patient engagement

September 14, 2013 By e-Patient Dave 3 Comments

From Let Patients Help: “For patients: collaborating effectively with your clinicians” by Dr Danny Sands

In a Twitter chat this afternoon, friend Dr. Jack West noted that some e-patients are great to work with and others, not so much. It’s obvious we need to teach people how to do this effectively – both docs and patients alike … sort of a “patient engagement handbook.”

So I decided to publish this, from the “tip sheets” section of my book Let Patients Help: A Patient Engagement Handbook: :-) This part is written by my primary physician, e-patient pioneer Dr. Danny Sands.

For patients: collaborating effectively
with your clinicians

By Dr. Danny Sands

Appreciate that healthcare should be a collaboration among the patient, the patient’s caregivers and family, and clinicians.
Be mutually respectful of each other’s contributions. Your physician is an expert in medicine, but you are an expert in you.
Take responsibility for your health—healthcare is not a spectator sport: it’s participatory.
Prepare for your visit: read about your conditions, review your record, make a list so you don’t forget, and discuss the agenda in advance. [Read more…]

September 4, 2013 By e-Patient Dave Leave a Comment

The OpenNotes project goes wide: a million patients and families enabled by access to information!

On the e-patients.net blog, I just posted an important update about the OpenNotes project, which is letting patients see what their doctors wrote – online. Look: over a million patients and families are getting access now.

Please click this screen capture (or click here) to go read the post. And ask your doctors and hospitals to get with the program! If you don’t ask, they won’t know you want it.:-)

June 15, 2013 By Ileana 1 Comment

Newest speech video: SAS Institute health analytics – business / tech / data conference

My videos page has recordings of various speeches. Here’s the latest – and, some are saying, my best. It was a month ago in Cary, North Carolina, at a big event conducted by SAS called “Health Analytics: From Big Insights to Big Breakthroughs.” It’s 56 minutes long.

Here’s the direct link to the video. If you’re not already registered on that site, you may need to register here.

Not all the slides are shown in the video; here’s a copy of them on Slideshare. Slideshare’s display software is pretty weak compared to what I do with PowerPoint :-) so some of the layouts display wrong on their site, but you can get the idea.

Don’t miss Peter Diamandis’s talk that day

Near the beginning I mention it. Here’s the link.

April 25, 2013 By e-Patient Dave 6 Comments

The reality of shopping for health insurance

I keep hearing disparaging things about what lousy consumers patients are – unable to understand how things work, unable to understand the options. Well, as I often say in my speeches, in any other industry you go out of business if consumers don’t understand you – because customers ditch you. But in medicine we consumers can’t easily do that. Heck, we can hardly get our hands on information in the first place.

Case in point: when I shopped for health insurance in 2011, I found out just how slanted the table is when companies offer insurance and consumers buy it. Here’s the true story of the information I was given.

1. Cancer? You can’t play in our market – go away.

First, Blue Cross of New Hampshire asked if I’d ever had various things. When I said cancer, they went from cordial & friendly to cold and “go away.” It was rude, frankly.

But at least I could get at the high risk pool. Some states won’t let people like me get ANY insurance without a six month waiting period. (Up yours, states. And up yours, regulators in those states.)

2. Here are your options. Figure it out yourself.

[Read more…]

March 10, 2013 By e-Patient Dave 38 Comments

“17 years for new medical practices to be adopted”: source

Important update next day: see comment below by Michael Porembra (and my reply) with new source information and important data on changes in rate of adoption.

A tweet from South By Southwest by @DVanSickle led me to finally post this, which I dug up last spring with the help of the ever-awesome @TedEytan of Kaiser. It’s part of my presentation at the Kanter Family Foundation’s confab last May for their Learning Health System initiative. (Video of that speech is here.)

The issue is a statistic often quoted by advocates for improving medicine: “On average it takes 17 years for new practices to be adopted.” That’s pretty shocking – the idea that some docs may not know something important to your college-age kid, even if the info came out when that kid was in diapers!

The source turns out to be a paper published by the Institute of Medicine in their Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2000. I’ve been unable to locate the full text online; somebody (Ted?) emailed me a scan, from which I screen-grabbed the excerpt in this slide.

For more validation, here’s a Google search of the table’s title, and here’s a search of “Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2000″+Balas.