Power to the Patient!
This post is a departure from my usual: it’s about a specific company, for a specific reason. First, some background.
Since 2007, Thanksgiving has been a time of reflection for me. That’s the year I was diagnosed as almost dead, yet by Fall I got to hear “looks like you beat it!” What a Thanksgiving that was.
I know firsthand that when a person like me is in need, being cared for and about makes all the difference.
[Read more…]Today in an email thread I realized it’s a decade since the OpenNotes work started, via Tom Delbanco and Jan Walker, and now promoted so brilliantly by Liz Salmi. How great that back then my PCP Danny Sands and I were among the first crew of OpenNotes study participants!
I decided to mark the occasion by creating an /OpenNotes page on my site, listing all the blog posts and articles that have emerged as part of the work.
(Interesting to observe: before cancer rearranged my life, I don’t think I ever stuck with any cause for ten years straight. Funny how that happens.)
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Last July I participated in a workshop on life after cancer at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington. They’ve just published the final report, Long-term Survivorship Care after Cancer Treatment: Proceedings of a Workshop. It’s a free 160 page PDF.
As I’ve written before, my business is evolving as the patient movement matures. For years our movement was, frankly, a question: “Should medicine listen to patients? Why?” I’ve spoken at hundreds of events, and happily, it’s no longer a question: we won. Now my speeches are increasingly about the academic and commercial aspects of patient engagement, not the “why.”
A sure sign of progress is that now the patient movement is progressing into business, which has opened the door for advisory work. My newest client is Massive Bio, a very different kind of entrant in the so-called “second opinion market,” where patients in trouble seek other options. It’s a popular idea but doing it successfully is not easy. Here’s the first post I wrote for their site; more will follow.
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