e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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The effectiveness of the US health system, in one graph

I’ll leave you with this thought for the weekend.

After years of study of healthcare around the world, listening to an immense number of arguments about what’s important and what works and doesn’t, it’s all summed up in this one picture. The Y axis is life expectancy; the X axis is cost. This graph has been tweeted furiously and often lately by health journalist @DanMunro. (More on him below.)

You can easily see that US health costs per capita are way, way, way out of whack with the rest of the world. And, the life expectancy we get for it is years worse than the countries that cost 2-3x less.

Some will argue bitterly that the facts aren’t relevant, or a hundred other arguments.  I’ve lost interest in those arguments, because they’re all about rationale, and no rationale is worth a damn if the outcomes they’re trying to explain don’t match the rationale.

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Evolution 4: 2009 part 2 – a health I.T. “information trainwreck”

Screen capture from the Information Quality Trainwrecks blog’s post about what happened with my data. (I’m not making this up.)

Fourth in a series of retrospective posts, reviewing the ten years since my cancer and how my shifting perspective has altered what I’ll be doing from now on.

I’m generally doing one post per year, but so much happened in 2009 that it’ll take several. In particular, this episode in the spring of 2009 had such unexpected impact that I’ve had to think a lot about what to say. Sorry for the delay, but as you’ll see, this is an example of the important question that arose here.

In May 2008 my hospital had announced that their Google Health interface was live:

… a patient, with their consent and control, can upload their records to Google Health in a few keystrokes. There is no need to manually enter this health data into Google’s personal health record, unlike earlier PHRs from Dr. Koop, HealthCentral and Revolution Health. …

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The power of “consultative speaking”: keynote at Leapfrog Group’s annual meeting (Speaker Academy #29)

This is the latest in the Speaker Academy series, which started here, but it’s also intended for my potential speaking clients.

I do what I call “consultative speaking.” It’s precisely comparable to consultative selling, in which “the emphasis is on what the potential customer wants and needs.” In one sense, I learned this in industry when I worked in marketing – every speech to any meeting has to be focused on the audience’s interests and concerns, or they’ll dive into their emails. In another sense, I learned it from Kent Bottles MD, who said that he always asks clients, “What outcome would make you say that I really knocked it out of the park?” Today, thanks to Kent, with every speaking client I have what I call a “home run call,” and build my speech around that.

Today I’ve uploaded the video of a speech I did in December for The Leapfrog Group‘s annual meeting.

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The value of sharing data: What healthcare can learn from oncology

2017 Future Health Index cover
Click to go to the report’s web page

Again this year I was thrilled to be invited by Philips to participate in their Future Health Index project. This is among the most visionary annual healthcare overviews in the world. The full report – a 100 page PDF – is available free here.

Each year they’ve also asked me to submit a post for the project’s blog. Here’s my submission this year, touching on why oncology is ahead of most specialties in this area: the field decided years ago to align for patient benefit!

Let’s all do everything we can to help healthcare achieve its potential! Sharing information is part of that.

The value of sharing data:
What healthcare can learn from oncology

Decade after decade, innovations change the future of care. Microbes, anesthesia, surgery, transfusions, public health, radiology, penicillin, genomics … each development produced a quantum shift in what clinicians can achieve and in patients’ lives.

I wrote an article for the Future Health Index last year, Could data make you live longer?, which lists six different ways I as a patient can be empowered by better data flow. Similarly, it turns out one of medicine’s next great frontiers is not biological but technological: the ability for clinicians to share relevant patient data with others.

In this innovation, oncology is ahead of other specialties: the 2016 Future Health Index report found that 71% of oncologists across 13 countries share patient data electronically, while only 63% of other clinicians do.

Why? What can we learn from this?

A big factor is that oncology as a profession decided nearly a decade ago that electronic data sharing is core to their work, and spoke up about what they need.
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Evolution part 3: February 2009 – the stage is set for an earthquake

Third in a series of retrospective posts, reviewing the ten years since my cancer and how my shifting perspective has altered what I’ll be doing from now on. I’m generally doing one post per year, but so much happened in 2009 that it’ll take several.

By the way, I added new items on my 2008 entry – things that later became important: an award I got for using data in my day job, and meeting @TedEytan. 

Forming the Society for Participatory Medicine

SPM handshake logoAt the annual “friends of Tom” retreat (Doc Tom’s friends) that I mentioned last time, that gang of crazies decided the time had come to become a medical society. In addition to deciding on a mission (patient-clinician partnerships) they talked about officers, and said “It won’t do to have this society run only by doctors, of course.” I think it was Gilles Frydman (founder of ACOR, where my patient community lived) who said it had to be a doctor-patient team. They looked around and pointed to the only pair in the room – Danny and me – and said we should be co-chairs.

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Evolution, year 2: 2008 – the e-patient movement and starting to speak

Last month I started a ten part series of retrospective posts, reviewing where I’ve been and how my perspective has significantly changed what I’ll be doing from now on. The first post, on 2007, was when I was diagnosed as nearly dead and got better; this is 2008.

I’d started my old blog at Thanksgiving 2007. Two months later, in January, my life took a sharp turn when I discovered e-patients. Here’s how the year unfolded.

January 24: Google Health

In hindsight this is amazing, but my tenth blog post ever was about the announcement of Google Health: What’s next, Google Health??  I said it’d be a cold day in hell when I’d trust Google with my health data. 13 months later that would change radically, which would change my life.

January 23-28: The e-Patient White Paper and “e-Patient Dave”

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