Power to the Patient!
A quarter century ago, in the early years of the Web, a seminal book was published by four marketing wizards: The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. Its central point was that the internet was going to completely change marketing, because it made information flow freely, to and between consumers. Importantly, it consisted of 95 theses, patterned explicitly after the 95 theses Martin Luther nailed to the cathedral door in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517.
This is going to be fun: a live, unscripted, free-for-all “ask me anything” YouTube event on the subject of Patient Design. At noon ET on Tuesday, March 21, just go here. Or go there now and click the little “Notify me” button at bottom left. There’s no registration required, but you can sign up here on EventBrite for reminders.
The host is “The Medical Futurist,” Bertalan Meskó, in Budapest. I’ve had a long history of collaborating with “Berci” (his nickname); my first blog post about him was 13 years ago yesterday, he endorsed my 2013 book Let Patients Help, and I’ve lectured at his course at Semelweiss University.
[Read more…]
I’m among the advisory vanguard for NextMed Health, and I’m hoping to speak there too. I hope you’ll come. Register here, or email me for a discount code.
Recently I’ve posted about horror stories that have happened as investor-driven chains get into hospice (here) and nursing homes (here). More broadly, nursing homes and assisted living are called long-term care, aka LTC.
For our mother and family, LTC has meant Less Than Caring. Last night, I posted My family’s disastrous experience with a growth-driven long-term care company, starting with this:
As many of you know, my mother died in October. What we haven’t disclosed until now is that it happened in horror story #3: she passed after a single week of “respite care” provided by the local outlet of a growing chain of assisted living facilities.
Many people asked who it is, and we’re ready to say: the chain is Integracare, and the local facility near Mom’s home in Annapolis is Bay Village.
Here’s how they advertise themselves. It does not in any way match our experience.
In August Medical Futurist Bertalan Meskó and I published Patient Design: The Importance of Including Patients in Designing Health Care in JMIR, in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). It ties together aspects of both our work. He’s a medical futurist, less than half my age, with a clear vision of how medicine will work in a future unencumbered by today’s limits. For me, an advocate for patient empowerment, it’s rooted in patients having the power to get the care they want. Our views come together in the idea of patients designing the care they want. From our abstract:
[Read more…]… genuinely empowered people living their lives and managing their health according to their own priorities, in partnership and consultation with physicians as needed.
Patient voices are now being accepted (and sometimes even invited) as authors in peer reviewed publications, a sure sign of culture change in medicine. Patients being in the literature is important, because it’s what future scientists will build on as they create the next generation of literature. Essentially, if you’re not in the literature, science has no way to build on your thoughts.
Below is a list of my most cited works. For a longer list, here are my author pages on two search engines:
Altmetrix: As another sign of culture change, it’s interesting to see below that The BMJ is now using Altmetrix as a measure of document performance. Altmetrix pays attention to public “citing” of a paper, i.e. social media discussion – a distinctly different measure than what other scientists notice. Importantly, old media have a lag time: it takes years for new work to make a splash there. Altmetrix is new media: it measures immediate impact in today’s discussions.
Last updated July 2023
Per Google Scholar
Additional papers and articles on topics I consider vital in the evolution of care to be more patient centered.
My H-index (“a metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications”) is 10, comparable to a tenured academic professor
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