e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

By 3 Comments

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??

[Read more…]

By 3 Comments

Interesting new e-patient resource: Medivizor

Added 9/11/2013:  I do not endorse this product. I have no idea if the information it gathers is reliable. I add this because in a press release the company lists me in people who have “covered” their service; I want to be clear, as it says below, that although I wrote about it, I didn’t endorse it. Frankly it feels a bit dicey that a careful curator of information would be a little bit incautious about the meaning of words.

I get a lot of requests to look at new products, websites, services. If I were rich and retired (or tenured :-)) I’d spend my whole life exploring, but I’m not, so I can’t. This is one, though, that caught my eye, because it proposes to automate something that can normally only be done by peers: filter all the information out there and tell you what’s useful to you.

If this works out, it could become an essential resource for engaging patients and families.

Disclaimer: I haven’t been able to vet the site, testing it as someone with “skin in the game” because the company is currently only handling a few conditions. Also, I’m open to reports of similar products that claim to do what I describe here. This is a description of what interests me, not a final and absolute endorsement.

Okay, enough fine print:

Medivizor is a startup that culls literature and other resources, including the social web. They select portions relevant to you (based on a questionnaire and your feedback), rephrase it in ordinary language, and send it to you. As their site says:

[Read more…]