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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.
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Writings and upcoming events – July 2015

Like last month, here’s this month’s update on travels, events, and articles (including a first for me!).

In my travels if you’re in the area and want to connect, contact me.

Writings:

  • Do you use online symptom checkers? Go for it but be wise: Last Friday I was interviewed by the Boston Globe (see below) to comment on a new BMJ article. It was such a stimulating topic I wrote a much-mentioned post about it on e-patients.net, and I hope to be writing more

Media mentions:
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I’m 65! That’s *really* old (you’ll be amused) – and I love it.

Birthday candles (source: Wikipedia)
“Birthday candles”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Updated – see modified population graphic

Some people moan about adding years. I love ’em. Today I’m 65, and I want lots more! I wanna get old!

We the old and many
are coming for you!

Did you know more than half the humans who’ve ever been 65 are alive today? That’s partly because medicine keeps saving people like me, who tried to die in middle age. Thanks, medicine; now get ready for lots of us getting older, happily, with chronic conditions. (I myself have slightly elevated blood pressure, and I’m just emerging from “obese.”)

Like my classmate Jay Pollack, who posted on Facebook that he’s getting a pacemaker because medicine saved him twice in ten years.

Have you thought about my question last September about taking care of all the old people?  Or how about Pew Research’s new book Next America, which depicts among other things how America’s classic “age pyramid” is becoming rectangular? Each band in the graphic is a five year age group. We used to have very few 80+, and now it’s commonplace: (Graphic modified 10pm ET)

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Slides and links for today’s presentation to Rotary Club of Seattle

Seattle Rotary web bannerUpdated 9/29 with the promised additions

Seattle has the world’s biggest Rotary Club – a lot of sharp, focused Seattle business people. Very different from my usual talk to a medical conference … I’m talkin’ to these people as patients and family members! So the content is different, and some is new this week.

Here’s the video (32 minutes):

Seattle Rotary #4, September 24, 2014 on Vimeo.

Two notes about the video:

  • The fonts didn’t upload correctly so some of the layouts overflowed. (30 years into desktop publishing and they still can’t make it work reliably!) An accurate PDF of the slides is on Slideshare.
  • Around 31 minutes I say that I’ll post my call to action online: our society needs mid-level managers who know how to create a team and produce a result! They’re on slides 50-56.

As promised, links to material cited in the talk:
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Talks in Stockholm – the Land of Nobel

I’ve been traveling (and recovering) enough that I’ve not blogged as much as I want. I’ll weasel out of that:-) by posting some videos. Here’s the first post.

Digital Health Days – Stockholm
(20 minute opening keynote,
tying our movement to the history
of the Nobel Prize in Medicine)

This is almost a completely new talk. Stockholm is the home of Karolinska Insitute, which is the home of the Nobel Prize. On the day before my talk, wife Ginny and I went to the Nobel Museum and looked at the exhibits about the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Trying to do the opening keynote for a two day conference in twenty minutes is a bitch of an assignment, frankly. I left 1/3 of my talk in the hotel room (not enough time) and still had to skip 1/3 of my slides. For this audience, my talk touched only lightly on my cancer story – I quickly jumped into lessons I found in the Nobel stories. My intent was to convey:

  • The world truly has changed. The nature of how we know things – and can know things – is different from thirty years ago.
  • Even in the best of establishment medicine, resisting change has sometimes cost us decades of progress. Beware of this. Be open to new realities.
  • Patients are the ultimate stakeholder. They have the most at stake, and can contribute real value in new ways.

My voice starts out dry and scratchy – speakers, don’t forget to hydrate!  (Subscribers, if you can’t see the video, click here to view it online)

Other resources from the event:

(I was blown away by how fast the videos were posted!  My talk was at 9:30 a.m. and it was edited, with slides, and posted on YouTube by lunch!  The conference world has much to learn from this AV team from FKDV.se)

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Speaker Academy #15: The contract

Addition October 30, 2014: in comments a meaty discussion has started on a subject that’s related but different – NDA’s (Non-Disclosure Agreements). They rarely arise in speaking engagements but they can often be part of “the business of patient engagement.” Have a look if you’re interested.

e-Patient Dave contract template 2013This 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 talk 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.

I’m at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 25th annual forum in Orlando, participating in a day of patient speaker training. In side conversations one thing that came up is the business relationship: getting paid. And that starts with the contract.

Do you need a contract?

Contracts weren’t important for me when I had few engagements and little pay. But when things got busy I needed structure. The contract I use (at right) provides:

  • A clear record of logistical details: where, when, arrival & departure, how you can list it, etc.
  • A clear record of finances: fee, expense reimbursement, and down payment
  • Who’s expected to be in the audience. (Today one speaker told of a case where she was sure an audience would be nurses, and found out at the last minute it was patient advisors!)

And of course in the rare case where a relationship goes sour, the contract records who owes what to whom. It’s not that you’ll end up in court – to the contrary, it keeps you out of court, because the rules are already in writing.

I also added sections for things that kept popping up as problems: [Read more…]