e-Patient Dave

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Understand the Blockchain in Two Minutes: Institute For The Future

If this is the first time you’ve heard of blockchain, remember it.

If you’re like me, this will be puzzling and maybe a little bit unsettling, because people are saying it’s going to change the world, but it’s not at all clear what it even is, much less why it would change the world.

But I understand enough about it now to say (with reasonable(?) confidence) that they’re right, but it’ll be years before we all see it happening.

This is not specific to healthcare, but  it will surely show up in health information.

It’s called blockchain, and the Wikipedia article on it doesn’t help much. But that’s why I like the two minute video I found last week (above), from the Institute for the Future…. how? Why, via Twitter, of course – hat tip to @Sasanof (David Grayson) for his tweet! Please click to watch it. (Email subscribers, if you can’t see the video, click the headline to come online.)

Blockchain is as fundamental a change as HTTP and SMTP.

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Vice President Biden’s potent speech about the importance of data in cancer

I’m at the 7th annual Health Datapalooza event in Washington. What I have to say here about this conference is subjective, my gut feel, because I haven’t been at most of the previous ones, because they were largely about the business side of health data – there hasn’t been nearly enough focus on the people who actually have the problem: the patient and family.

This year’s different. It’s managed by a different organization (Academy Health), and a lot of strong patient voices are involved, on stage and behind the scenes. There’s a whole Consumer Track, in addition to all the business things going on. And yesterday we saw a speech by somebody who most definitely fits the category “the people who have the problem.”

Vice President Joe Biden’s son Beau died a year ago this month of glioblastoma, a nasty nasty brain cancer. For his talk I left the main room and went to a side viewing room so I could record it on my iPad.


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Excellent podcast: “Better Health While Aging”

Leslie Kernisan Podcast CoverI have a confession: as e-geeky as I may be, I missed the boat when podcasts got popular, and I never got into them. At last, here’s one that’s worth solving that: Better Health While Aging by Dr. Leslie Kernisan.

I wish I could explain things as clearly as she explains geriatrics – which, as she says in every episode, is “the art and science of adapting healthcare so that it works better for older adults.” (Isn’t that the clearest definition you’ve heard for that word?)

I’ve become addicted – her voice is so clear and friendly; she words things (especially touchy issues) in such a way that you can get the message and hear what you need to hear, without getting clobbered with medicalese or stuff you’d rather not think about.

I’m not giving anyone elder care right now (nor receiving it), but having turned 65 last year I have an interest in my future, and I’ve seen lots of friends and relatives experience elder issues. You know what my thought is about aging? If medicine keeps you from dying, you’re gonna get old! And no better time to learn about it and think about it than right now.

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Patient Engagement and Empowerment: A Culture War Begins (lecture at MITRE)

A Culture War Begins - title slideI’m starting 2016 with a series of posts that lay out “the arriving future” of health and care. Previous entries:

Technological advances are making new things possible, and our deepening conception of what medicine is about (and how best to achieve care) are changing our thinking about the nature of the work. We are truly shifting from “the doctor knows everything that needs to be known” to patients as potentially capable partners.

This is real culture change. Predictably, the establishment fights back: some people don’t believe it, some just don’t like change (especially change in their work), and some don’t like what they perceive to be a challenge to their authority.

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It’s time to adopt a good working definition of empowerment.

Source: dave.pt/worldbankempowerment1
Source: dave.pt/worldbankempowerment1

A major theme of my work last year was that it’s time to create a science of patient engagement (see blog posts) – a rigorous inquiry into what patient engagement is, what factors (parameters) increase it, which ones diminish it, develop some hypotheses that researchers can test. This was the theme of my visit to the Mayo Clinic as Visiting Professor in Internal Medicine in March and my tenure as NEHI’s Patient Engagement Fellow.

A science needs practical definitions. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions notes that until a field has an agreement on what a concept means, the practitioners in the field literally have nothing in common to talk about. I’ve seen that myself, when people talk about empowerment but the field goes nowhere.

It’s time for definitions.

Fortunately, a useful definition of empowerment exists.

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The arriving future of tech in health(care): Lucien Engelen on LinkedIn

@Reshape's Twitter avatar
Radboud @REshape’s Twitter avatar

This is going to be a fascinating year, with a mix of social and technological change. On Saturday I started the year with The future of caring: careful, kind, “minimally disruptive.” Today I’ll flip to a completely separate channel: how technology is changing what’s possible.

Lucien Engelen head shotLucien Engelen, about whom I’ve often written, is the manically productive visionary at Radboud UMC, the Dutch medical center that sponsored my TED Talk in 2011. In particular, he’s head of their REshape Innovation Center … it’s fitting that @REshape’s Twitter avatar is a kid with a spyglass looking to the far horizon … far, but visible.

A post you should read:

Lucien’s just written a post on LinkedIn with his vision of what’s on the horizon and what is changing, now, already. It’s a short post but it’s a dense learning experience, with dozens of relevant links and a half hour of embedded YouTubes. Lucien’s view of the horizon is (a) different from most observers’, and (b) firmly grounded in what REshape is already doing, so this is not a distant pontificator’s view, it’s from the trenches, feet on the ground. With spyglass.
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