e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

Search Results for: schedule

By 6 Comments

Speaker Academy #18: Client Honor Roll – great and valued business partners

This is the latest in the Speaker Academy series, which started here. The series is addressed to patients and advocates who basically know how to speak on a subject but want to make a business out of it. I’ll try to be clear to all readers, but parts may assume you’ve read earlier entries.

In #16 I said “For a small business, cash is king.” This is especially true for patients who are trying to build a small business in speaking, with no financial backing. In this post I want to “spotlight the spotless” – my clients who have honored our partnership by paying every single invoice within the agreed time of 30 days. Thank you!! A couple of foonotes before we start:

  • Date range: This is for events starting January 2013 and ending April 2014. (This May’s events haven’t reached 30 days yet.)
    • I hope to dig back earlier, but before 2013 I was in survival mode and my records were sometimes not accurate. Meanwhile, clients – if you remind me that you paid promptly I’ll be glad to include you – just let me know!
  • Special honor: Some clients are so great that they’re in a special category – they paid on-site or EARLY! (And they reimbursed my out-of-pocket expenses promptly.) So I’ll start with them:

[Read more…]

By 1 Comment

Speaker Academy #17: “Your message did not fall on deaf ears.”

Erin Moore profile picture

This is the latest in the Speaker Academy series, which started here. The series is addressed to patients and advocates who basically know how to speak on a subject but want to make a business out of it. I’ll try to be clear to all readers, but parts may assume you’ve read earlier entries.

A great moment just happened, and I say “great” because it brings together two big factors in the Speaker Academy series here:

  • If patient voices are a cornerstone of the future of medicine (as the Institute of Medicine says), they need to be actively supported in their participation. Otherwise, the future will be built on whatever scraps people find for free.

Well, Speaker Academy pal Erin Moore just knocked one out of the park. Speaking last week at two events in DC (for free), she had an occasion arise where she spoke effectively – in fact I’d say she knocked it out of the park!

Here’s a cross-post of her news, with permission, from her blog 66 Roses. Change agents, take note.
[Read more…]

By 12 Comments

Speaker Academy #16: Getting paid (being businesslike about cash flow)

Cash is King image from Image: mobilepaymentsworld.com
Image: mobilepaymentsworld.com

Update 4/11/2014: Substantially expanded the section “submit bills electronically”
____________

This is the latest in the Speaker Academy series, which started here. The series is addressed to patients and advocates who basically know how to give a speech but want to make a business out of it. I’ll try to be clear to all readers, but parts may assume you’ve read earlier entries.

This post is about cash flow – an important part of being responsible for ourselves financially. In earlier posts we discussed getting agreement from your client on the value of your message and the need to get paid: Ratty Boxers, A turning point for patient voices, and Speaker Academy #15: The Contract. This post is about managing how the cash actually gets to you, because many hearts have been broken along that road.

1. For a small business, cash is king

One of the most common causes of small business failure is running out of cash. So if you want to build a business, even a small one, it’s your responsibility to be businesslike about cash flow. On About.com, Scott Allan put it this way:

Cash (Flow) Really Is King

One of the most important lessons entrepreneurs have to learn, often painfully, is that cash really is king. I’m not talking about paper money — I’m talking about cash flow. Simply put, it doesn’t matter how much money is coming in the future if you don’t have enough money to get from here to there.

Don’t plan to spend money you don’t have yet.

[Read more…]

By 7 Comments

Site’s links and menus are temporarily broken. (Thanks, Bluehost.) What to do.

Update two hours later: this is fixed. See the resolution and further thoughts in the comments.

This seems to me to be a great example of a process that wasn’t designed reliably, so all kinds of things could be done per the plan yet the result still didn’t work. I’d like to work with them to define a better process. (We need to have the same approach to system failures in healthcare!)
_________

By the end of this weekend things should be back to normal, but right now links to this site’s pages are broken.  The site is mangled due to a bad migration of my site to web hosting company BlueHost.com. (I’m naming them because every step I took was as directed by them, and because their techs assured me this wouldn’t happen.)

Specifically, the home page URL www.epatientdave.com is working, but the links to pages within the site are broken. So, for instance:
[Read more…]

By 1 Comment

Interview with Dr. Brian Goldman @NightShiftMD last May

Being interviewed by Brian Goldman MDLast May I spoke at Kingston General Hospital in Kingston, Ontario, a couple of hours northeast of Toronto. They’re a remarkable hospital – five years ago they were a disaster, and under the leadership of CEO Leslee Thompson and her team, they’ve become spectacular. One key example: their staffers’ hand hygiene achievement is now at 96%! (Most hospitals are at 60% or lower, which is the primary cause of hospital acquired infections ending in death.)

A key to KGH’s turnaround was to actively partner with patients they’d previously wronged, and many more patients since; patients are now part of every decision team, even hiring of doctors. As you might imagine, working with them on this event was one of the highlights of my year.

A major treat was meeting two bright stars of Canadian health media, journalist André Picard @PicardOnHealth and Dr. Brian Goldman @NightShiftMD, author of The Night Shift: Real Life in the Heart of the ER and host of the CBC Radio program White Coat, Black Art.

[Read more…]

By 14 Comments

Resources from today’s lecture at the World Parkinson’s Congress

Major updates made Sunday 10/6.

Panorama of World Parkinson Congress auditorium

Today I had a rare privilege and challenge: I spoke to a kind of audience I’d never addressed before – the World Parkinson Congress in Montreal. I was one of four speakers in a two hour session “New Views of Managing Parkinson’s Disease”; we each had 25 minutes plus Q&A. Above is a photo I took from the stage – a big hall at the Palais de Congres, with over 2,000 in the room.

Click to visit the book's sale page
Click to visit the book’s sale page

I composed a talk about patient empowerment (in the context of Parkinson’s) based on things I’d learned about the disease community – and, importantly, research issues – from two good friends with the disease, Sara Riggare of Sweden and Perry Cohen of DC. They must have coached me well, because four times I was unexpectedly interrupted by applause. It was webcast, and video of the session should be published in a day or two.

One item I noted in the talk was a brand new, magnificent book [right] that was launched at the conference, conceived, written, edited and produced entirely by patients. In my view this book is the instant exemplar of how patients can define their disease to the world: the experience of getting the diagnosis, exploring treatment options with each other, coping with life with the disease, and much more. It’s a gorgeous, browsable, full color coffee table book – you can jump in anywhere. More on this book later.

Here’s a version of today’s slides, modified to be more understandable without the audio:

There was enough interest that we added an unscheduled breakout session in a side room – thanks to organizer Eli Pollard for her quick response!

The unplanned session truly had no plan – we started talking and taking notes. In a sense this was an example of a point I make frequently: patients know what patients want to know. It was great to see the fire and hope in the eyes of these patients and caregivers who want so much to define the future on their own terms, given the constraints of the future they own. I took notes as we talked (using the room’s projector) and promised to publish them.
____________

[Read more…]