A quick note on site updates as a busy Fall season begins – new videos and new speaking appearances:
e-Patient Connections: A business and policy conference with real value
I think e-Patient Connections is the highest value business conference for how patient engagement can transform healthcare. Conceived by former pharma marketer Kevin Kruse, last year it attracted a hybrid audience: almost half of attendees were in public health and non-pharma sectors. All came to understand connecting with empowered, engaged patients. It was a high quality event, with smooth logistics and facilities, despite being its first year with a skeleton staff.
This year I’m speaking in the opening keynote on 9/28, and I gladly agreed to participate in this new video. I want to say why.
As regular readers know (here and on my personal blog and e-patients.net), I think healthcare transformation is both a need and an opportunity. We desperately need to stop the cost spiral, we need to much more effectively connect clinicians’ skills with the patients and families who need them, and we need to improve quality and eliminate medical errors.
Innovation has turned many industries inside out – why not healthcare? Because we’re missing something. When smart people work hard for a long time, unsuccessfully, it’s a good bet they’re overlooking something fundamental. I believe it’s that the engaged patient is a valuable and underutilized resource, and most businesses don’t get it. So they operate, leaving a worthy resource untouched. This resource blindness constitutes waste.
E-Patient Connections 2009 taught attendees how to understand the value of connecting authentically with e-patients. I encourage people to attend.
Full disclosure: I receive no fee from this conference, just travel expenses. My speech will be inside the keynote by Klick Pharma, a client who has me on a small quarterly retainer. I support this conference for exactly the reason I said – it’s a smart, valuable event, addressing a vital aspect of making healthcare more effective and more efficient.
eBook experts, advice please: Best way to convert complex layouts?
Update: the questions were answered (thank you all!) and the book’s now available on Kindle. Buy some now!
We have many, many requests for a Kindle, eBook (Sony) or iPad version of Laugh, Sing, and Eat Like a Pig, and the time has come to git ‘er done. BUT (and it’s a big but), for this book there are decisions to be made, so it’s time to crowdsource: what’s our best approach?
I’ve never done this, so correct me or make suggestions. [Read more…]
Available now on Amazon UK
Unboxing “Laugh, Sing and Eat Like a Pig”
For reasons I’ll never understand, “unboxing videos” are a big thing these days: some geek will turn on a camcorder while they unpack some cool new gadget they just received. Examples: Unboxing the iPhone 4 (simplistic, unedited, 1:29), Xbox 360 Unboxing and Review (slick, fancy, edited, 5:58).
Well, my friend Mark Graban, author of the excellent healthcare improvement book Lean Hospitals, just received his copy of my new book Laugh, Sing and Eat Like a Pig (Amazon), and he was so excited he decided to do an unboxing video of it.
Enjoy. :–)
For more information see the book’s web pages. Thanks, Mark!
Public speaking: “Your delivery was spectacular.”
Speaker fees are how I fund my work, allowing me to do the research and learning that inform my talks, and allowing my participation on behalf of patients in policy meetings in Washington.
I want to be hired for more speaking engagements, so I’d like to share some feedback I just got.
Today I delivered the keynote address at the 13th annual ICSI/IHI Colloquium. ICSI is the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement, and IHI is the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Both are magnificent organizations of smart caring people devoted to, well, Improvement. :–)
In the audience was Jim Conway MD, Senior VP of IHI, a tremendous speaker himself. Afterward, he wrote:
“Your content was great, your slides most impressive, and your delivery spectacular. I have no doubt – there are many in the room who are in a different place now because of you.”
That’s my purpose in every talk: to leave people in a different condition than when they walked in. My goal is to awaken new possibilities, speaking on behalf of patients everywhere – I’d even dare to say, I aim to leave people with a different view of life.
Kent Bottles MD, President of ICSI, followed up the next day with these kind words:
“e-Patient Dave gave the best keynote I have heard in years at the ICSI conference in the Twin Cities. If you want to learn and cry, book him.”
On May 12 on the ICSI blog Kent’s colleague Gary Oftedahl MD added:
“…shaking those of us in health care up to the need to pay attention, and ‘use’ the expertise and experiences of our patients. I’ve heard no one in over 30 years in medicine who has so passionately and personally captured the essence of this powerful message”
If your organization would like to hire me: