Power to the Patient!
Regular followers of social media in medicine will instantly recognize the name @Berci: he’s Bertalan Meskó, MD, PhD, widely considered to be the hottest young doc who “gets it” about the future of medicine – and is actively working to create it. Look what he just tweeted, after reading an advance copy of Let Patients Help:
(Click the image to visit the blog post he linked to.)
Yes, how SHALL we achieve that?? Please, discuss in the comments below!
More about @Berci –
As I said yesterday, my new book Let Patients Help is available for sale now. Here’s the introduction, generously contributed by the famed Dr. Eric Topol.
An extraordinary paradox exists in medicine and health care today. On the one hand, as a recent Consumer Reports cover article on cancer tests pointed out “cancer screening remains stuck in a 1960s view of the disease.”[1] This problem of being stuck in our ways is much broader than cancer screening and can certainly be viewed to be operative across the board in health care. On the other hand, we have the newfound potential to obtain unparalleled, critical data and information about each individual. Whether this is via wearable sensors that capture one’s vital signs or sequencing the DNA that comprises one’s genome, we have new tools at our disposal – tools that were not available just a couple of years ago.
The buzzword of “big data” is used to refer to the immense amount of data that is currently being generated throughout the world—more than a zettabyte per year (that is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). At the same time we can now generate “big data” for each individual and define his or her medical essence. So we have entered an unprecedented time of the information era finally invading and converging with the medical world.
Moreover, this information is flowing in a new way. [Read more…]
I’m thrilled to announce that my next book is available for sale:
Let Patients Help!
A patient engagement handbook –
how doctors, nurses, patients and caregivers
can partner for better care.
It’s concise – less than 100 pages – because I want people to READ it. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about medicine in recent years, it’s that the most useful advice is often concise.
Buy it here, on CreateSpace, Amazon’s self-publishing site:
Let Patients Help on CreateSpace
(CreateSpace requires creating a free account. It’ll be on Amazon in a while.)
It’s a book of lists:
As the subtitle suggests, this book is about partnership between patients and professionals. It tells why it’s valid and important for medicine to listen to patients, with specific how-to’s on making it a reality. A patient engagement handbook.
In keeping with that spirit, I managed to talk some really slick doctors into contributing:
Email and RSS subscribers, click the headline to come see the video.
I’m speaking today at a meeting of the Northeast Regional Telehealth Resource Center (NRTRC). They’re 35 telemedicine providers 
who cover a vast region – seven states including all of Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, Nebraska and Utah – which includes all the U.S. territory that legally qualifies as “frontier” because there are <6 people per square mile. In the twenty years some of these folks have been doing telemedicine, a lot has changed – it used to be mainly letting the doc see something from afar (remote video), but now things are evolving.
Check out this delightful video, winner of last year’s American Telemedicine Association competition. Brilliant messaging.
Watch for this to come to your family – not just if you’re in the industry, even if you’re in downtown LA. Why? Because as the video shows, people are realizing it’s not just remote seeing – it makes the whole danged process more efficient.
Prediction: as medicine becomes more of a competitive marketplace, some clinics will offer more convenience features like this, and customers (patients) will develop strong preferences for the chance to get their problem solved quick ‘n’ easy.
I just learned that “The Wall Street,” as cool people call it, reported last Tuesday on a session at the uber-hip South By Southwest conference (SxSW), saying this:
SXSW Reporter’s Notebook:
Who Rules the Data?
The full text requires a subscription, but here’s the relevant snip:
… Privacy is only one data concern. John Wilbanks, chief commons officer at research nonprofit Sage Bionetworks, began a panel on “health 2.0” by playing a song called “Gimme My Damn Data.”
While acknowledging the great possibilities of data for improving science and individual health, Mr. Wilbanks lamented the currently “broken” system where people can’t easily use data about themselves. “It is very hard to open-source your data,” he said. “It is owned by whoever has it—and it might be considered a corporate secret or private.”
The power of art in a cultural revolution:
[Read more…]
“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” – Thoreau
Yesterday I spoke in Las Vegas at the Dignity Health Patient Experience Summit. They started with this four minute video, released recently by the Cleveland Clinic, titled “Empathy.” It’s so powerful that I found myself in tears, seriously, as I watched. It starts with those words from Thoreau.
I think without exception everyone who wants to improve medicine should watch this, including people on the patient side, the provider side, insurance, government, media, everyone. It reminds me of the “Walking Gallery of Healthcare” from Regina Holliday (Wikipedia) because it makes us conscious of the story that each of us carries around.