e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

Search Results for: e book

By Leave a Comment

Geneva, Monday June 27: evening keynote open to the public!

Click to visit press release page
Click to visit press release page

Next Monday, June 27, I’ll be doing something really fun: an evening keynote at a medical conference in Geneva, Switzerland, open to the public. If you know anyone who can get there, please invite them! It’s just 20 Swiss francs (about US$21), and simultaneous translation will be offered.

The conference is NI2016 (Nursing Informatics 2016), whose theme this year is “eHealth For All.” My talk is from 6:20 to 7:20 pm, followed at 8 by a fashion show featuring wearable technology.

The conference will provide simultaneous translation into German and French, and a delegation from China will have its own simultaneous translator.

I’ll take a moment here to mention four international editions of my signature book Let Patients Help, because of the international nature of this event – and because three translators will be present:

French, German and Chinese editions
(and Spanish)

Let Patients Help is available in eight languages, a real sign that participatory medicine is not just an American thing – it’s becoming a global movement. In addition to English, four languages are relevant to this event:

  • Christine Bienvenu
    Christine Bienvenu

    French: Impliquons les Patients!
    Christine Bienvenu (right), translator of the French Kindle edition, would love to find a publisher or sponsor for a print edition. Come meet her!

  • German: Lasst Patienten mithelfen! is Part 1 of the German e-patient textbook Gesundheit 2.0.
  • Chinese: 请患者参与 (available only in China … this may be of interest to the Chinese delegation)
  • Spanish: ¡Dejad que los pacientes ayuden! I mention this because its translators, Elia Gabarron and Luis Fernandez Luque, will also be present.

Again, if you know anyone in the area, please do invite them. Thanks!

 

By 1 Comment

Beyond Empowerment: Patients, Paradigms, and Social Movements

It’s time to move beyond empowerment and engagement, and get to the deeper issues.

For 18 months it’s been increasingly clear that the nature of this work – at least mine – has moved beyond surviving cancer (though that’s great), beyond “Gimme my DaM data” (though that’s true). It’s time to examine the core beliefs that hold medicine back from achieving its potential – its mistaken conceptions about what patients can do and should be supported in doing.

So when Susan Carr, editor of the excellent Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare, asked last summer if we should do another piece, I proposed that we pick up where I left off in 2015 as Mayo’s Visiting Professor: let’s examine whether it’s time to formally examine “the paradigm of patient”; to rigorously ask whether establishment medicine’s conception of what “patient” means – especially what patients are capable of, and should be empowered to achieve – needs to be updated. If we get that wrong, then business and science and policy can’t possibly get it right.

The resulting interview is here – they made it their cover story! You can jump to that link, but if you have a moment, I’d like to say more about its background, and why this is important.

Problems in a paradigm are not to be taken lightly.

[Read more…]

By 2 Comments

Five years ago: a three-speech three-country earthquake week

Longtime readers know that this has been a long hard road, creating a “market” for a patient voice to speak culture change at health conferences. This is an anniversary week worth noting, on several fronts … it’s the fifth birthday of not just my TED Talk, but two other events that bent my trajectory.

First, the TED Talk – I know you’ve seen it, but here it is anyway. Click it (to boost the view count:-)) or just skip ahead.

Photo: Aad van Vliet (Mirella Boot on Flickr)
Photo: Aad van Vliet (Mirella Boot on Flickr)

Strictly speaking the birthday was a week ago – April 4, 2011. I stepped on stage onto the “big red dot” that TED Talks are famous for, and faced an audience of 900 in a theater with two balconies. The place was historic: Maastricht, where the European Union had been formed 19 years earlier. Fifteen minutes before going on stage I’d handed in my revised slides (modified in the two hours after lunch); not to be outdone on the “last minute” thing, waiting back stage, host Lucien Engelen had just told me “You have to do” the e-Patient Rap, created by Keith Boone (@Motorcycle_Guy). (In the talk when I say “a little improv,” I meant it – it was not planned, not even rehearsed.)

Sixteen minutes later, the talk ended with the chant “Let Patients Help!” With a standing ovation happily in my tummy, I stepped off.

#2: Jerusalem – debating with Israeli scholars

[Read more…]

By 1 Comment

Quick year-end wrap – and winter retreat.

Christmas wreath HeatherKnitz

Through Monday, January 11 I’ll be on reduced availability, for a period of “retreat and think.” It’s not a full-bore vacation; I’ll be reading and writing (and blogging), but I won’t be responding to most emails.

I can still be reached for anything time-sensitive and I will still monitor contacts from media and potential clients, per the Contact page.

Year-end wrap:

Here’s a list of my favorites on this site from 2015.  I’ll repeat something I said in August:
[Read more…]

By 1 Comment

Berci’s “My Health: Upgraded”: A futurist vision worthy of Doc Tom

Berci holding "My Health: Upgraded"

The headline above is an extraordinary statement, but after 450 speeches and policy meetings, I’ve heard a lot of discussions about healthcare (especially its future), a lot of predictions, and a lot of attempts to explain the past, and the new book My Health: Upgraded (Amazon) stands out as the best explanation of the future that I’ve seen.

I myself never met “Doc Tom” Ferguson, the founder of the e-patient movement, but I’ve looked back at the vision he published and how it’s come true – and I’ve thought about why, a lot. This new book by 30 year old Bertalan “Berci” Meskó MD, PhD is in the same league. (Disclaimer: having never met Tom, I’m talking about the vision as he expressed it in his writings, which is all I have to go on.)

Happily, the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) liked the following review well enough that they published it on the BMJ blog. Below is that text, slightly modified.

“My Health: Upgraded”
is a clear vision from
a young futurist

In my work to understand how medicine saved me from Stage IV renal cell carcinoma in 2007, yet so often falls catastrophically short, I’ve looked for causes of both success and shortfall. More than anything, I’ve seen that “the progress of progress” depends on whether we correctly see, or fail to see, the latest and most important new patterns that alter what’s possible and what direction we should head in.
[Read more…]

By 4 Comments

August: “retreat and think”

Cover of Structure of Scientific Revolutions 50th anniversary edition

For the month of August I’ll be mostly offline, for a period of “retreat and think.” It’s not a full-bore vacation; I can still be reached for anything time-sensitive (see my Contact page) but I’ll be less active online.

This year has already been full of change – Ginny’s knee replacements, Visiting Professor at Mayo, the first Patient Engagement Fellowship, new publications, and most of all, rethinking what “patient” means (and could mean), per the book that made paradigms famous: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (right). Our movement is gaining traction, which means a change agent needs to rethink. This month is good for that (I’m only traveling to one event), so I’m going to dial back the dialog.

September will be amazing.

One reason to retreat now is that on August 28 the calendar flips from empty to packed.

[Read more…]