Search Results for: e book

January 1, 2012 By e-Patient Dave 3 Comments

Looking back, looking ahead, part 1: early speeches

Janus looking backward and forward, from Wikipedia — Image: Wikipedia

Well, it’s January, Janus time – the Roman god of beginnings and transitions. He looks back, he looks ahead… he’s amazing!

Soon I’ll post about 2011 and 2012. But first: while putzing with my website today I revisited some way back content, which sets the stage even better for looking ahead. So, a quickie to start the year:

Video oldies – three short talks from the start of my public speaking about healthcare.

I just found video of the first talk I ever gave (18:03) at a healthcare business conference – e-Patient Connections, Oct. 2009. It’s amazing to go back there and see what we were looking ahead to, back then.
- The Society for Participatory Medicine had just been formed, and its journal had just launched its introductory essays.
- Two years later, two dozen e-patients were brought together at the event to create an e-Patient Bill of Rights.
Six weeks later, December 2009, was this Quantified Self talk (14:43) at Wired headquarters in San Francisco.
- I loved relating with the tech geeks at QS; it was the first time I dared show the spreadsheet where I’d tracked my tumor sizes.
- btw, socializing after this event I asked Matthew Holt of Health 2.0 for a bit of start-up advice. He never gave me a penny, of course :-), but his advice worked out.
Three months later, March 2010, was this impromptu 10 minute interview with the then-enigmatic Dr. Anonymous. (He’s since uncloaked himself: Dr. Mike Sevilla at Family Medicine Rocks.)

December 26, 2011 By e-Patient Dave 3 Comments

2010, 11, 12: Patient engagement rising, right into The Media Lab’s January hackathon

As 2012 starts up, I have a feeling that patient engagement’s time is here. The movement is credible and has become tangibly real. Consider these 2011 tidbits:

In January Time had its first article about a googling patient who helped a doc nail the right diagnosis.
In April, TEDx Maastricht was the first TED event to be heavily patient-centered, with many presentations by e-patients and empowering physicians
July’s e-patient tour of Spain, resulting in the Spanish translation of the e-patient white paper
In the government section, the US Department of Health & Human Services had a four-city road show about consumer engagement – “Putting the ‘I’ in Health IT”
In August the “SCAD sisters” were featured in the Wall Street Journal and have since become internationally famous
September:
- The twenty-patient e-Patient Bill of Rights pre-meeting at e-Patient Connections
- The first e-Patient Boot Camp, presented as a Master Class in the Netherlands at UMC St. Radboud
In October the Mayo Clinic held its first e-patient day – with five unknown e-patients (not just the usual cast of stars)
December’s news of mega-blogger (and new cancer patient) @Xeni’s rude awakening to the poor state of health IT, and the need to take the reins ourselves: one of her scan CDs contained images that were rather obviously “some dude’s.” (On Twitter she referred to it as “the #ghostpenis.”) Then she had a horrid first MRI experience, which led quickly to the start of a “My First MRI” patient training initiative.
- In a matter of days she became a full-fledged engaged patient, thoroughly on top of her data – within a week she was helping docs read her scans on her Mac, because they couldn’t view them on their own machines
- She ditched the rude MRI shop and got her next one in a much nicer place.

There’s more, but suffice it to say, 2010 looked nothing like that. e-Patient is finally beginning (just beginning) to show up in the mainstream. And 2012 looks to be stronger.

[Read more…]

December 5, 2011 By e-Patient Dave 12 Comments

The AHRQ Academy for Integrating Mental Health and Primary Care

Update, 2014: The finished (and still growing) Integration Academy website is here.

I’m en route today to New Orleans for a meeting about adding something back in to primary care that used to be there, a long time ago: care for behavioral and mental health issues. The project is to unite mental health with primary care.

It’s worth explaining why this is being fixed, and why I’m involved. First, please watch this presentation by Ben Miller of the University of Colorado, an expert voice in the field. It describes the NIAC (National Integration Academy Council), a new project of AHRQ, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. This New Orleans trip is for a meeting of NIAC, of which Ben is a leader and I’m a member.

NIAC is the steering committee for AHRQ’s Academy for Integrating Mental Health & Primary Care:

The AHRQ Academy for Integrating Mental Health and Primary Care on Prezi

[Read more…]

November 27, 2011 By e-Patient Dave 5 Comments

In memoriam: Monique Doyle Spencer

Monique Doyle Spencer signing books from Levy blog — Photo from Paul Levy's blog, 11-27-2011

Last night a dear and inspiring friend breathed her last.

Monique Doyle Spencer, metastatic breast cancer patient, died at home as she wished. Please see the post today by our mutual friend, Paul Levy, who sponsored the publication of her book when no publisher would.

All knew the end was near. A couple of weeks ago she happily attended her daughter’s wedding; she had a good Thanksgiving, Paul says, then went rapidly downhill.

Monique’s book is The Courage Muscle: A Chicken’s Guide to Living With Cancer. She says no publisher could imagine a funny book about living with cancer. Paul said he could – in 2004, long before the world at large could think that way. It was so out-of-the-ordinary that Business Week interviewed her, four years after her 2001 diagnosis and three years before my own book talked about laughing with cancer.

Many cancer patients have sought a better word to describe how they view themselves. Well, on Paul’s blog, Monique signed her comments “NASOV”: Neither A Survivor Or Victim.

Here’s the farewell comment I posted this morning on Paul’s post.
[Read more…]

November 24, 2011 By e-Patient Dave 7 Comments

Silkfire Watson: What if Watson lived in Amazon’s cloud?

This is going to be waaaay crazy and out-there, except my antennas are twitching that it might be reality within 18 months.

Don’t ask me where I got that date; my antennas told me. Serendipitously I read two articles tonight. (I love Thanksgiving weekend.) I’ve probably got the details wrong, but consider three technologies:

Amazon’s new “Kindle Fire” tablet
Amazon’s new “Silk” browser
IBM’s Watson.

1. Kindle “Fire”

In case you missed it, there’s been enormous talk about Amazon’s latest Kindle product, the Fire. It bears little resemblance to previous “books only” Kindles – it’s a media-streaming tablet. To understand what a big difference this is, see the new Wired interview with Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.

Note: all is not great – I’m a strong believer in David Pogue’s reviews at the New York Times, and he says this first version of Fire is ugly-bad: [Read more…]

October 20, 2011 By e-Patient Dave 3 Comments

The business of patient engagement: an office in a box

A year ago I posted about the business of patient engagement – some reflections on what it’s like to be creating some kind of business that has no precedent. Yeah, that’s innovation – not new technology, but definitely innovating a business model. It’s had to be agile: set out in a general direction, and follow the opportunities. Somebody told me “Evangelism always requires taking it to the field,” and boy were they right: the Past Events section of my schedule shows over 150 events since 1/1/2010.

That’s a lot of travel, a lot of unproductive time to/from/in airports, and a lot of time checking into and out of hotels. Tons of opportunity for things to get misplaced, and tons of opportunity for expected services not to be there when I arrive. All that means more unproductive time, not to mention replacement costs. That stuff can kill a startup.

I’ve addressed this, with the help of my gadget-happy clever wife, by developing an “office in a box” briefcase, with a place for everything and everything in its place. Check it out.