After a year of work in partnership with the University of Minnesota School of Nursing, I’m thrilled to announce that my first commercial, professional continuing education course is live:

Patient Engagement
in Health Information

An online C.N.E. course
at the University of Minnesota
School of Nursing

Register here.

From the course web page:

Target Audience:
Healthcare team members interested in learning to plan for and implement supportive actions for patient engagement and activation through the use of health information technology (IT).

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Updated a year later with different video link.
Today I turn 64.  So let me introduce to you the act you’ve known for all these years: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, performing “When I’m 64”:

Notes about the song:

• When the song finishes, the rest of the album will play – stop it if you wish. See also the playlist, at bottom.

• If you don’t know the song’s history, you must read it on Wikipedia. Did you know Paul started it as a teen, and the song features a clarinet trio?

Happy birthday(?)

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I have such conflicted feelings about this. Another brother’s death, as the circle of life continues. It. Just. Feels. Wrong.

Having survived my own near-death seven years ago, I celebrate being alive whenever I can. So it hit me like bricks last May when my younger brother Steve died, and again in December when my best friend Dorron died. These were the first unexpected deaths I’ve ever experienced close to me.

And they were both eight years younger than me. Incomprehensible. It just doesn’t make sense, a life ending with eight years less experience??

And then two days ago I learned that another brother, Ken, age 62, has died unexpectedly. So now our six siblings are down to four.

I just freakin’ don’t know how to process this. I don’t like it, I’m not rational, of course it’s not rational, it grabs the brain at a far more primitive level than logic can ever address.  I’m rereading my post about Steve’s death, and boy is it on target. Death has been around a lot longer than human thought has, and it’s apparent to me that we as social creatures are constituted to not like it, and get upset when one of our tribe disappears.

Ken, like Steve, smoked and drank. Nothing like having some public health statistics step up and kick you in the face.

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Update two hours later: this is fixed. See the resolution and further thoughts in the comments.

This seems to me to be a great example of a process that wasn’t designed reliably, so all kinds of things could be done per the plan yet the result still didn’t work. I’d like to work with them to define a better process. (We need to have the same approach to system failures in healthcare!)
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By the end of this weekend things should be back to normal, but right now links to this site’s pages are broken.  The site is mangled due to a bad migration of my site to web hosting company BlueHost.com. (I’m naming them because every step I took was as directed by them, and because their techs assured me this wouldn’t happen.)

Specifically, the home page URL www.epatientdave.com is working, but the links to pages within the site are broken. So, for instance:
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