Power to the Patient!
Updates May 8:
I’ve often blogged and spoken about the many parallels between the women’s movement and the patient empowerment movement. Here’s one perfect quote from Miriam Hawley, one of the founders of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, whom I met last year:
[Read more…]It’s been a busy winter. Amid all the Facebook scandals and new government regulation work that’s going on, I thought I’d send an update on travels. Here are some visuals from a recent 17 day, six country, seven speech trip. (Fun facts: nine different hotels, and doing laundry in a Vienna laundromat that only takes instructions from a smartphone app.)
The background image is the HIMSS19 (health IT systems conference) logo repeated over and over and over and over, because that brutal exhausting conference is like that :-), and is the background of everything else.
Counterclockwise from left:
[Read more…]
This book is so good I don’t know where to start. Just read it. (There’s an introductory 20% discount on the e-book below.)
Except – seriously – don’t read it if you demand a roadmap from here to the future. This is from the future. The image above, of a kid with a telescope, has been in the author’s office since I first met him, but until I was halfway through this book I didn’t understand why.
In Augmented Health(care) Dutch innovator Lucien Engelen of Radboud University Medical Center goes on a tour of the landscape that may strike the unfamiliar as manic or just plain nuts. Don’t trust that reaction – listen. He is unbound by the traditional view but absolutely bound to a future world where health – and care – are augmented such that things actually work.
Email subscribers, to see the multimedia below, you may need to click the headline to view this online.
Last July I participated in a workshop on life after cancer at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington. They’ve just published the final report, Long-term Survivorship Care after Cancer Treatment: Proceedings of a Workshop. It’s a free 160 page PDF.
I’m participating today as a “consumer/patient” voice in a meeting on clinician burnout, part of a project of the National Academy of Medicine. I was going to be there in person but a bad and contagious coughing cold kept me home, so I’m watching and listening remotely.
Remote participants often don’t get as much chance to speak up, so I’m doing what empowered people do: find another way to get heard.:-)
Burnout is important to me, because I’m deeply grateful to the highly trained people who saved my life 11 years ago, and I want them to have a good life. But look at the statistics in the project’s infographic here. It drives me nuts (and makes me sad) that the doctors and nurses who put in all those years of training, and gained their years of experience, are so often unhappy with their working life.
As I said recently, I’ve been writing less here for a number of reasons. One is that I’ve been asked to write on other sites. Another, a sobering factor, as that after years of study, I’ve concluded that the American healthcare system has tied itself in a fatal knot. The post shown here, on the Patient Power blog, is an example of both.