e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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“The system is squandering value in medicine” – guest post on West Wire

Click to visit the post on the West Health site
Click to visit the final post on the West Health site

West Health is a new initiative funded by Gary and Mary West, four separate organizations (read about them here), pursuing innovations in healthcare. The parent organization has a new blog on patient perspectives, “West Wire.” The first post on July 9 was an interview with friend / colleague / attorney Donna Cryer, then they invited me to submit a post.

I chose to blend the Institute of Medicine’s report Best Care at Lower Cost (which said our health system must be “anchored on patient needs and perspectives”) with California-style disruptive innovation, which is about serving the customer perspective. Their final post is here (edited to fit their word count); my original full text is below. My wording is more in-your-face than I usually am, but I chose my words thoughtfully, and I mean it.:-)
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The system is squandering value in medicine.
Disrupt! Disrupt! Disrupt!

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A new era: the “consumer-patient,” via Inquire Healthcare

Inquire Healthcare home screen

A new website launched last month. I’m not involved with the organization, but I almost wish I were, because what I’m seeing is what I hope we’ll see everywhere, for every medical need.

The site is InquireHealthcare.org, a project of the non-profit Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute (HCI3). It’s the first time I’ve seen a new term that I love: “consumer-patients.”

(Some activated consumers hate the term “patient” and some activated patients hate the term “consumers.” My own views are in the glossary of Let Patients Help. Here I want focus on what you get when you mix the best of both – because that’s what they’re after on this site.)

It’s got three things I’ve never seen combined: shopping tools, self-assessment tools, and community activist tools. How’s that for a toolbox to create change? (Again, I wish I were bragging about my own work, but I never heard of them until they launched.) Specifically:

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Prize-winning Consumer Reports app seeks study participants: Hip or Knee Replacement

For U.S. residents – 

I spoke last month at a health price transparency conference in Washington, sponsored in part by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In a side session we saw presentations by the winners of the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge Consumer Reports logofor shopping tools. Consumer Reports won first place for shopping apps for their Hospital Advisor: Hip & Knee app. (The link has their demo video.) It’s a fabulous tool for comparing prices and quality for hip and knee replacements.

Now they’re expanding the data behind the app, so they want information from us. Team member Chris Baily sent this request – feel free to share widely:
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