This is such big news that last weekend I made over my home page with this at the top:
It’s the banner from the cover of my new book Superpatients: Patients who extend science when medicine’s out of answers.
This book is the culmination of the first decade of my advocacy and explorations into helping healthcare achieve its potential. It’s particularly come to a head in the past year, a concept that goes well beyond e-patients (“empowered,” “engaged,” etc.): these are patients who have extended science when the docs said “There’s nothing more we can do.”
The Superpatients concept changes everything about the rules of the road – because now that patients without medical training are genuinely creating new knowledge and (sometimes) new treatments, there’s no longer any excuse for saying “Patients should just do as they’re told,” and especially not “Patients have no use for their data.”
Ten years in development, a year in maturing
The first presentation of the Superpatients concept was a year ago, a webcast on Nov. 29, 2018 to “QI Connect,” Scotland’s quality improvement group. Then in February I did another event, recorded below … the concept is presented in the first few minutes. (Email subscribers, click this post’s headline to come online.)
The February audience was the National Network of Libraries of Medicine. Why would NNLM invite this? Because superpatients are exactly the kind of people who might turn to medical librarians for help.
You can learn lots more about the book on its own home page. But first … I want you to help me finish this book. Want to read a current draft in early December? Read on:
Meet LeanPub:
the modern way to self-publish
I’m publishing this book using a website I’d never heard of – LeanPub. I learned about it from my Hungarian collaborator Berci, who’s published six(!) e-books there, then learned it’s also the preferred method for my long-time Lean Hospitals friend Mark Graban, who’s also published six, in print as well as ebook. (Six books each?? You might think this “lean” stuff is a boost to productivity – who knew??)
LeanPub lets readers buy an unfinished version of a book and comment on it (very much like being a beta tester for software), then guide the final phases and get updates as you go along. Pretty amazing, and very un-Amazon. (As modern as Amazon likes to be, it’s very old-school in its desire to control the whole publishing process.)
Here are the LeanPub pages for two books I have in process right now:
- Superpatients
- Spigots: Why we need a “health data spigot” to let our medical data “flow” to us.
Superpatients as a speech topic
Superpatients speeches have been hot stuff, especially to people in the life sciences: pharma etc. Every Superpatients talk to a pharma audience has had a standing ovation or the equivalent: long long seated applause. And twice pharma executives have said, “In 20 years with this company I’ve never seen a reaction like this.” This just reinforces my sense that this is a world-changing idea.
Next year I plan to publish The Paradigm of Patient, a new synthesis of all my thinking (and others’) about how we all can (and must) upgrade our thinking about what patients are capable of. I have big aspirations for that one … I want it to be required reading in medical schools!
But first things first: Superpatients!
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