My videos page has recordings of various speeches. Here’s the latest – and, some are saying, my best. It was a month ago in Cary, North Carolina, at a big event conducted by SAS called “Health Analytics: From Big Insights to Big Breakthroughs.” It’s 56 minutes long.
Here’s the direct link to the video. If you’re not already registered on that site, you may need to register here.
Not all the slides are shown in the video; here’s a copy of them on Slideshare. Slideshare’s display software is pretty weak compared to what I do with PowerPoint :-) so some of the layouts display wrong on their site, but you can get the idea.
Please click this image, watch the two minute video, and donate what you can. This is THE famous Regina Holliday, who has been called “the Rosa Parks of healthcare.” You’ll see why. A humble but immensely strong woman who has become the leader of a movement made almost literally with her bare hands.
This modest $10,000 fundraising project (very little for a film) is one week away from completion, and has less than $2,000 to go. As I said on Facebook when it was $2500, let’s find two $1,000 donors and dozens of $20 ones!
Click it and read. Get your name in the credits, if you’ve got the scratch! (If you have one of these jackets, you must donate; even if you don’t and you just love supporting a great new future, pitch in! I did.)
Incentives include a shirt, a copy of the DVD, and all the way on up to Regina coming to your company or club and doing a speech or even a lecture!
Image source: FreeDigitalImages.net, by digitalart
It seems these days internet ads get high click-through rates if they start with “Weird trick.” I’m game. For patient centered care, the weird trick is to think about this:
Listen to what matters to patients (ask them),
and decide that it matters to you.
You’ll see things from their point of view,
and you’ll become patient centered.
I know it’s weird, but think: when patients tell you something’s bothering them, do you say “Sorry, there’s nothing we can do about it”? That’s the hallmark of being disempowered. Or do you do something about it? Or as your team to see if you can?
For instance, noise: I just learned that some hospitals are letting people put up a Do Not Disturb sign! Hard to imagine? It’s in a great Wall Street Journal piece yesterday by Laura Landro.
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Have you ever seen the set of pills that have to be managed for a person with a slew of prescriptions? It’s nuts. What’s even more nuts is that with all we pay for healthcare and computers in this world, there’s no software anywhere that makes it easy to do the right thing. Let’s change that!
(I’m not complex at the moment (at least my prescriptions aren’t), but when I was sick I sure was. Farther down is the true story that gave me this idea.)
This is my submission for the “Blue Button CoDesign Challenge” that was sprung on us last Monday by the good folks at Health & Human Services, who are doing this radically modern thing – unusual for government, eh? They came up with a fascinating challenge and are opening it to the public, with prizes! For details you can check out the challenge site.
Here’s my proposal. Over the weekend I’ll flesh out this blog post with more details, but for starters Friday afternoon, here’s the big idea:
Build me a Blue Button enabled tool that….
… makes it easy to manage our frickin’ prescriptions and take the right pills at the right time!
My doctors’ computers know my prescriptions and when I’m supposed to take them, right? So do the pharmacies. And computers can mash up all kinds of information from different sources, and organize it, and display it clearly, right? So why do they make ME figure out when I should take what?
Let’s have an app that can read all my prescriptions, and organize them into times of day. Even better, it could print out my pillbox and add pictures of what goes in each square. Why not?? Isn’t that what computers do – make complex information easy??
The cost chart at right shows what’s happened since Reinhardt’s paper appeared, in the middle of the chart. It’s what you’d expect if slush is flowing around with nobody watching.
Today I was reminded that it ain’t just hospitals. :-)
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Last week I got my annual checkup. There were two separate problems in my hospital’s appointment system, so I ended up leaving too late to get the simple lab work my doctor had ordered; I said I’d get it done at a local lab.
Today I visited AnyLabTestNow, a chain with a local office. I called ahead, and for walk-in self-pay, it’s $49 for the chemistry panel I needed (Calcium, CO2, etc) and $49 for the cholesterol, total $98. And a $10 off coupon, on the site! Just $88.
Eight weeks ago on Forbes I noted an article I’d found that said half of all humans who’ve ever been 65 are alive today. (Actually the source said 60-75% of all 65+ people ever. But I’ll settle for half.) In less than two years that demographic bomb will include me.
Think about that. There are 3x more people alive today (7 billion) than at the start of the baby boom (2.3 billion, 1946). Combine it with the reality that because medicine is awesome, people who in those days would have died (e.g. me) are living much longer. Lots of old people coming. Zombie fields of old people. (We’re not “getting old” until much later, but there are a lot of us.)
Case in point: here are the 34 obituaries in today’s New York Times.
I got two wonderful surprises this week about Let Patients Help – unexpected, very favorable reviews of this little book.
The first was Tuesday on the Health Leaders web site. (They’re the magazine for medical management that in 2009 featured Dr. Sands and me in their cover story “Patient of the Future,” then included us in their “20 People Who Make Healthcare Better.”) In What the E in e-Patient Really Means, editor Scott Mace shows that he really gets it:
I’ve made a career out of documenting the empowering effects of technology. In the 1980s, among other things, personal computers were a way to engage students of all ages through the interactivity of educational software. In the 1990s, the Internet equipped us to get the most current data. In the 2000s, Web services enabled us to build “digital nervous systems” that automated the publication of that data, and our ability to subscribe to updates through the power of technologies such as RSS and search technologies such as Google.
But here in the 2010s, it’s ironic that the most personal of data we generate – that about our health – remains locked in healthcare’s vaults for a variety of reasons. …
It’s a long, perceptive essay – almost 10% as long as the book itself! The items he cites are truly the core of the message. Well done, Scott.
The second was today in Oncology Times – someone tweeted that they’d just seen it. (Why do I only learn of these things through Google Alerts and Twitter??) In the “Practice Matters” column, Lola Butcher writes Let Your Patients Help You.
Lola is informed and funny. Excerpts:
If you don’t know what [e-patient] is, click here and get with the 21st century. …
It only takes about an hour to read but if that seems like too much, skip to the “tip sheets” at the end. … Look for two sections — “Ten Things Clinicians Say That Encourage Patient Engagement” and “Ten Things Clinicians Say (or do) That Discourage Patient Engagement” — written by deBronkart’s primary care physician and co-author, Daniel Sands, MD.
I’ll just take issue with this closing item:
deBronkart has a big smile and a humorous way of making his points but physicians who do not support patient engagement should be very afraid of him.
Afraid of moi?? I wouldn’t say they should be afraid of me, but they sure will feel uncomfortable as the new reality unfolds. And that’s happening with or without me – I only talk about it, to spread the word and shed light on what’s possible.
Thanks to both Scott and Lola for drawing attention to this little book. Its tummy tickles every time someone says something nice.
I know this is last-minute. I’ve been busy and disorganized, and thrown for a loop (frankly) since the death in my family earlier this month.
Don’t miss this. It’s Monday. Act now! (How often do I say that??)
If you’re a health geek, or a patient centered care geek, or anything of the sort, and you’re in southern California, don’t miss this. Tell your boss right now that you should go – it may be the best conference deal of the entire year (and I see a lot):
Monday, June 3, Long Beach, CA, 8:30-5:00
(Details are at the form link below.)
$150 for one person in the health professions $99 each for three or more (bring colleagues – 3 for the price of 2!) $65 for patients and family members!
The event: Patient & Family Centered Care Partners @PFCCPartners – fourth annual conference. Speakers:
Opening keynote (8:40 a.m.): Bob Wachter @Bob_Wachter, whom I recently heard speak at the Michigan Hospital Association (right). He’s chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine (I’ve worked with some of their people – really terrific), and Wikipedia says he’s “a prominent academic physician on the faculty of UCSF … regarded as the academic leader of the hospitalist movement, the most rapidly growing field in modern medical history.” He is a true leader and a great speaker.
Closing keynote (4 pm): Me
Also presenting will be Martie Hatlie, a terrific moderator I worked with at a PCORI meeting earlier this year. Tons of experience in patient and family centered thinking.
All this for $150 or less, with extra-special pricing for patients and family!
Let them know you’ll be coming: fill out this info form (site includes full event details). Walk-ins will be welcome but it helps a LOT if they know you’re coming!
See you there – two global keynote speakers, bookending a great day for a great price, hosted by a great organization!
(And who knows, maybe a beverage afterward… I hear Long Beach is lovely in the evening, and I’m staying over. :-)
Since Let Patients Helpwas officially released on April 15 there’s been lots of praise. The most exciting just arrived today: a hospital CEO who’s making the book’s ideas into something of a mission, starting now.
On her blog “Executive Rounds,” today Leslee Thompson posted “Let patients help” and other things I am learning. She’s CEO of Kingston General Hospital in Kingston, Ontario, where I spoke two weeks ago at their “KGH Connect” event. Please go read her post; these excerpts show how much she gets it:
One thing I do when looking at my calendar is to imagine what a patient in my hospital would think about how I am choosing to spend my time and energy. Would they approve of me sitting in my office reading reports about how to improve patient satisfaction? No. So I head on up to the wards and talk directly to patients and families.
On May 10, at the KGH Connect conference in Kingston, Ontario, I met Dr. Brian Goldman; we both spoke there. In 2011 he gave this 19 minute TEDx talk in Toronto; please watch it. It’s stunningly clear, grippingly told, and extremely important to understanding the real truth about medicine: it’s complicated. Really complicated.
Doctors make mistakes. Can we talk about that?
He gave me a copy of his book The Night Shift, a chronicle of one night in the ER where he works. The night’s cases are interspersed with the stories and experience that come to an ER doc’s mind with every new patient who comes in. I’ll write more about the book soon. First, as preparation, please spend 19 minutes watching this. What did you learn? Any new thoughts?
