Power to the Patient!
A quarter century ago, in the early years of the Web, a seminal book was published by four marketing wizards: The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. Its central point was that the internet was going to completely change marketing, because it made information flow freely, to and between consumers. Importantly, it consisted of 95 theses, patterned explicitly after the 95 theses Martin Luther nailed to the cathedral door in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517.
Sunday night I blogged this:
I haven’t been blogging nearly as much as I did five years ago, largely because my early blogging was all about trying to figure out “what the heck is up with the American healthcare system???” … it’s been two years since I had any new realizations.
Why would “figuring it out” make me stop blogging? Because as a change activist who’s also a public speaker, I’m gripped by one question: “What could be said that would make any difference?” There literally is no point in saying anything else. So once I realized how locked-in the system is, how intractable it is to change, I lost interest in flapping my gums and fingers.
But new things are in the wind, and it’s time to start pushing out those top learnings as foundation for what’s next. So, game on – in responses to two tweets, I got ornery:
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I haven’t been blogging nearly as much as I did five years ago, largely because my early blogging was all about trying to figure out “what the heck is up with the American healthcare system???” and it’s now been two years since I had any new realizations. Here’s a summary of that, then some quick hits on recent and upcoming events.
No, wait – this part turned out long, so I’ll continue tomorrow with the “quick hits.” For today, here’s the baseline I reached two years ago.
[Read more…]It’s been a busy winter. Amid all the Facebook scandals and new government regulation work that’s going on, I thought I’d send an update on travels. Here are some visuals from a recent 17 day, six country, seven speech trip. (Fun facts: nine different hotels, and doing laundry in a Vienna laundromat that only takes instructions from a smartphone app.)
The background image is the HIMSS19 (health IT systems conference) logo repeated over and over and over and over, because that brutal exhausting conference is like that :-), and is the background of everything else.
Counterclockwise from left:
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This book is so good I don’t know where to start. Just read it. (There’s an introductory 20% discount on the e-book below.)
Except – seriously – don’t read it if you demand a roadmap from here to the future. This is from the future. The image above, of a kid with a telescope, has been in the author’s office since I first met him, but until I was halfway through this book I didn’t understand why.
In Augmented Health(care) Dutch innovator Lucien Engelen of Radboud University Medical Center goes on a tour of the landscape that may strike the unfamiliar as manic or just plain nuts. Don’t trust that reaction – listen. He is unbound by the traditional view but absolutely bound to a future world where health – and care – are augmented such that things actually work.
To achieve its potential, healthcare must be democratized.
I’ve reached this conclusion after hundreds of speaking events in eighteen countries over nine years. For me “speaking” has always involved a lot of listening and learning, and the more I’ve learned, the more I’ve puzzled over this paradox: