” and @Berci said “Every medical student must read this book.” A free download, two days only.

Get it here! Wednesday update: We appear to be crashing the site – sometimes it says “site not available” – sorry, please try again after a while!  The correct URL is indeed www.eburon.nl/tedxnijmegen?language_code=en

But also, read the fine print. Here:

The fine print:

  • This is a free “preview edition.” It has bugs. (Yes, an ebook can have bugs!) Some hot-links don’t work, and the endnotes will be improved.
  • When the final version is ready, you can download it. (You’ll register on the site.)
  • This is the .ePub format, not Kindle. Yes, there will be a Kindle edition (sooner than I expected). In the shopping cart, you’ll get a link to download the .ePub file. You’ll also get an email containing links to both the epub and the .mobi file (for Kindle).

What? Free eBook?
Last week you said NO eBook yet!

Yeah, I know. Let me tell you about my Dutch buddy @LucienEngelen.
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Managing online reputations: my piece in @KevinMD’s new book

Cover of Kevin's book (click to go to Amazon)
Click to see the book on Amazon

My Nashua, New Hampshire neighbor @KevinMD (Twitter, blog) is known as “social media’s leading physician voice,” and I believe it. His blog is terrific, both technically and in breadth, depth, and consistency. I don’t know how he does it, on top of running a vibrant family practice in a busy area.

I’m late in discussing it, but he recently published a new book with many invited contributions, including one from me. It’s Establishing, Managing, and Protecting Your Online Reputation, and it’s smart.

This is a tricky subject, because online reputation is something consumer/patients are increasingly consulting as they start acting like consumers (trying to be informed), and reputation is a form of data – and as with all data, it’s really hard to know sometimes if the data is high quality. That was precisely my point in my submission, which I’m posting here, with permission (which of course Kevin granted, since I wrote the stuff! :-))

Space didn’t permit all these words to make it into the book, but here’s the full text of what I had to say.
__________

Reputation – online or off – means a lot.
But whose opinion is it?

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Orders resume for “Let Patients Help”

Let Patients Help coverWhat a fascinating experience this self-publishing is. You compose the book in Word, save as PDF, and upload it. If you did everything right, within 24 hours they say “Okay, go!” And it’s instantly available for sale.

And if you want to do a revised edition – e.g. to fix 7,000 typos….. or a major rewrite, or anything…. well, just upload another one.  NO COST.

This is sooo different from the print production cycle I grew up with. There, significant costs were incurred every time you make a new master, so you check check check check check before sending it to press. Today, it’s all digital.  And Amazon’s CreateSpace wants to encourage people to just try it, so they charge nothing for uploading files. Not a penny for setting up a title, not a penny for changes.

SO I WENT AHEAD THIS MONTH and released the first version for print, without checking carefully. How interesting! And what feedback I already got from my empowered, engaged readers.

I love that the all-digital workflow means I can make use of all this feedback! So here’s what’s already in this updated edition:

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An encounter with the Swiss medical system

See the comments at the end!

I had a wholly satisfying encounter tonight with the Swiss medical system. It started, as you might imagine, with a worry: I appeared to have a deep vein thrombosis (clot, aka DVT), which in the worst cases can be fatal. I was processed promptly, with good news, at a good price.

Chief complaint: swelling, redness and pain in the foot

Last week while traveling I developed what seemed to be gout: a painfully swollen big toe joint. Long story short, five days and a long overseas flight later the symptoms had shifted and I wondered if it could now be a DVT. My doctor, with images and discussion via Skype & email but unable to physically examine me, said yes, I should go have it checked out.

Great: nothing like looking for medical services in a strange city, I mean strange country. Where to go? What’s this going to cost this uninsured foreigner? How long will I wait?

My trip host and the hotel desk agreed I should go to the walk-in clinic at the railroad station, across the street. Ginny and I gathered our things, and 15 minutes later we’d found the clinic and were waiting in line, with one person ahead of us. I checked in, and ten minutes later was called into an exam room.

Outcome:

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“Every medical student must read your book. How shall we achieve that?”

Regular followers of social media in medicine will instantly recognize the name @Berci: he’s Bertalan Meskó, MD, PhD, widely considered to be the hottest young doc who “gets it” about the future of medicine – and is actively working to create it. Look what he just tweeted, after reading an advance copy of Let Patients Help:

http://scienceroll.com/2013/03/20/let-patients-help-a-new-book-authored-by-e-patient-dave-debronkart/

(Click the image to visit the blog post he linked to.)

Yes, how SHALL we achieve that??  Please, discuss in the comments below!

More about @Berci –

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“This book will unquestionably help many individuals become more active and fully engaged in their health care.”

As I said yesterday, my new book Let Patients Help is available for sale now. Here’s the introduction, generously contributed by the famed Dr. Eric Topol.

An extraordinary paradox exists in medicine and health care today. On the one hand, as a recent Consumer Reports cover article on cancer tests pointed out “cancer screening remains stuck in a 1960s view of the disease.”[1] This problem of being stuck in our ways is much broader than cancer screening and can certainly be viewed to be operative across the board in health care. On the other hand, we have the newfound potential to obtain unparalleled, critical data and information about each individual. Whether this is via wearable sensors that capture one’s vital signs or sequencing the DNA that comprises one’s genome, we have new tools at our disposal – tools that were not available just a couple of years ago.

The buzzword of “big data” is used to refer to the immense amount of data that is currently being generated throughout the world—more than a zettabyte per year (that is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). At the same time we can now generate “big data” for each individual and define his or her medical essence. So we have entered an unprecedented time of the information era finally invading and converging with the medical world.

Moreover, this information is flowing in a new way. [Read more…]