e-Patient Dave

Toward a New Science of Patient Engagement

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Events and travels, winter 2019

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:

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15 Health IT Social Media Influencers Worth following, and more news

Hi, this is Kristin, Dave’s assistant. If you’ve talked to Dave, you’ve probably talked to me. :-)

I’m happy to announce that Dave has again been named to a top social media list as an influencer worth following. This time it’s Health Tech magazine’s list. Not every list like this is great, but this one is – all top in their specialized area.

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Book review: Augmented Health(care):
the end of the beginning, by Lucien Engelen

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.

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“Patients are the most underused resource” – Warner Slack, 1933-2018

Teaching at Harvard Medical School, 2012 (Photo: Paul Levy)

A great, great man has passed away – a man I quote in half my speeches.  I was privileged to know him enough to feel grateful about it, and especially grateful to have been able to visit him a few times in his final weeks. It’s Warner Slack, the one who famously said in the 1970s that patients are the most underutilized resource in healthcare.

There’s so much to say about him, but I’ll mostly let others speak, partly because it’s hard to know what to add. Here are a few things.
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From theory to bedside: how paradigms affect practice

One of my best collaborators through the years has been editor Susan Carr. She “gets it” and always has, and she has the very special set of traits of a good editor-in-chief: she knows what her readers will value and she knows how to guide an article idea through the development process.

Both traits are essential help for an activist (like me) who wants to help people see things differently. To do that work, you can’t stand outside a conversation and throw rocks at it – you have to get inside and understand the conversation, see things as they do, and then point out from their perspective a new way of looking at things.

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“The Patient’s Perspective – medicine’s new true north” – essay in PLAID diabetes journal

PLAID Journal coverFor the past year I’ve mentioned this in speeches, but I’ve never written about it here:

In November 2014, a routine blood test revealed that my hemoglobin A1C was slightly elevated, making me what they call “pre-diabetic.” (See lab results below.)

Well, that got my attention.

Why? Because, through social media, I know a lot of really smart, articulate, passionate members of “the DOC” – the diabetes online
community – and I’ve learned all kinds of things about the reality of diabetes that you don’t see in the TV commercials.A1c screen capture

I’ve learned that it’s not rare for a basically “healthy” person with diabetes (PWD) to die in their sleep when their blood sugar crashes; I’ve learned about unfixable nerve pain and amputations; I’ve learned about all kinds of things that can go wrong when diabetes gets out of control. I don’t even know enough to make a properly prioritized list, but I know enough to say you do not want to have diabetes if you can avoid it.

(Footnote: it drives many of us nuts when a TV commercial or news story talks about “diabetes” as if it were one thing. It’s not. Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is medically different from type 2 diabetes (T2D), which I am at risk for; it typically arises in middle age, but has been seen as young as age 3. “Diabetes prevention” is an ignorant thing to say: Type 1 can’t be prevented, Type 2 sometimes can. But that’s a rant for another day.)

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