e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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Understand the Blockchain in Two Minutes: Institute For The Future

If this is the first time you’ve heard of blockchain, remember it.

If you’re like me, this will be puzzling and maybe a little bit unsettling, because people are saying it’s going to change the world, but it’s not at all clear what it even is, much less why it would change the world.

But I understand enough about it now to say (with reasonable(?) confidence) that they’re right, but it’ll be years before we all see it happening.

This is not specific to healthcare, but  it will surely show up in health information.

It’s called blockchain, and the Wikipedia article on it doesn’t help much. But that’s why I like the two minute video I found last week (above), from the Institute for the Future…. how? Why, via Twitter, of course – hat tip to @Sasanof (David Grayson) for his tweet! Please click to watch it. (Email subscribers, if you can’t see the video, click the headline to come online.)

Blockchain is as fundamental a change as HTTP and SMTP.

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“When assets digitize, things change fast”: the #OpenAPS do-it-yourself pancreas

Dana Lewis on stage at O'Reilly
Click image to watch video on the O’Reilly site

For some reason I’ve spoken about this a lot in speeches for more than a year but I haven’t blogged about it. The time has come.

One of my sayings in Let Patients Help is a lesson we learned in graphic arts, and the music industry learned too: “When assets digitize, things change fast.” This is, truly, an extraordinary example.

Some people with diabetes pretty much do as their doctors tell them and the industry tells them – they wait and hope that things will get better. That’s fine with me – I never say that people should be more like me. But when someone wants to take a more active role, I believe society (including medicine) should not stand in the way: let patients help improve healthcare.

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Vice President Biden’s potent speech about the importance of data in cancer

I’m at the 7th annual Health Datapalooza event in Washington. What I have to say here about this conference is subjective, my gut feel, because I haven’t been at most of the previous ones, because they were largely about the business side of health data – there hasn’t been nearly enough focus on the people who actually have the problem: the patient and family.

This year’s different. It’s managed by a different organization (Academy Health), and a lot of strong patient voices are involved, on stage and behind the scenes. There’s a whole Consumer Track, in addition to all the business things going on. And yesterday we saw a speech by somebody who most definitely fits the category “the people who have the problem.”

Vice President Joe Biden’s son Beau died a year ago this month of glioblastoma, a nasty nasty brain cancer. For his talk I left the main room and went to a side viewing room so I could record it on my iPad.


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This.

Graphic Recorder's depiction of Lucien Engelen's keynote at the Joule Innovation Forum

Here it is, all in one picture: the future of healthcare. At least a lot of it.

These are the topics Lucien Engelen has been talking about, the concepts he’s been developing, since arriving at Radboud University Medical Center (RUMC) in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. You MUST pay attention to what he’s thinking about, because it’s coming, and most people don’t know it yet. So study that picture.

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New presentation: “Failure to share data – both ways – makes medicine fall short.”

As healthcare progresses, my business is changing: new speech topics, and more advisory projects. This is a two-part video of a new speech last month, at the New England chapter of HIMSS (the big health IT systems society). Finally clients are agreeing that there’s more to talk about than “Dave’s scary cancer story” – most of this speech is information that didn’t exist when I started giving speeches. Predictions are coming true, so new imperatives emerge.

The videos: (Email subscribers, if you can’t see the videos, click the headline to come online.)

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“Knowledge is Power. Power to the people.” (Guest post for Philips Healthcare)

For healthcare to achieve its best,
empower the patient and family.

Here’s a composite of four quote graphics Philips tweeted yesterday for World Cancer Day:

Memes Philips tweeted with links to the post

I’ve had the good fortune to cross paths with Philips Healthcare several times, most recently for a speech (video) at the big RSNA radiology convention in Chicago. I just love what they’re doing in partnership with REshape and Innovation Center at Radboud UMC, where my crazy-amazing friend Lucien Engelen is rapidly creating the future of health and care with Philips and Salesforce.com. Seriously: watch what will come out of that threesome!

So when Philips asked me to do a guest post for yesterday’s global #WorldCancerDay, I said sure. It ran on their blog yesterday.

“Knowledge is Power. Power to the people.”

For healthcare to achieve its best, empower the patient and family.

When social change meets innovation, new things become possible. That’s what’s happening in the patient world, as “participatory medicine” is empowered by patient access to all kinds of useful information.

When the Web was born the term e-patient was coined by “Doc Tom” Ferguson to describe a new kind of patient, no longer in the dark but thoroughly empowered to achieve new things – because they have unprecedented access to information. The idea has matured and deepened, and now, ten years after Ferguson’s death, is coming of age with the signature catch-phrase ‘empowered, engaged, equipped, enabled’.

It’s a moment we should celebrate, because for too long medicine has edged away from the changing landscape of consumer power. Every industry from music to travel to supermarkets has gone digital, sharing knowledge and power and flexibility with their consumers, but medicine has lagged behind: many are not on board, and it’s holding healthcare back.

This is serious stuff: the information revolution has touched my medical life more than once – sometimes in life-saving ways:

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