e-Patient Dave

Democratizing Healthcare

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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…]

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Speaker Academy #28: “It’s my job to be more interesting than your email” (@TedEytan)

Phreesia webinar screen capture
Click to watch replay on Vimeo

This post is part brag, part teach, part challenge.

Last summer I did a webinar about patient engagement (here’s the replay) for Phreesia, a company that makes an iPad-like tablet that integrates a lot of steps to get you (the patient) into the provider’s computer system. Afterward, they said they “monitor the attention level of the attendees (it’s a GoToWebinar feature) … and it was the highest I’ve ever seen it.”

Really? GoToWebinar feature?  Yep, the system keeps track of how long attendees stay, whether they ask questions, and even whether they listen but stop watching by switching to another window while listening to the audio.

[Read more…]

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Speaker Academy #27: Impact speakers! Get the “Official TED Guide” to speaking

TED Talks book cover

There’s only been one post in this series in the past year, but for impact speakers, this book is real news. Best advice on how to have an impact I’ve ever seen. Not perfect IMO, but full of things I bet you’ve never thought about that can really help you up your game.

By “impact speaker” I mean a speaker who really wants to grab the audience’s thinking and have an impact. That’s not the only valid kind of speaking, and it’s certainly not the only valid way to tell your patient story. But if you, like me, truly want to change the world, it’s really useful to get people’s attention. And this book makes clear that how you go about it can make a big difference.

It’s full of examples on big topics and details. And it does it so well that I’ve decided to:

  1. Blog about the book before I’ve finished it
  2. Buy the Kindle version as well as the audio version. (Kindle is infinitely better for note taking and excerpts.)
  3. Buy a copy for any Speaker Academy visitor (you) who can convince me they want it for good reason.

The author is Chris Anderson @chr1sa, founder of TED. When I first heard about the book I thought it might be some light fluffy cheerleading: “You can do it! Just be yourself!” Instead, it’s absolutely full of “This is what works,” “Do this; do NOT do that,” often including examples like “You might have done it this way:” followed by “But see how much better it is if it’s done this way?” Most points are accompanied by example TED Talks you can watch, and in the Kindle version those talks are even linked.

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Geneva, Monday June 27: evening keynote open to the public!

Click to visit press release page
Click to visit press release page

Next Monday, June 27, I’ll be doing something really fun: an evening keynote at a medical conference in Geneva, Switzerland, open to the public. If you know anyone who can get there, please invite them! It’s just 20 Swiss francs (about US$21), and simultaneous translation will be offered.

The conference is NI2016 (Nursing Informatics 2016), whose theme this year is “eHealth For All.” My talk is from 6:20 to 7:20 pm, followed at 8 by a fashion show featuring wearable technology.

The conference will provide simultaneous translation into German and French, and a delegation from China will have its own simultaneous translator.

I’ll take a moment here to mention four international editions of my signature book Let Patients Help, because of the international nature of this event – and because three translators will be present:

French, German and Chinese editions
(and Spanish)

Let Patients Help is available in eight languages, a real sign that participatory medicine is not just an American thing – it’s becoming a global movement. In addition to English, four languages are relevant to this event:

  • Christine Bienvenu
    Christine Bienvenu

    French: Impliquons les Patients!
    Christine Bienvenu (right), translator of the French Kindle edition, would love to find a publisher or sponsor for a print edition. Come meet her!

  • German: Lasst Patienten mithelfen! is Part 1 of the German e-patient textbook Gesundheit 2.0.
  • Chinese: 请患者参与 (available only in China … this may be of interest to the Chinese delegation)
  • Spanish: ¡Dejad que los pacientes ayuden! I mention this because its translators, Elia Gabarron and Luis Fernandez Luque, will also be present.

Again, if you know anyone in the area, please do invite them. Thanks!

 

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An examined life in an unfolding movement

Yesterday I wrote about a mistake I made last year at Medicine X, behaving unfairly to a volunteer while over-tired. At the end I said “I believe in introspection – ‘the examined life,’ as they say – and continuous self-improvement,” and that I’d be saying more about what I’ve learned.

In potentially troubling times, what makes a difference is what you’re committed to, because that’s where your compass points even when things get bumpy. My goal in this essay is to close out the episode having learned something. Here’s what I see.

[Read more…]

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A mistake, and an apology to Medicine X

Medicine X 2016 promo graphic

In life, in relationships, and in social movements, sometimes things get messy. Despite all the things I’m committed to, I made a mistake last fall while extremely over-tired, and behaved offensively to someone I didn’t even know, a volunteer at the wonderful Stanford Medicine X conference (MedX), about which I’ve written so favorably here and on e-patients.net and even in the BMJ. They’ve decided to ask me to sit it out for a year (i.e. not attend), and I accept it – it’s reasonable. I apologize to MedX and I apologize to the volunteer.

I believe in introspection – “the examined life,” as they say – and continuous self-improvement. So later I’ll say a bit more about what I’ve learned while thinking about this. (Update: that post is here.)