e-Patient Dave

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Book launch celebration is finished. Game on!

Just a quick note as the weekend ends –

The book launch celebration for Let Patients Help has finished. Over 1500 copies are in circulation now, including both ebooks and the print edition.

I’ve updated the book’s web page, with the complete list of links to all the places to buy it online, and the newest praise, which I love:

“There’s not a doctor or patient in the land who won’t benefit from reading this clear, concise manual which sets out how each can contribute and collaborate to get better and safer healthcare.”

Dr. Tessa Richards, Analysis Editor, British Medical Journal

Thanks for everyone’s support! And remember, now that the book’s finished, the real work begins: spreading the word in earnest, and getting zillions of people to know what’s in it.

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Book promotion: Awesome deals on Let Patients Help, this week only!

Updated 4/21:

  • This promotion has ended, with over 1,500 copies now in circulation, including print and e-books!
  • The links below will still let you buy, in print or ebook formats (ePub for iBook, Kindle, PDF, etc)
  • See also Saturday’s post suggesting bulk purchases to further the movement and help transform your practice.

The original post:

This week only – through Saturday, April 20:

1. Free e-book download!

There’s an amazing self-publishing site called Smashwords that gives me total control over distribution of my e-book editions.

Through Saturday, get it FREE on Smashwords!  Not an excerpt – the whole book!  In Kindle format, or ePub (for Apple iBook and others), PDF, and a slew of other formats!

  • Click here and SCROLL DOWN to the download list (“available ebook reading formats”).
  • Questions? See their support FAQ. If that fails, write to support@epatientdave.com and we’ll do our best to help.

2. 50% off on the print edition!

Also through Saturday, get the print edition on CreateSpace at HALF PRICE! At checkout, copy & paste this discount code LMQ6RVTF in the “apply discount” box.

Note: CreateSpace lets me set my own price and discounts, but they do not have overnight delivery. Right now it’s showing delivery in a week or so, depending on shipping speed. For quick delivery (at list price), use Amazon:

3. Live on Amazon!

[Read more…]

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Managing online reputations: my piece in @KevinMD’s new book

Cover of Kevin's book (click to go to Amazon)
Click to see the book on Amazon

My Nashua, New Hampshire neighbor @KevinMD (Twitter, blog) is known as “social media’s leading physician voice,” and I believe it. His blog is terrific, both technically and in breadth, depth, and consistency. I don’t know how he does it, on top of running a vibrant family practice in a busy area.

I’m late in discussing it, but he recently published a new book with many invited contributions, including one from me. It’s Establishing, Managing, and Protecting Your Online Reputation, and it’s smart.

This is a tricky subject, because online reputation is something consumer/patients are increasingly consulting as they start acting like consumers (trying to be informed), and reputation is a form of data – and as with all data, it’s really hard to know sometimes if the data is high quality. That was precisely my point in my submission, which I’m posting here, with permission (which of course Kevin granted, since I wrote the stuff! :-))

Space didn’t permit all these words to make it into the book, but here’s the full text of what I had to say.
__________

Reputation – online or off – means a lot.
But whose opinion is it?

[Read more…]

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“Every medical student must read your book. How shall we achieve that?”

Regular followers of social media in medicine will instantly recognize the name @Berci: he’s Bertalan Meskó, MD, PhD, widely considered to be the hottest young doc who “gets it” about the future of medicine – and is actively working to create it. Look what he just tweeted, after reading an advance copy of Let Patients Help:

http://scienceroll.com/2013/03/20/let-patients-help-a-new-book-authored-by-e-patient-dave-debronkart/

(Click the image to visit the blog post he linked to.)

Yes, how SHALL we achieve that??  Please, discuss in the comments below!

More about @Berci –

[Read more…]

“Let Patients Help”: a patient engagement handbook

Book cover

With Dr. Danny Sands
Introduction by Eric Topol MD

A concise, action-oriented handbook on how to do what medicine calls “patient engagement” – an activated, empowering partnership between patients and their medical professionals.

“I am a better doctor for having read this book. It is clear, concise, and practical. It contains powerful truths that will help both patients and providers (and all the organizations that support them) work together towards what really matters.”

— Laith Bustani, MD, Kingston (Ontario) General Hospital

For more praise, see below.

Where to buy (in eight languages!):

1. English:

  • Amazon (in English; print edition $10 or Kindle $6): Amazon US / UK / France / Deutschland
  • eBook, $6 on Smashwords (ePub for iBook, PDF, Kindle, etc)
  • I can arrange quantity discounts with slower delivery than Amazon. Write to the priority address on the contact page.

2. Spanish (Feb. 2014): “¡Dejad que los pacientes ayuden!”


3. Dutch (Nov. 2013):

  • eBook – email for information

Let Patients Help Chinese cover
4. Greek (Nov 2013): “Οι ασθενείς µπορούν να βοηθήσουν!”


5. Hungarian (Jan 2016): “Engedjük a beteget segíteni!”


6. German (June 2014): “Lasst Patienten mithelfen”


7. French (Nov. 2014): “Impliquons les Patients!”

  • Available on Kindle. Print edition may be available later. 


8. Chinese (2015): 请患者参与

_________________________

From the book’s sale page:

Concise reasons, tips & methods for making patient engagement effective.

The third book by e-Patient Dave, cancer beater, blogger, internationally known keynote speaker and advocate for patient engagement; co-founder and past co-chair of the Society for Participatory Medicine.

It’s concise – less than 100 pages, takes 60-90 minutes to read – because I want people to READ it all. And DO IT.  And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about medicine in recent years, it’s this rhyme:

Useful advice is often concise.

It’s a book of lists:

  • Part 1: Ten Fundamental Truths
  • Part 2: Ten Ways to Let Patients Help
  • Part 3: Tip Sheets

As the subtitle suggests, this book is about partnership between patients and professionals. It tells why it’s valid and important for medicine to listen to patients, with specific how-to’s on making it a reality. A patient engagement handbook.

In keeping with that spirit, I managed to talk some slick doctors into contributing:

“With Dr. Danny Sands”

My famous primary physician, Dr. Danny Sands, is not only on the cover, he’s in the pages: he wrote some of them. In part 3 (Tip Sheets) he wrote:

  • Ten Things Clinicians Say That Encourage Patient Engagement
  • Ten Things Clinicians Say (or do) That Discourage Patient Engagement
  • For Patients: Collaborating Effectively with Your Clinicians
  • Dr. Danny Sands’ Rules for Smart Web Use

Regular readers will know that Dr. Sands has been a pioneer of patient engagement since the 1990s. Way back then he…

  • co-created the first medical record system and patient portal at our hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess
  • co-authored the first published guidelines on how to do doctor-patient email successfully
  • became a friend and colleague of “Doc Tom” Ferguson, founder of the e-patient movement.

(Why does Danny Sands not have a Wikipedia page??)

Introduction by Eric J. Topol, M.D.

I’m really thrilled to be honored that the amazing Eric Topol wrote the introduction. Read the full text of it here: “This book will unquestionably help many individuals become more active and fully engaged in their health care.”

If you don’t know Dr. Topol’s name, here are a few glimpses:

Praise for Let Patients Help!

“I am a better doctor for having read this book. It is clear, concise, and practical. It contains powerful truths that will help both patients and providers (and all the organizations that support them) work together towards what really matters.

“Dave’s story is a testament to the power of people working together to accomplish amazing things against all odds. That’s what we need to do. This is how to start doing it.”

— Laith Bustani, MD, Kingston (Ontario) General Hospital

_____________

“If you’re interested in getting up to speed fast on patient engagement, Let Patients Help is your passport.”

— Susannah Fox, Pew Internet and American Life Project (blog post here)
_____________

“Simply, bravo! … The Ten Fundamental Truths About Health and Care not only confronts the license we all have to be engaged in our own care but also comfortably helps us use it for a collective good.”

–Jim Conway (see blog post), senior quality and safety leader (former senior VP at IHI ; former EVP and COO at Dana Farber Cancer Institute)
_____________

“Will unquestionably help many individuals become more active and fully engaged in their health care.”

From the introduction by Eric J. Topol, MD
_____________

“There’s not a doctor or patient in the land who won’t benefit from reading this clear, concise manual which sets out how each can contribute and collaborate to get better and safer healthcare.”

Dr. Tessa Richards, Analysis Editor, British Medical Journal
_____________

“The culture change that will cure medicine.”

“A must read – a clarion call for the culture change that will cure medicine. If enough people – patients, clinicians, researchers – read this book and act on its wisdom, health and care will be changed, forever, for the better.”

Michael Seid, PhD, Professor, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center; Co-Principal Investigator, C3N Project
_____________

“Every medical student must read your book.
How shall we achieve that?”

Bertalan @Berci Meskó, MD, PhD, medical innovator, Webicina.com, author of the award-winning Scienceroll.com
_____________

Questions about the book

  • Why just $8?
    Because I want a gazillion people to buy and read this. I want the decision to be a no-brainer: if you’re at all interested, buy it and read it. And heck, get one for someone else.
  • Volume discounts? I want one for everyone at my conference.
    What, you want discounts off EIGHT BUCKS?? Okay; write to me – dave at epatientdave.com

More questions? Ask in comments below, or email me.

Thank you to everyone who’s supported my work for the past three years, to get to the point where this book is not just possible, but a reality.

By 4 Comments

“This book will unquestionably help many individuals become more active and fully engaged in their health care.”

As I said yesterday, my new book Let Patients Help is available for sale now. Here’s the introduction, generously contributed by the famed Dr. Eric Topol.

An extraordinary paradox exists in medicine and health care today. On the one hand, as a recent Consumer Reports cover article on cancer tests pointed out “cancer screening remains stuck in a 1960s view of the disease.”[1] This problem of being stuck in our ways is much broader than cancer screening and can certainly be viewed to be operative across the board in health care. On the other hand, we have the newfound potential to obtain unparalleled, critical data and information about each individual. Whether this is via wearable sensors that capture one’s vital signs or sequencing the DNA that comprises one’s genome, we have new tools at our disposal – tools that were not available just a couple of years ago.

The buzzword of “big data” is used to refer to the immense amount of data that is currently being generated throughout the world—more than a zettabyte per year (that is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). At the same time we can now generate “big data” for each individual and define his or her medical essence. So we have entered an unprecedented time of the information era finally invading and converging with the medical world.

Moreover, this information is flowing in a new way. [Read more…]