e-Patient Dave

Democratizing Healthcare

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Patient Safety Awareness Week – speaking at Mass General

I’ll be speaking Wednesday at Mass. General Hospital in Boston. The public is invited; 1 p.m. in O’Keeffe Auditorium. (Go in the main entrance (White Building) on Fruit Street and ask.) This post is mainly about Patient Safety Awareness Week.

Every year the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) sponsors Patient Safety Awareness Week, to raise awareness of the many issues that contribute to patient safety – and the many ways healthcare sometimes falls short.  It’s a big deal: most people really don’t want to hear this, but thousands of people are accidentally killed in hospitals every month.

Most people don’t call it “killed,” but some do – what else do you call it when something is done by accident and a person dies?
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“How Patient-Provider Engagement Can Transform Healthcare”: Keynote at IHI Forum, 2010

I’m thrilled that the Institute for Healthcare Improvement has agreed to release the full video of the talk that Dr. Danny Sands and I delivered at the annual IHI Forum in December: “How Patient-Provider Engagement Can Transform Healthcare.”

Click the image to view it on the Videos page.

Thanks very much to the IHI for releasing this video for public viewing, so it can be viewed freely by patients, providers, payors and policy people everywhere. Their commitment to the cause of patient engagement is showing!

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How Patient-Provider Engagement Can Transform Patient Safety (new article in PSQH)

I’m honored to be the author of a new article in Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare magazine (PSQH): “How Patient-Provider Engagement Can Transform Patient Safety.”

It’s a companion to a Special Interest Keynote titled “How Patient/Provider Engagement Can Transform Healthcare,” which my primary physician Dr. Danny Sands and I will deliver December 7 at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Forum in Orlando. It’s my cancer story as seen from our two perspectives, as physician and patient, in the age of the internet.

Earlier versions of the talk have been titled “Illness in the Age of ‘e’,” but this event calls for a change – because participatory medicine is now a full-blown movement, with its own medical society, with its Journal of Participatory Medicine as well as the e-patient blog. Plus, significantly, patient and family engagement is now part of Federal policy – it’s one of the “meaningful use” requirements for providers to earn financial incentives in the coming years.

Clearly, the age of participatory medicine – of patient/provider engagement – has arrived.

An early ally of the movement was Susan Carr, editor of PSQH. The patient safety movement clearly sees the value of patients and families being actively engaged in all aspects of care, so we talked this summer about how we really ought to do something together. Then we realized, the subject of our IHI keynote applies perfectly to patient safety, an important part of healthcare.
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Patient & Family Engagement for post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury, especially military families

I spoke this morning at an event outside Boston hosted by NAMI NH, the New Hampshire organization of the National Alliance for Mental Illness. The subject was “Best Practices in Mental Health, Prevention and Wellness for Military and their Families,” and to be blunt, a major issue is suicide prevention among veterans.

This video cites that in 2009, more veterans killed themselves than all the active duty soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan combined – and many vets with war-related mental problems aren’t getting any services. Whatever your political views may be about the military actions themselves, this is a human tragedy.

I spoke about the patient engagement movement, starting with citing my own father’s service in World War II and my father-in-law’s – he returned not well, and though we can’t diagnose the dead, his lifelong explosive anger sounds like today it might be called PTSD. (I emphasize that we can’t know.)

Below are my slides. I sure wish my voice recorder wasn’t out of batteries – a lot was said that’s not in the slides. At bottom are the URLs for the resources I talked about.

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How to improve healthcare faster: a TEDMED minute

This past week I was thrilled to attend TEDMED, the medical offshoot of the famous TED conferences. (TED = Technology, Entertainment, Design.) I was invited to be one of the analysts sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Pioneer Portfolio, my kinda people: “The Pioneer Portfolio is powering ideas to transform health. We accelerate the trajectory of innovation … supporting exploration and helping great ideas to gain momentum. Pioneer focuses on the future, seeking breakthroughs with the potential to generate significant health and social impact.” Huzzah!

The Pioneer Portfolio funded the creation of the e-Patient White Paper, which blew my mind almost three years ago and set me on this path. (That paper’s at top right of www.e-patients.net.)

At TEDMED RWJF asked the analysts (and anyone else!) to record brief, informal videos on how to improve healthcare fast.  Here’s mine:

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