e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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I’m 5! (Well, ePatientDave.com is…)

5th birthday candle
By Andrew Eick on Flicker. Licensed for re-use with attribution. https://www.flickr.com/photos/andreweick/2971677419/

It is a time of celebration.

Since creating this domain five years ago (2009!) I’ve done:

  • 242 speeches
  • 36 panels
  • 30 policy meetings
  • 68 participant in other events
  • 18 countries

and authored or co-authored:

  • 304 blog posts (including this one)
  • 7 posts on my Forbes blog
  • 472 posts on e-patients.net (and 106 more on that site, before this “birthday”)
  • Two books: Laugh, Sing and Eat Like a Pig and Let Patients Help: A Patient Engagement Handbook (with Dr. Danny Sands)
  • Seven articles and papers (BMJ, iHealthbeat, SGIM Forum (twice), Aspen Institute booklet, Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare, ACM Interactions)

and acquired on social media:

  • 21,400 more Twitter followers
  • 2,000 Facebook friends
  • 500+ LinkedIn connections (they won’t seem to say more than that!)
  • Klout impact score of 80
  • … while spending $0 on traditional advertising.

And 150 media mentions.

Well, that explains a lot… I couldn’t have done it without you people paying attention and spreading the word. Thank you!

And, looking forward…

… stay tuned for tomorrow’s post on what’s next in life.

 

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Getting your health data: BlueButton/ShareCare tweetchat Thursday

A press release published Tuesday begins:

Sharecare and Blue Button Host Twitter Chat to Help Consumers Take Control of Their Personal Health Information

Gaining control of your health and your personal health information is more than just a convenience – it’s your legal right. But most people don’t know where to start. In an effort to educate the American public about how they can access their health records easily and securely, Sharecare, the online health and wellness engagement platform created by Dr. Oz and WebMD founder Jeff Arnold, is hosting a Twitter chat on Thursday, June 5 at 12pm ET. …

Sharecare tweetchat site screen captureIn February I posted video of a talk I gave last summer in New York at the Blue Button Developer Conference, passionately appealing to developers to join in to achieve what US Chief Technology Officer Todd Park has for years been calling “Data liberación” – setting data free so that we, the citizens, can benefit from it. When Todd first said it he was talking about data in government “data warehouses”; Blue Button is different: it’s about our data – mine, yours, your family’s – as individuals. Now, to promote citizen awareness of this new and evolving method of getting our data, Sharecare is hosting this Twitter chat on Thursday. See the event’s web page for more information. Astute readers will notice that I’m among the listed experts. I’ll be live in the third hour, 2-3 pm ET Thursday, when the topic will be “what’s the future of health and healthcare supported by Blue Button?” Boy do I have thoughts on that. (As a result, I now have an expert page on Sharecare.com.) And of course as with everything on Twitter, the archive will be available afterward.

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Acceptance talks of the five Platinum Fellows

Mayo certificateLast week I blogged about the Mayo Clinic social media fellowships. Here’s a picture of the sheet.

Today Mayo posted the videos of everyone’s talk on their blog. I want to especially highlight the other four people. As the blog post says, they’re all real stars of social media in healthcare, each in a different way. I’ll introduce each with their twitter handle and a snip from Mayo’s blog post.

@MeredithGould: Meredith Gould, Ph.D. is an elder in the #hcsm community (really, she’ll take that as a compliment!) who greatly assisted #MCCSM in its infancy.” [MCCSM is the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media.]

Meredith, as usual, put together an irreverent and fun one minute video.
[Read more…]

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Knowledge is leaky now. Farewell to centralized control; hello to rapid spread and discovery.

Too Big to Know covershift index coverPower of Pull coverYesterday I posted about discovering a really good year-old video about something I’ve often blogged: the importance of letting people see the prices of what they buy, in healthcare.

The process by which I found it is a crystal clear illustration of a profound change in how information moves around today. It’s totally different from before the web, and anyone who wants to understand the present and the future needs to understand how it works now. Because as hard as it may seem – especially to a trained scientist – the path to finding the best information is no longer through a methodical, linear, step by step process.

This drives some people insane, but it’s true. In the past year I’ve found four major publications about this from three unrelated sources, and I’m convinced.

First, the story; then about the books. (If you don’t know how Twitter works, ignore the jargon; it’s just a way of messaging, and this story isn’t about Twitter itself.)

How I ran across the video illustrates how the network of social media works, and how centralized control is becoming impotent:

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Great Robert Wood Johnson video “This Cost How Much?”

I’m always getting surprised by the vast resources out there that not only have I never seen, but nobody else has told me about, even when I write about something closely related. Latest example: this 7 minute video from last year on the need to publish prices of medical services.

(That’s my buddy and four-time cancer patient Jessie Gruman in the preview picture. The clarity of everything she says hides how deep her insights are: she’s a world-changer.)

I’ve blogged a lot about the problems patients face when they try to be responsible for health costs, so in a sense this video doesn’t contain anything new to my readers. BUT, this video existed a year ago, and I wish I’d known about it …. and there’s something about a well produced video that conveys the point effectively.

I could see this being used at the start of many sorts of health meetings.

This bit of awesomeness comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, of course. I feel like they’re the Smithsonian of research on improving health – so vast that nobody knows everything that’s in there. So I love it when I find something like this.

(Later I’ll post about the significance of how I found it.) <= Here’s that post.