e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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Amazing: THE Tom Peters to join our patient engagement session Tuesday

You can’t make this stuff up. Here I am, a cancer patient from Nashua, New Hampshire who goes around raving enthusiastically about engaging patients in better care, and out of nowhere, tomorrow in a session I’m running, Tom Peters has something to say, and asked to comment. So though he wasn’t planned as a speaker, he’ll be in my session.

Thud.

Tom Peters(That’s the banner from the top of his site, TomPeters.com.) He’s the co-author of the absolute classic business book In Search of Excellence, and sixteen books since then. Here’s his Wikipedia page, that book’s Wikipedia page, his Twitter @tom_peters, his other books.

So, what is mister Management Guru doing, asking to comment at a medical conference? In the interest of time, I’ll interview myself.

What’s this event?

This is at the Eleventh Annual Quality Colloquium, at Harvard, today through Wednesday. It’s a top-tier conference on improving quality and safety in medicine.

What do you mean by that?
[Read more…]

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Information for the Association of Utah Community Health meeting

AUCH sealHere’s information for the talk I just gave to the good folks at AUCH, the Association of Utah Community Health.

  • This talk was based on the speech I gave last summer in Los Angeles at ONC’s “road show” for the people who are rolling out health IT. See this post last summer for all sorts of references and links.
  • You can subscribe (free) to this site (see the Subscribe block at right), e-patients.net (the blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine), and our Journal of Participatory Medicine.

At the live event Friday, we had technical glitches that prevented the planned Q&A, so I’ll invite those questions in comments here, where others can share them!

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New policy: publishing all my evaluations, full text

Source: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/similar.aspx#ai:MC900439448|

One aspect of Obamacare is that the public’s ratings of healthcare providers will be published. A lot of providers are nervous about this, just as anyone is nervous about dumb things being said about them online.

But as I’ve often said in speeches, one thing healthcare lacks is the usual incentives we see in other industries: rewards when a job’s well done, consequences for when it’s not. And I sometimes tell providers, fear not: the public knows there are idiots online as well as good info; ultimately the truth will out. And yes, it’ll be messy along the way.

So I figure it’s time to practice what I preach. On my Testimonials page I’ve often published the evaluations I get from my speeches. But I’ve decided to start publishing all speech feedback, good bad and ugly.

I won’t blog them all (they’ll just go on that page), but to introduce it here’s the first one, posted with permission. (See discussion below.) [Read more…]

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“Health IT can improve care, because information can improve care.”

Twitter friend Alicia Aebersold, at George Washington University, just reminded me of this quick video interview recorded last year. I’d forgotten! But I love what it says.

This spring I did a whole speech on the same topic, 35 minutes with slides. That video’s here.

Folks, do you (yes you, the person in your underpants) know what’s in your medical record? Your kids’? Your folks’? Now’s the time to ask – before those records become important in a crisis.

In my speeches I say “Let Patients Help.” Now it’s your turn: do the helping – help your healthcare providers. Make sure the info at their fingertips is correct. How else can they perform to the top of their training?

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“A young mom’s musings” blog: “How I lost my fear of Universal Health Care”

One of the great things about Twitter is that although you can’t possibly keep an eye on everything, every now and then something flies past that you never would have seen otherwise.

This weekend this extraordinary post caught my eye: How I lost my fear of Universal Health Care. Please read this earnest young mom’s experience. It starts:

When I moved to Canada in 2008, I was a die-hard conservative Republican. So when I found out that we were going to be covered by Canada’s Universal Health Care, I was somewhat disgusted. This meant we couldn’t choose our own health coverage, or even opt out if we wanted to.

I’ve always preferred to stay out of political spitting contests (to put it mildly), because I can’t function when wild accusations fly around. Heck, everything I’ve seen says most people don’t actually know what’s in the health reform law. And besides, what I’m about is patient engagement, not politics. I believe people should be actively engaged and responsible in health and care, and that society should enable that, not block it.

So what I need is real-world examples of how things work out when people try to get care and try to be responsible for their families’ health.

And this young mother relates what she found when she moved to the land of universal care.  Partway through the post, she writes – [Read more…]