e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

Search Results for: e book

By Leave a Comment

Terrific event in Long Beach, Monday – act now – last minute opportunity

I know this is last-minute.  I’ve been busy and disorganized, and thrown for a loop (frankly) since the death in my family earlier this month.

Don’t miss this. It’s Monday. Act now! (How often do I say that??)

If you’re a health geek, or a patient centered care geek, or anything of the sort, and you’re in southern California, don’t miss this. Tell your boss right now that you should go – it may be the best conference deal of the entire year (and I see a lot):

Monday, June 3, Long Beach, CA, 8:30-5:00
(Details are at the form link below.)

$150 for one person in the health professions
$99 each for three or more (bring colleagues – 3 for the price of 2!)
$65 for patients and family members!

The event: Patient & Family Centered Care Partners @PFCCPartners – fourth annual conference. Speakers:

  • Dave with Bob Wachter 4-25-13Opening keynote (8:40 a.m.): Bob Wachter @Bob_Wachter, whom I recently heard speak at the Michigan Hospital Association (right). He’s chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine (I’ve worked with some of their people – really terrific), and Wikipedia says he’s “a prominent academic physician on the faculty of UCSF … regarded as the academic leader of the hospitalist movement, the most rapidly growing field in modern medical history.” He is a true leader and a great speaker.
  • Closing keynote (4 pm): Me

Also presenting will be Martie Hatlie, a terrific moderator I worked with at a PCORI meeting earlier this year. Tons of experience in patient and family centered thinking.

All this for $150 or less, with extra-special pricing for patients and family!

Let them know you’ll be coming: fill out this info form (site includes full event details). Walk-ins will be welcome but it helps a LOT if they know you’re coming!

See you there – two global keynote speakers, bookending a great day for a great price, hosted by a great organization!

(And who knows, maybe a beverage afterward… I hear Long Beach is lovely in the evening, and I’m staying over. :-)

By 3 Comments

Wall Street Journal picks up “Gimme My DaM Data” song!

Click to view the story & & the video

I just learned that “The Wall Street,” as cool people call it, reported last Tuesday on a session at the uber-hip South By Southwest conference (SxSW), saying this:

SXSW Reporter’s Notebook:
Who Rules the Data?

The full text requires a subscription, but here’s the relevant snip:

… Privacy is only one data concern. John Wilbanks, chief commons officer at research nonprofit Sage Bionetworks, began a panel on “health 2.0” by playing a song called “Gimme My Damn Data.”

While acknowledging the great possibilities of data for improving science and individual health, Mr. Wilbanks lamented the currently “broken” system where people can’t easily use data about themselves. “It is very hard to open-source your data,” he said. “It is owned by whoever has it—and it might be considered a corporate secret or private.”

The power of art in a cultural revolution:
[Read more…]

By 4 Comments

The Big Ugly continues: “Hospital charges bring a backlash”

Here’s the next episode in what I’m starting to call “The Big Ugly” – a wave of suffering that will happen as the medical industry contracts, and everyone tries to find ways to maintain their income. Unfortunately when an industry shrinks, everyone can’t maintain the same income. As anyone knows who’s seen an industry die (like mine, typesetting; or steel in America, or what Detroit went through), it’s painful. Good people get hurt, and organizations fight for survival.

Medicine’s certainly not going to die – we need it – but the Institute of Medicine says (see links below) we have massive overspending, and when the overspending shrinks, that too will hurt.

Today’s Boston Globe has the newest item: Hospital charges bring a backlash:

Patients, angered by surprise surcharges that hospitals tack on bills for doctor visits, are increasingly challenging these fees — sometimes even refusing to pay.

Hospitals say the charges cover their overhead, but the fees are sometimes added to the bill even when patients are treated in offices miles away from the medical centers. …

The Globe published a story in January about a patient charged $1,525 in operating room and facility fees for a minor skin procedure. Yeah, the doctor charged $354 for her services, and the hospital (Lahey Clinic) added $1525 of overhead. Another patient is quoted as sounding like (amazingly) an empowered consumer:

“I am willing to spend my money for my doctor — I am getting expert care,’’ said the New Hampshire resident. “I am not willing to pay $500 to sit in a waiting room.’’

Watch for more stories of overhead charges, and more, as organizations gasp for air, and ask consumers to bear the burden. See other stories in the links below, like the chain that put its E.R. docs on quota.

What to do: [Read more…]

By 38 Comments

“17 years for new medical practices to be adopted”: source

e-Patient Dave Slide - Balas IOM 17 year adoptionImportant update next day: see comment below by Michael Porembra (and my reply) with new source information and important data on changes in rate of adoption.

A tweet from South By Southwest by @DVanSickle led me to finally post this, which I dug up last spring with the help of the ever-awesome @TedEytan of Kaiser. It’s part of my presentation at the Kanter Family Foundation’s confab last May for their Learning Health System initiative. (Video of that speech is here.)

The issue is a statistic often quoted by advocates for improving medicine: “On average it takes 17 years for new practices to be adopted.” That’s pretty shocking – the idea that some docs may not know something important to your college-age kid, even if the info came out when that kid was in diapers!

The source turns out to be a paper published by the Institute of Medicine in their Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2000. I’ve been unable to locate the full text online; somebody (Ted?) emailed me a scan, from which I screen-grabbed the excerpt in this slide.

For more validation, here’s a Google search of the table’s title, and here’s a search of “Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2000″+Balas.

People always ask “Is it still true?”

[Read more…]

By 3 Comments

Collapse couldn’t happen in law, and it can’t happen in medicine. Right?

If you care (or worry) about the crunch-time that’s beginning in medicine, read this post last Tuesday on the Harvard Business Review blog:

Creative Destruction Visits the Legal Profession

It has strong echoes of what I wrote last month in As the crunch hits, will the best survive? That post talked about how much pain there’s likely to be as we try to solve the $750 billion of unnecessary spending in US medicine.  Until now I wasn’t aware of how much the legal profession has been hit by changing realities. Items from the HBR post:

  • “In the ten years or so since running that course, the assumptions underpinning a lot of the business models at law firms have come unraveled. Just as we argued, a lot of the lower-end, but profitable, work is now being done by cheaper providers or has been automated”
  • “Legal budgets have come under intense scrutiny as the Great Recession’s aftermath grinds on.”
  • “And — gasp — lawyers are now realizing that if nobody is looking after the business end of things — ahem — in other words, being strategic, the entire operation can come to a crashing halt. Witness the spectacular bankruptcy of once high-flying Dewey & LeBoeuf.”

Yeah, the bankruptcy of a once-high-flying law firm. More:

  • “The problems started to become urgent when young lawyers, armed with freshly minted degrees, either couldn’t get legal jobs or, worse yet, couldn’t get jobs at all.” Only 55% percent of 2011 graduates had a law-related job nine months after graduation.

Imagine if only 55% of med school graduates could find a job. Can’t happen, right?

That’s at the low end. And at the top?