Patient engagement is reshaping healthcare. Learn how. Learn why. Learn what to do.

Update, 2014: The finished (and still growing) Integration Academy website is here.

I’m en route today to New Orleans for a meeting about adding something back in to primary care that used to be there, a long time ago: care for behavioral and mental health issues. The project is to unite mental health with primary care.

It’s worth explaining why this is being fixed, and why I’m involved. First, please watch this presentation by Ben Miller of the University of Colorado, an expert voice in the field. It describes the NIAC (National Integration Academy Council), a new project of AHRQ, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. This New Orleans trip is for a meeting of NIAC, of which Ben is a leader and I’m a member.

NIAC is the steering committee for AHRQ’s Academy for Integrating Mental Health & Primary Care:

At TEDMED this October I found myself trading tweets with @DrPatriciaFitz, a new name to me. We met, and I learned she’s the Wellness editor for The Huffington Post – which is about the biggest baddest high-publicity blog in the universe.

She was already familiar with participatory medicine and my TEDx talk. We talked, and then she invited me to blog for them! I was thrilled, because as  Wikipedia says, “The Huffington Post has an active community, with over one million comments made on the site each month.”

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I’m a day late on this, but happy birthday to The New Life of Patient Dave – the blog I started in 2007, at Thanksgiving, eight weeks after the docs said “It looks like you’re gonna make it.”

Man, talk about Thanksgiving.

So I gave thanks.

• My first post, 11/29/2007, thanked my hospital: Thank you, Beth Israel Deaconess!
• My next, 12/4, thanked my surgeon. (Somehow I’d left him out of the first one.)
• On 12/9 I thanked my insurance company. (Yes, I thanked my insurance company – Harvard Pilgrim, at the time.)

And in between, I mused about two things that foreshadowed the future: a sense that I wanted to be more effective in life than I had been, and analyzing a misuse of statistics in reporting: [Read more…]

Last night a dear and inspiring friend breathed her last.

Monique Doyle Spencer, metastatic breast cancer patient, died at home as she wished. Please see the post today by our mutual friend, Paul Levy, who sponsored the publication of her book when no publisher would.

All knew the end was near. A couple of weeks ago she happily attended her daughter’s wedding; she had a good Thanksgiving, Paul says, then went rapidly downhill.

Monique’s book is The Courage Muscle: A  Chicken’s Guide to Living With Cancer. She says no publisher could imagine a funny book about living with cancer. Paul said he could – in 2004, long before the world at large could think that way. It was so out-of-the-ordinary that Business Week interviewed her, four years after her 2001 diagnosis and three years before my own book talked about laughing with cancer.

Many cancer patients have sought a better word to describe how they view themselves. Well, on Paul’s blog, Monique signed her comments “NASOV”: Neither A Survivor Or Victim.

Here’s the farewell comment I posted this morning on Paul’s post.
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This is a bittersweet but truly wonderful announcement. After a year-plus as my very-part-time assistant, Cheryl Paradiso has gotten a great full-time job! She starts Monday, November 28.

I really should have posted this in advance, but, well, I’ve been busy.

And that’s due in no small part to how Cheryl has helped implement the systems I now use today. I did most of the picking (because I’m picky), she didn’t know any of them, and she learned them all to the point of managing the business:
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