e-Patient Dave

Democratizing Healthcare

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A decade advocating for OpenNotes

Today in an email thread I realized it’s a decade since the OpenNotes work started, via Tom Delbanco and Jan Walker, and now promoted so brilliantly by Liz Salmi. How great that back then my PCP Danny Sands and I were among the first crew of OpenNotes study participants!

I decided to mark the occasion by creating an /OpenNotes page on my site, listing all the blog posts and articles that have emerged as part of the work.

(Interesting to observe: before cancer rearranged my life, I don’t think I ever stuck with any cause for ten years straight. Funny how that happens.)

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50th anniversary of the first Our Bodies, Ourselves meeting! May 10, Boston

Updates May 8:

  • Address correction! It’s 120 Tremont St, not 20 Tremont St.
  • Not surprisingly, it’s sold out with waitlist. If you want to add yourself to the waitlist, write to cwhhr@suffolk.edu
Click image to register on Eventbrite.

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:

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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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