Innovation

March 1, 2018 By e-Patient Dave 2 Comments

We must democratize healthcare.

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:

Medicine can save incredibly more lives today than ever (evidenced by the extraordinary growth in elder population in my birthday post “65!”)
Yet we still have terrible shortfalls: we have sewage leaks in operating rooms; we have medical errors causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US every year; and much more.

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June 1, 2017 By e-Patient Dave 3 Comments

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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April 7, 2017 By e-Patient Dave Leave a Comment

From theory to bedside: how paradigms affect practice

One of my best collaborators through the years has been editor Susan Carr. She “gets it” and always has, and she has the very special set of traits of a good editor-in-chief: she knows what her readers will value and she knows how to guide an article idea through the development process.

Both traits are essential help for an activist (like me) who wants to help people see things differently. To do that work, you can’t stand outside a conversation and throw rocks at it – you have to get inside and understand the conversation, see things as they do, and then point out from their perspective a new way of looking at things.

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August 4, 2016 By e-Patient Dave 2 Comments

Big steps forward for my client Antidote (née TrialReach)

In September 2016 TrialReach rebranded itself Antidote, to shift focus away from the “solution” (the clinical trial), focusing instead on the patient’s need: “I have a problem, and I need an antidote.”

For the past several years my business has been diversifying – in addition to speeches, workshops and policy meetings, I’ve spent an increasing amount of time as an advisor to startups. One of my favorite clients, the most successful so far, is TrialReach, about which I’ve written before, when they raised another round of financing in 2015, and this year on their blog, reporting on Vice President Biden’s extraordinary speech about his son Beau’s cancer death last year, particularly the family’s search for information that might have saved Beau’s life.

In Beau’s case it was not to be: his glioblastoma is a nasty form of brain cancer. Yet still, Biden spoke of the several ways the doctors’ and families’ efforts to try everything possible were frustrated by factors in academic medicine and publishing that hindered the flow of information.

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June 11, 2016 By e-Patient Dave 8 Comments

#2016ADA day 1: incredible interview with “artificial pancreas” creators Dana and Scott

If you can’t see the video above, click to watch it on Vimeo.

One of my favorite sayings about digital health is “When assets digitize, things change fast.” The point is that once information (or anything else, even fonts) goes digital it can suddenly be hundreds of times faster to develop new things. In health and care, a special kind of liberation becomes possible: if the person who has the problem can suddenly invent things, what becomes possible?

I’m at my first-ever diabetes convention, the American Diabetes Association’s 76th annual Scientific Sessions. I’ve written before about @DanaMLewis and husband @ScottLeibrand of OpenAPS.org, the open-source Open Artificial Pancreas System project. (Most recent was this on this site “When assets digitize, things change fast”: the #OpenAPS do-it-yourself pancreas and this amazing speech last month on e-patients.net.)

Did you know it’s not unusual for a basically health person with diabetes to die in their sleep? I never heard that until I got to know people in the DOC (diabetes online community). (Amazing what happens when you talk to the person who has the problem, eh?) That’s why I want awareness of what diabetes is, and awareness of this amazing project, to spread way beyond the usual diabetes community.

So early in this interview I ask Dana to briefly explain what the pancreas does, why it does it, and what goes wrong if it doesn’t work, which (I assure you) will lead you to understand why people with this disease might say “WeAreNotWaiting.” (If you don’t know that phrase, google it.)

Dana flashes her pocket pancreas while husband Scott grins.

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June 7, 2016 By e-Patient Dave 13 Comments

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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