e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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Getting ornery on social media: What I’m doing in 2019, episode 2

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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Facebook, I’m out. Your irresponsibility with patient groups has gone too far.

I have stopped participating on Facebook.  I’m leaving my account live (so that my post about why I’m leaving is visible), but everything will be shut off as much as possible, and the rest will be ignored. No Messenger, no more posts on my timeline, no notifications, no tagging, etc.

I’ll be spending more time on LinkedIn and Twitter. I hope you’ll follow those pages, or use the Subscribe form on the right side of my blog page.

This isn’t an easy decision because it will be harder to keep in touch with everyone in my life, not least my family (including famous daughter and grandchild) and the many friends I’ve made in my travels. But I’ve decided we must stand up.

The rest of this post explains why; if you don’t need that info, ignore it – but  please keep in touch.

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Rice bytes: best way I’ve seen to understand giga, mega, peta and such

I love anything that makes it easier for people to know what’s going on. Case in point: this tweet yesterday from Twitter friend David Grayson @Sasanof, from the IBM Watson Summit in New Zealand.

You can use this to understand enormous sums of money, too:

$1 = one grain of rice
$1000 = cup of rice
$1 million = 8 bags of rice
$1 billion = 3 trailer trucks of rice
$1 trillion = 2 ocean freighters (3,000 truckloads)
$3 trillion (the US healthcare budget) = 6 ships (9,000 truckloads)

When someone says a health improvement project will save (or cost us) $100 million a year, it’s a lot, but think:

  • The proposed amount is like 800 bags of rice.
  • The US health budget is 9,000 truckloads of rice

Puts it in perspective.

Thanks to @Green_Goddess, Caroline Taylor, CMO of IBM Global Markets, for the visualization, and to @Sasanof for tweeting it. Don’t I love how social media helps ideas spread??

Update next day:

One of my very early blog posts, on my old blog, was on this same subject. March 9, 2009: Comprehending the US healthcare budget. Here are the graphics from that one:

Here’s a million bucks’ worth of $100 bills. (That’s 100 packets of 100 $100 bills; each packet is 1/2″ thick.)

Here’s 100 times as much – a million hundred-dollar bills, $100 million:

Ten of those – a billion:

And a thousand of those – a trillion. Check out the little dude, who’s now in the bottom left corner:

And US healthcare is three times that size.

This helps me, for one, start to comprehend the magnitude of the problem. Something like that does not shrink willingly: lots of people would lose their jobs, including CEOs etc.  That’s why I liken US healthcare to “a tumor that doesn’t know how to stop growing and killing its host.”

Go back up and take a look at the size of one million in this picture. Urk.

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I’m 7! (Well, epatientdave.com is)

Birthday cake photo by pinterest user dnkchavez10
Birthday cake photo by pinterest user dnkchavez10

This is an updated clone of this 2014 post.

It is a time of celebration!

Since creating this domain seven years ago today (2009!) I’ve done:

  • 242 323 speeches
  •  36 52 panels
  •  30 38 policy meetings
  •  68 86 participant in other events
    … that’s 499 events so far, totaling about 150,000 people, in …
  • 213 cities, in
  • 18 20 countries, logging …
  • … around 830,000 air miles

and authored or co-authored:
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A patient to be inducted into the Healthcare Internet Hall of Fame

HIHOF website badge
Click to visit this year’s inductee page

As an activist for the patient movement – a social change movement – I look for and often cite signs of real change in the establishment, documenting that it’s increasingly accepting patient voices as a real part of the future of medicine. Examples:

  • 2011: TEDx Maastricht was the first TED conference to prominently feature patients as its speakers, produced by Radboud University Medical Center (UMC) in the Netherlands

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Notes for @BCPSQC #QualityChat Twitter chat

BCPSQC web logoFor Wednesday’s “#qualitychat” Twitter chat here are a few notes.

A few notes from participants at the February event

  • “The BC Cancer Agency has led a provincial project asking patients for solutions to some of the lower Provincial Cancer Care Patient Experience scores.  It is a project to listen to the patient voice and implement some solutions that came from patients and their families. … [We have been] inspired to come together as a province to have a provincial approach and also, look at solutions that patients suggest. ” Sue Fuller Blamey Corporate Director, Quality & Safety, Provincial Health Services Authority and BC Cancer Agency
  • Let Patients Help “was sent to all Community Engagement Advisory Network members … It is also a resource that we like to share in our day to day work now.” Saori Yamamoto Community Engagement Advisory Network Co-ordinator, Vancouver Coastal Health
  • “It really brought things back to the patient and showed us THEIR perspective on healthcare.  One thing that really stood out for me what the emphasis on including patients as partners in their own care, full members of the care team.  It challenged the all-too-common thinking that they are just unknowing recipients of the care that “the experts” decide is right for them and showed that, not only are many of them intelligent and able to participate in the conversation and decision making, but also (and perhaps more importantly), that they are real partners in it, with as much knowledge and information to share re: the “problem” as anyone else on the team.” From a Quality Improvement Consultant
    • Note how this echos the thinking of the Mayo Clinic’s chief residents in this post

Post-event summaries

In less than an hour, moderator @Kevin4Quality (Kevin Smith) posted the after-event resources!

Thanks again to all for a great event!