Power to the Patient!
A quarter century ago, in the early years of the Web, a seminal book was published by four marketing wizards: The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. Its central point was that the internet was going to completely change marketing, because it made information flow freely, to and between consumers. Importantly, it consisted of 95 theses, patterned explicitly after the 95 theses Martin Luther nailed to the cathedral door in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517.
I’m among the advisory vanguard for NextMed Health, and I’m hoping to speak there too. I hope you’ll come. Register here, or email me for a discount code.
In August Medical Futurist Bertalan Meskó and I published Patient Design: The Importance of Including Patients in Designing Health Care in JMIR, in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). It ties together aspects of both our work. He’s a medical futurist, less than half my age, with a clear vision of how medicine will work in a future unencumbered by today’s limits. For me, an advocate for patient empowerment, it’s rooted in patients having the power to get the care they want. Our views come together in the idea of patients designing the care they want. From our abstract:
[Read more…]… genuinely empowered people living their lives and managing their health according to their own priorities, in partnership and consultation with physicians as needed.
Speaking isn’t just a business – it’s a vehicle for accomplishing what we really need: changing how people think … especially, empowering them to take effective action, to become involved in their health. Here’s a photo from a speech to radiologists, encouraging them to share images with patients:
The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) continues to lead the world in patient & public partnership with clinicians, including more coverage of patient empowerment topics than anyone else I know in medical publishing. Some of the issues are unique to Britain but many are global cultural issues – not least being the balance of power between clinicians and the patients they serve.
[Read more…]Today in an email thread I realized it’s a decade since the OpenNotes work started, via Tom Delbanco and Jan Walker, and now promoted so brilliantly by Liz Salmi. How great that back then my PCP Danny Sands and I were among the first crew of OpenNotes study participants!
I decided to mark the occasion by creating an /OpenNotes page on my site, listing all the blog posts and articles that have emerged as part of the work.
(Interesting to observe: before cancer rearranged my life, I don’t think I ever stuck with any cause for ten years straight. Funny how that happens.)
