For healthcare to achieve its best,
empower the patient and family.
Here’s a composite of four quote graphics Philips tweeted yesterday for World Cancer Day:
I’ve had the good fortune to cross paths with Philips Healthcare several times, most recently for a speech (video) at the big RSNA radiology convention in Chicago. I just love what they’re doing in partnership with REshape and Innovation Center at Radboud UMC, where my crazy-amazing friend Lucien Engelen is rapidly creating the future of health and care with Philips and Salesforce.com. Seriously: watch what will come out of that threesome!
So when Philips asked me to do a guest post for yesterday’s global #WorldCancerDay, I said sure. It ran on their blog yesterday.
“Knowledge is Power. Power to the people.”
For healthcare to achieve its best, empower the patient and family.
When the Web was born the term e-patient was coined by “Doc Tom” Ferguson to describe a new kind of patient, no longer in the dark but thoroughly empowered to achieve new things – because they have unprecedented access to information. The idea has matured and deepened, and now, ten years after Ferguson’s death, is coming of age with the signature catch-phrase ‘empowered, engaged, equipped, enabled’.
It’s a moment we should celebrate, because for too long medicine has edged away from the changing landscape of consumer power. Every industry from music to travel to supermarkets has gone digital, sharing knowledge and power and flexibility with their consumers, but medicine has lagged behind: many are not on board, and it’s holding healthcare back.
This is serious stuff: the information revolution has touched my medical life more than once – sometimes in life-saving ways: