e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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Understand the Blockchain in Two Minutes: Institute For The Future

If this is the first time you’ve heard of blockchain, remember it.

If you’re like me, this will be puzzling and maybe a little bit unsettling, because people are saying it’s going to change the world, but it’s not at all clear what it even is, much less why it would change the world.

But I understand enough about it now to say (with reasonable(?) confidence) that they’re right, but it’ll be years before we all see it happening.

This is not specific to healthcare, but  it will surely show up in health information.

It’s called blockchain, and the Wikipedia article on it doesn’t help much. But that’s why I like the two minute video I found last week (above), from the Institute for the Future…. how? Why, via Twitter, of course – hat tip to @Sasanof (David Grayson) for his tweet! Please click to watch it. (Email subscribers, if you can’t see the video, click the headline to come online.)

Blockchain is as fundamental a change as HTTP and SMTP.

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“Think, think, think”: message to European Cancer Patients Coalition AGM

View mHealth presentation to ECPC Annual General Meeting on Vimeo.

ecpc logoThis is a quick first post to get this online before the meeting finishes. I hope to add more notes below.

I’m in Brussels at the AGM (Annual General Meeting) of the European Cancer Patients Coalition, an association of over 400 cancer patient organizations. They are organized, they’re methodical, they’re action-oriented, working on health policy, drug development processes, patient involvement in clinical trials, and anything else in the patient’s interest. I was invited by Mrs. Kathi Apostilidis, vice president of ECPC and a long-time member of the Society for Participatory Medicine. She is also known as a force of nature.

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An examined life in an unfolding movement

Yesterday I wrote about a mistake I made last year at Medicine X, behaving unfairly to a volunteer while over-tired. At the end I said “I believe in introspection – ‘the examined life,’ as they say – and continuous self-improvement,” and that I’d be saying more about what I’ve learned.

In potentially troubling times, what makes a difference is what you’re committed to, because that’s where your compass points even when things get bumpy. My goal in this essay is to close out the episode having learned something. Here’s what I see.

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This.

Graphic Recorder's depiction of Lucien Engelen's keynote at the Joule Innovation Forum

Here it is, all in one picture: the future of healthcare. At least a lot of it.

These are the topics Lucien Engelen has been talking about, the concepts he’s been developing, since arriving at Radboud University Medical Center (RUMC) in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. You MUST pay attention to what he’s thinking about, because it’s coming, and most people don’t know it yet. So study that picture.

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New presentation: “Failure to share data – both ways – makes medicine fall short.”

As healthcare progresses, my business is changing: new speech topics, and more advisory projects. This is a two-part video of a new speech last month, at the New England chapter of HIMSS (the big health IT systems society). Finally clients are agreeing that there’s more to talk about than “Dave’s scary cancer story” – most of this speech is information that didn’t exist when I started giving speeches. Predictions are coming true, so new imperatives emerge.

The videos: (Email subscribers, if you can’t see the videos, click the headline to come online.)

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Beyond Empowerment: Patients, Paradigms, and Social Movements

It’s time to move beyond empowerment and engagement, and get to the deeper issues.

For 18 months it’s been increasingly clear that the nature of this work – at least mine – has moved beyond surviving cancer (though that’s great), beyond “Gimme my DaM data” (though that’s true). It’s time to examine the core beliefs that hold medicine back from achieving its potential – its mistaken conceptions about what patients can do and should be supported in doing.

So when Susan Carr, editor of the excellent Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare, asked last summer if we should do another piece, I proposed that we pick up where I left off in 2015 as Mayo’s Visiting Professor: let’s examine whether it’s time to formally examine “the paradigm of patient”; to rigorously ask whether establishment medicine’s conception of what “patient” means – especially what patients are capable of, and should be empowered to achieve – needs to be updated. If we get that wrong, then business and science and policy can’t possibly get it right.

The resulting interview is here – they made it their cover story! You can jump to that link, but if you have a moment, I’d like to say more about its background, and why this is important.

Problems in a paradigm are not to be taken lightly.

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