e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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Information, at the point where it’s needed, can save a life

At the Joseph H. Kanter Family Foundation’s Learning Health System Summit, at the National Press Club in Washington last month, I was asked to deliver a dinner speech about the power of information to improve the effectiveness of medical care – not just for patients, but for every doctor and nurse at the bedside. Because everyone performs better when they’re better informed.

Important: This was my first major speech that’s not about patient engagement per se – it’s about the value of information, to everyone engaged in any aspect of health or care.

Clinicians, policy makers, everyone can only perform at the top of their training if the relevant information is available where and when it’s needed. That’s IT, baby – information technology – but it’s also culture. We need the will to bring the info to the point of care – and to put an end to information that dies on the vine, unused. We can do it!

If you can’t see the video, click here to view it directly on Vimeo.

About the event:
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Links for today’s Oracle Health Sciences Innovation Forum

Click to visit event siteI’m speaking today at Oracle’s Health Sciences Innovation Forum in San Mateo, California. They’re into big data and what it can do to create value, and as regular readers know, I love that idea. Heaven knows medicine can use all the “value help” it can get – and heaven knows most of medicine doesn’t think nearly enough about the value of data.

Here are links to the resources I’ll mention:

Also of interest – I may or may not mention it – to optimize consumer value for treatment of my new skin cancer, I published an RFP, specifying what I want from providers. Why? Like more and more consumers, I have high deductible insurance – $10,000 deductible – so I myself am calling the shots.  I’m getting the treatment tomorrow – I’ll be blogging the decision I made, as an outcome of the RFP process.

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New thoughts on value in healthcare: slides for today’s eHI webinar on chronic conditions

Today I participated in a webinar on chronic conditions hosted by eHI, the eHealth Initiative (NationaleHealth.org). I don’t have any expertise on chronic conditions but they asked for my voice regarding the value of patient engagement – e-patients!

Before me there were two great presentations by diabetes / weight-loss wizard Julie Cabinaw (with the amusing but misleading Twitter handle @Loser_Mama) and cardiac patient Dan Treadwell. An archive of the whole event will be posted soon.

(The webcast used a new technology, ReadyTalk, that had a lot of problems, not least of which was that it has no online audio (dial-in only) and it quickly sold out (“All lines are full”) so people could watch the slides but not hear. There will be an archive of the whole thing, but it still won’t include my slides, because I didn’t send them in soon enough – totally my bad. Thus, this post.)

Here are the slides; below are notes on what I said.

eHI webinar 4-25-2012 on chronic conditions
(Click this link if you can’t see the slides here)View more presentations from e-Patient Dave deBronkart.

Notes on the slides:

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Help TEDMED focus on what patients want. Vote.

Correction 4/12: I’m glad to say that there are in fact several patient speakers at TEDMED. There was a massive communication disconnect in the months leading up to this TEDMED, leading to my impression that there were no patient speakers; I hope to find out how it happened. So I’m editing out those points in the post below. The bottom line remains that we should certainly vote to be sure The Role of the Patient is recognized by TEDMED as one of the Great Challenges facing healthcare.

I apologize to anyone misled by what I wrote because of the disconnect.

Please go to the Great Challenges page
and vote for #19, The Role of the Patient.

The top 20 will be selected. At this writing we’re #4 – down from #1 two hours ago.

See other patient-centered suggestions below.
______________________

The event: A number of SPM members are at TEDMED, the big high-profile conference happening this week at the Kennedy Center in Washington. As I’ve discussed with the conference organizers, I have a great concern that the event is conceived from the old-school perspective: it’s about the business of medicine, not about whether patients are getting the care they need.

In the list of 70 speakers, there is not a single patient. We must vote.  

18 months ago TEDMED opened with a spectacular patient story from Charity Tillemann-Dick. This year there are none.We must vote.

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Links for e-Patient Boot Camp #003 (Florida Health Care Coalition)

Here are links to content discussed in the e-Patient Boot Camp Monday, and my keynote and session Tuesday. Thanks to the Florida Health Care Coalition’s board for supporting the boot camp – I look forward to following up with participants!