e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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Information for the Association of Utah Community Health meeting

AUCH sealHere’s information for the talk I just gave to the good folks at AUCH, the Association of Utah Community Health.

  • This talk was based on the speech I gave last summer in Los Angeles at ONC’s “road show” for the people who are rolling out health IT. See this post last summer for all sorts of references and links.
  • You can subscribe (free) to this site (see the Subscribe block at right), e-patients.net (the blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine), and our Journal of Participatory Medicine.

At the live event Friday, we had technical glitches that prevented the planned Q&A, so I’ll invite those questions in comments here, where others can share them!

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New policy: publishing all my evaluations, full text

Source: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/similar.aspx#ai:MC900439448|

One aspect of Obamacare is that the public’s ratings of healthcare providers will be published. A lot of providers are nervous about this, just as anyone is nervous about dumb things being said about them online.

But as I’ve often said in speeches, one thing healthcare lacks is the usual incentives we see in other industries: rewards when a job’s well done, consequences for when it’s not. And I sometimes tell providers, fear not: the public knows there are idiots online as well as good info; ultimately the truth will out. And yes, it’ll be messy along the way.

So I figure it’s time to practice what I preach. On my Testimonials page I’ve often published the evaluations I get from my speeches. But I’ve decided to start publishing all speech feedback, good bad and ugly.

I won’t blog them all (they’ll just go on that page), but to introduce it here’s the first one, posted with permission. (See discussion below.) [Read more…]

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Information, at the point where it’s needed, can save a life

At the Joseph H. Kanter Family Foundation’s Learning Health System Summit, at the National Press Club in Washington last month, I was asked to deliver a dinner speech about the power of information to improve the effectiveness of medical care – not just for patients, but for every doctor and nurse at the bedside. Because everyone performs better when they’re better informed.

Important: This was my first major speech that’s not about patient engagement per se – it’s about the value of information, to everyone engaged in any aspect of health or care.

Clinicians, policy makers, everyone can only perform at the top of their training if the relevant information is available where and when it’s needed. That’s IT, baby – information technology – but it’s also culture. We need the will to bring the info to the point of care – and to put an end to information that dies on the vine, unused. We can do it!

If you can’t see the video, click here to view it directly on Vimeo.

About the event:
[Read more…]

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Links for today’s Oracle Health Sciences Innovation Forum

Click to visit event siteI’m speaking today at Oracle’s Health Sciences Innovation Forum in San Mateo, California. They’re into big data and what it can do to create value, and as regular readers know, I love that idea. Heaven knows medicine can use all the “value help” it can get – and heaven knows most of medicine doesn’t think nearly enough about the value of data.

Here are links to the resources I’ll mention:

Also of interest – I may or may not mention it – to optimize consumer value for treatment of my new skin cancer, I published an RFP, specifying what I want from providers. Why? Like more and more consumers, I have high deductible insurance – $10,000 deductible – so I myself am calling the shots.  I’m getting the treatment tomorrow – I’ll be blogging the decision I made, as an outcome of the RFP process.

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New diagnosis means I can’t attend South By Southwest

Back in August I blogged about my proposal to speak at South By Southwest, the super-hip high impact event every winter in Austin.  In October I was thrilled to announce that my proposal was accepted: Let Patients Help: Why Healthcare Must Wake Up.

Well, I have to cancel. It’s an unhappy side effect of two things:

  • My skin cancer diagnosis, and a couple other items (below), will hit me with $7,000-$10,000 of unplanned medical bills.
  • South By Southwest is such a competitive event that not only do they not pay speakers, you have to pay all your own expenses (travel, lodging, meals).

[Read more…]