e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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New essay in the Patient Experience Journal on “the paradigm of patient”

Essay in Patient Experience Journal's special issue on Patient InvolvementSeveral of you have commented that I started a series this spring on the evolution of my business and my advocacy over the past eight years, and then it stopped. Well, it hasn’t stopped, but the work itself has collided with the reporting about it.

I have a new essay, just published today, in Patient Experience Journal, which brings together a ton of interwoven issues I’ve been reading and thinking about: The paradigm of patient must evolve: Why a false sense of limited capacity can subvert all attempts at patient involvement.  It’s in that journal’s first Special Issue, devoted to patient involvement in producing healthcare.

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Ten years ago today: “Dave, there’s something in your lung”

Adapted from a slide I use in many speeches
Adapted from a slide I use in my keynotes

Some moments stick in your memory in vivid, multi-sensory recall. This blog post is dated ten years after such a moment.

Today I can still see the clock digits on my Sony desk phone when it rang at precisely 9:00 a.m. It was my primary care physician, Dr. Danny Sands. I’d had my annual physical on 12/29, and as a follow-up for a stiff shoulder, on January 2 I’d had an x-ray from one of the Boston Red Sox team physicians.

Patients around the world have told me they can relate to what happened when I answered the phone: what Dr. Sands said changed my life in an instant.

Dave, your shoulder’s going to be fine – it’s just a rotator cuff problem. But there’s something in your lung, and we need to find out what it is.

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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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Medicine is flipping. Join Eric Topol and me at MedCity ENGAGE to discuss

Click to register with FOUR hundred dollars off (better price than early-bird) with promotion code EPDAVE
Click to register with FOUR hundred dollars off using promotion code EPDAVE.

If you’re, frankly, a visionary who sees that the power structure in medicine is flipping, I urge you to come to La Jolla next month.

MedCity News, one of the best health IT publishers, is hosting its annual “ENGAGE” conference. The mighty Eric Topol is speaking the first morning, and I’m doing the closing keynote on day 2. (I call him mighty because that’s what I think about his vision. So sue me.:-)

Register with promotion code SpeakerReferral and get $500 off, so your cost is only $395. That’s a heck of a good price for this list of speakers – even better than the $300 early-bird discount shown above.

Here’s why this event is unusual: [Read more…]