e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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A Man of the Year in “Shapers & Influencers”? I’ll take it…

My H.I.T. Men of the Year awardMonday night at the gigantic (37,000 people) HIMSS conference in Orlando (Health Information Management Systems Society), Healthcare IT News presented its 5th annual “H.I.T. Men & Women of the Year” awards. I was one of the nine nominees in the “Shapers & Influencers” category, and I was thrilled to learn that I was one of the three winners! Announcement and photo here.

Even better, famed art activist Regina Holliday was another. So our Society for Participatory Medicine nearly swept the category. That’s a huge acknowledgement in a Society that still barely knows patients exist – not a single patient was invited to speak in the big hall.

My thanks to Healthcare IT News, and to emids, the company who founded the award.

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High Reliability Organizing: new conference next month

hro_bannerRegular readers know that in everyone’s efforts to improve health and care, I’m fascinated by work in other sectors too, because a lot of the ways that medicine falls short of its potential have been solved in other industries.  Our failure to use those methods (too often) is not just a disservice to patients – it’s a disservice to clinicians who work hard, too.

My friend Jim Conway, a titan in the world of safety and quality improvement (LinkedIn), told me about a new conference that may interest you too, if you work in improving quality. He’s keynoting.  I’ll be attending even though I’m not speaking, because anything that semi-retired Conway will focus attention on is good enough for me. As a small new event they’re looking for other sponsors, too, in addition to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations and Dow Chemical:

Institute for High Reliability Organizing

  • March 28-30, Fort Worth, hosted by The University of North Texas Health Science Center
  • Organization website here.
  • Event website here.
  • Registration here.

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My slides for Brookings Institution webcast

Updated at noon – fixed missing links

Event: “Involving Clinicians in Payment and Delivery Reform: The Role of Social Media and MOOCs.” The event’s website is here and the Twitter archive on Symplur is here. I’m on a panel 11-11:45 and they can’t display slides, so I’m posting some here, selected based on what I’ve heard in the previous panels. Social media busts through boundaries!

 

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Health quality people – important last call: NQF’s annual meeting

NQF event logo (click to visit site)

A quick note to DC policy people:

Chart of medical spending in America (source: KFF.org)There’s a shift in the wind, and you may want to join what I think is an important conference this Thursday and Friday. The National Quality Forum, an independent organization that defines quality measures for industry to use, is having its annual conference and membership meeting.

As regular readers know, I’ve often said that medicine is the only industry I know where quality isn’t defined by the customer, the patient, the ultimate stakeholder. That’s starting to change: NQF is now actively engaged in shifting to make patient point of view a core part of the process.
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Finally! Composite video of my call to action at Blue Button Plus Developer Challenge (New York, July 22)

Blue Button Plus event artLast month I blogged that a “lost speech” had finally surfaced. It was my closing speech at an event last July, and said why this moment (this year, this series of conferences) is an essential turning point:

“The event was a conference conducted by our Department of Health & Human Services to educate and encourage software developers about the “Blue Button Plus” initiative. … which is really important for the future of health IT, and not just in America; this innovation initiative will change what patients and families are capable of.”

And I said:
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Video of my AMIA keynote is live

In November I posted about how fun my opening keynote was at AMIA, the American Medical Informatics Association. See that post for tweets from the event and discussion.  It was great fun – a conference of 2,000 information science geeks – people who understand data, especially what it’s for and why data quality is important!  Boy does it save time when you start from a common view.

This week AMIA’s Jeff Williamson got  me the video of the speech.  Here it is, with Dr Danny Sands introducing me. (He’s one of the revered figures in the association; they’re also the ones who published his 1998 article on doctor-patient email.) See notes below about what makes this talk different from others. Dr. Sands starts by noting that it was 50 years since JFK’s assassination.

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