e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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How PatientSite handles interop (not). (Screencast demo)

My PatientSite labs screen capture
Screen shot of my lab data from the video below

I’m a health data nudist: I don’t care who sees my “privates,” if doing so furthers the cause. And the time has come to push the issue, because my hospital is stonewalling, and that is just so not okay: as comments on my previous post show, this truly impedes care. And that must stop.
To end any mysteries about the much-touted PatientSite portal, in all its 1990s glory, I’ve decided to publish a complete 15-minute walk-through of everything in my chart, when I’m logged in PatientSite at Beth Israel Deaconess, the hospital that magnificently saved my life ten years ago.

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Dear John: I still want to download my records! Gimme My DaM Data!

Let us start by reviewing our anthem: “Gimme My DaM Data – it’s all about me so it’s mine,” by the magnificent Ross Martin MD and his wife Kym, multi-cancer patient whose care has been affected by lack of access to her health data. “DaM” is Data About Me, Kym’s more-polite version of my cussing. Read on for why this is newly urgent.

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#OpenNotes mashup! 20th birthday of Seinfeld’s “Elaine’s a difficult patient” :)

“It was twenty years ago today / Sgt Pepper taught the band to play” … well, today’s the 20th birthday of Seinfeld episode #139, October 17, 1996. This was the famous segment where Elaine looked in her chart and found she’d been marked “Difficult.” What followed was hysterical, as she got lied to and ultimately recruited Kramer to impersonate a doctor (“Doctor Van Nostrum”) to get her records.

You see, when this episode aired, Elaine did not have the right to see her chart. The HIPAA law had been passed in August 1996 by the legislative branch, but the regulations giving her access rights had not been created yet by the executive branch.

OpenNotes logoWell, things have changed, and change can be good … and in a delicious twist, the OpenNotes people got me to impersonate Kramer impersonating a doctor, in a new video mashup. Enjoy.

Here’s a hashtag: #ElaineDifficult20.

 

 

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Patient and family engagement event August 8 in Concord NH

On Monday, August 8, my state’s Foundation for Healthy Communities (HealthyNH.com) is hosting an event where I’ll be speaking, titled “Improving Care at the Bedside through Effective Patient and Family Engagement.” It’s mostly intended for New Hampshire people, but organizer Tanya Lord says “I don’t think we would turn anyone away.”:-)

So come on down! Or up, or over, or whatever. Here’s a very short video introduction. (Email subscribers, if you can’t see the video, click the headline to come online.)
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“When assets digitize, things change fast”: the #OpenAPS do-it-yourself pancreas

Dana Lewis on stage at O'Reilly
Click image to watch video on the O’Reilly site

For some reason I’ve spoken about this a lot in speeches for more than a year but I haven’t blogged about it. The time has come.

One of my sayings in Let Patients Help is a lesson we learned in graphic arts, and the music industry learned too: “When assets digitize, things change fast.” This is, truly, an extraordinary example.

Some people with diabetes pretty much do as their doctors tell them and the industry tells them – they wait and hope that things will get better. That’s fine with me – I never say that people should be more like me. But when someone wants to take a more active role, I believe society (including medicine) should not stand in the way: let patients help improve healthcare.

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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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