I’m having so much fun with this TED video (see earlier post) that I hardly know what to say. The best thing is that the simple message “Let Patients Help!” is spreading around the world – it’s got over 180,000 views so far, and volunteers have added subtitles in nine languages – most recently Persian (Farsi) and Korean. People are passing it from friend to friend to friend – clearly, this has tapped into a universal desire: let patients help heal healthcare.
Yesterday the TED people even gave it a vanity URL: http://on.TED.com/Dave. How fun is that??
The next big thing is a live “TED conversation” Wednesday at 1:00 p.m. EDT (10 a.m. Pacific, 7:00 p.m. in Central Europe, etc). The topic ties into one of the key statements in the video: “Patients are the most under-utilized resource” in healthcare. The question:
Why is the patient
the most under-used resource in healthcare??
How did that happen??
To participate, some preparation is required; instructions below:
About the event
- TED Conversations are online discussions about TED-worthy topics. Many are started by members of the TED community; you can start one yourself. Here’s the Conversations page.
- Some Conversations are live one-hour discussions about a question that’s been proposed by a TED speaker. That’s what this one will be.
- The question is posted a day in advance, at 3 pm ET. Comments will not be open until the event starts.
- You’ll be in a group discussion room, typing with other people. People post questions, and I’ll see them and answer as much as I can. (A moderator will be watching for spammers and trolls.)
Preparation
- Create a TED.com account. Do this now, before the event: http://www.ted.com/pages/114
- Start thinking now about what you’ll want to say during the event.
- Tell friends, if you want.
The event itself
- As 1 pm ET approaches, sign in and go to the event URL http://www.ted.com/conversations/4547/live_ted_conversation_july_27.html
- Questions will open when the event starts, at http://on.ted.com/ePatientDaveQA
- Post-event, the discussion will stay open online for one or more weeks.
__________
Where did this speech come from, anyway?? Who started this?
It happened at TEDx Maastricht, a distinctive, terrific event last April 4, in the south Netherlands city of Maastricht. (Here’s a Blogger Grand Rounds post with many videos from the event.) Perhaps most significant, the first speaker announced for that event wasn’t a big name celebrity, it was a patient. Just a patient. And that’s what the event was about: putting the patient at the center of the whole health conversation.
Next year’s event is already scheduled – April 2, 2012. I’ll be in the audience if at all possible, because there were some sharp talks, and event production was excellent.
TEDx Maastricht is produced by Lucien Engelen, “health 2.0 ambassador, speaker, author and Director of the Radboud REshape & Innovation Centre at UMC St Radboud in Nijmegen.” Reshape? Yes – as in, taking healthcare apart and putting it back together, better.
Dave who was it that first said “that patients are the most under utilized resource”?
Hi Sherry – to the best of my knowledge it was Warner Slack, MD, in the 1970s. I have, somewhere, a photocopied page of a Lancet article, I think, making this argument re data entry in a medical record(!).
I first heard it, though, in a statement made by Slack’s colleague / “mentee” Charlie Safran MD in a statement to the House Ways and Means subcommittee on health in 2004: “I want to note especially the importance of the resource that is most often under-utilized in our information systems – our patients.”
And in one of our joint presentations this spring, Dr. Danny Sands showed me a more generic version (not-IT-specific) in Slack’s 2001 Jossey-Bass book, CyberMedicine: How Computing Empowers Doctors and Patients for better Health Care: “It can be argued that the largest yet most neglected health care resource, worldwide, is the patient…”