Archive for the ‘positive patterns’ Category

Hand Hygiene Saves Lives: video for hospitals to show newly admitted patients

September 2, 2010 · Filed Under positive patterns, trends & principles · Comment

At last weekend’s MITSS patient safety workshop, some of us remarked out loud that it would be great to have a simple video teaching newly admitted hospital patients the importance of hand washing, and even showing them how to speak up to a staff person who doesn’t wash before touching.

Well, seek and ye shall find: this just arrived via Twitter, forwarded to us by Susan Carr, editor of Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality magazine. From the good people at CDC:

I especially love that they posted (at http://www.cdc.gov/CDCTV/HandHygiene) all sorts of ways to use this resource: the embeddable code for the video, downloadable versions of the video file, a PDF transcript, and an overdubbed Spanish version (with Spanish transcript).

Hey hospitals – let us know when you’ve made this (or an equivalent) available to your patients!

“Are You Safe?” patient safety awareness video

August 28, 2010 · Filed Under Why PM, e-pts resources, positive patterns, pt/doc co-care · 4 Comments

Today I’m participating in a workshop, “Engaging Minority Communities in Safer Healthcare,” organized by MITSS (Medically Induced Trauma Support Services), a Boston non-profit I’ve written about before.

The current speaker is Lisa O’Connor, VP of Nursing at Boston Medical Center. She just showed this four minute safety awareness video, produced by Quantros. Much of its content will be familiar to our readers here (the frequency of medical errors and hospital acquired infections), but I’m posting it here because of its good, concrete, specific actions every patient should know. That part starts around 2:30. (My highlights below.)

“How to become a more effective e-patient” (and clinician): lecture at Duke by Dr. Charles Smith

August 19, 2010 · Filed Under Why PM, key people, net-friendly docs, positive patterns, pt/doc co-care · 6 Comments

Well, here’s a treat: Dr. Charles Smith, a founder of the Society for Participatory Medicine, recently gave a lecture at Duke titled “How to Become a More Effective e-Patient.” Here it is, in four YouTube segments.

“Charlie,” as we all call him, is a wonderful guy. He’s co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Participatory Medicine and was Doc Tom Ferguson’s physician. He’s been walking this walk for many years, and here he shares his personal advice – not just for patients but for health professionals who want to learn this participatory thing.

(The “Joe & Terry” he mentions are our founders Joe and Terry Graedon of People’s Pharmacy, longtime Duke associates.)

An audio-only version is at bottom. Here are the videos.

Part 1

Read more

Must-hear: four Journal of Participatory Medicine contributors discuss how we know what we know

August 7, 2010 · Filed Under Why PM, positive patterns, pt/doc co-care, reforming hc, research issues, understanding statistics · 6 Comments

Last night I got word of an unexpected treat: an hour-long conversation between some real experts about participatory medicine. It’s on Andrew Schorr’s Patient Power site – he and his team are powerhouses as well, and they produced a special hour-long audio program. I encourage you to start playing it like a radio program, as four authorities discuss the nature of evidence and how we know what we (think we) know. Click the headline to go there:

Participatory Evidence: Opportunities & Threats

From the site’s description:
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In medicine, evidence separates modern scientific treatment from Folk Art. Medical evidence is acquired through observation, experimentation, and information sharing in scientific peer-reviewed journals. When new treatments are used, millions of patients around the world provide additional evidence for what works and what doesn’t. Read more

Why Victor Montori joined the Society for Participatory Medicine

August 3, 2010 · Filed Under Why I joined, Why PM, key people, net-friendly docs, positive patterns, pt/doc co-care, reforming hc · 8 Comments

Next in our “Why I Joined” series is Victor Montori, MD of the Mayo Clinic. My wife and I met him in May; he’s high energy, with boundless optimism. And as you’ll see, he feels very strongly about patients being at the center of healthcare.

The civil rights movement has not finished its job. In the list of people who are routinely oppressed today we find patients. I have come to understand that physicians, and I am one, oppress patients not willingly, not deliberately, not intentionally. Oppression of patients is also the result of actions by healthcare administrators, payers, pharma, device manufacturers, and governments, perhaps often unwillingly. At its simplest, oppression (and coercion, and injustice) results from patients staying in the dark about their own health state, their available options and the relative merits of each, the extent to which services can flexibly meet their needs, and the extent to which uncertainty, ignorance, and impotence remain part and parcel of modern medicine. Read more

We’re quoted in PBS Newshour online

August 3, 2010 · Filed Under found on the net, positive patterns, reforming hc, trends & principles · Comment

Our Susannah Fox (and her research) are quoted in a piece yesterday on PBS Newshour’s online edition about the HealthCare.gov insurance research site. There’s also a small quote from me.

Why Mark Boguski joined the Society for Participatory Medicine

July 25, 2010 · Filed Under Why I joined, Why PM, general, medical records, net-friendly docs, positive patterns, reforming hc · 3 Comments

Next in our series, Mark Boguski, MD, PhD is both a personal and a corporate member, as co-founder with Dr. Alan Littleford of ResoundingHealth. If you’d like to submit your own reason, write to me. (This is not an “invitation only” series – that wouldn’t be like us! When a member submits, we put it in the queue.)

Why did I join the Society for Participatory Medicine? Because of its potential as a catalyst for epochal change in our healthcare ecosystem. Read more

Moving the mountain: Producing evidence and results on methods for better care

July 21, 2010 · Filed Under policy issues, positive patterns, reforming hc · 6 Comments

I ran across a graphic today that warmed my heart:

Recognize that agenda? (Click to enlarge if you want more clarity.) Sure is a lot of what we’ve discussed.

Pie in the sky, tough hill to climb, nice idea but not feasible, right? Wrong. Thursday I’m at a quarterly meeting a group that’s already making this happen. They’ve got demonstration projects, measurable results, tests of different payment models, the whole nine yards. They’ve been working on it for five years, and I don’t understand why none of the better-health-minded people I talk to have ever heard of the group.

It’s the Read more

Dear White House: The Personal Data Challenge

July 20, 2010 · Filed Under e-pts resources, medical records, policy issues, positive patterns, pt/doc co-care, reforming hc · 18 Comments

Gary Wolf of Wired has posted a whizbang write-up that came out of a whirlwind one-hour 12-way Skype chat about personal health data. Sound frenetic? It was. (I participated. It was, well, 12-way.)

I can’t imagine how to model what happened, except to say that it was wired.

It grew out of a request from the people at the Community Health Data Initiative, which (as we reported here last month) is opening vast amounts of HHS data for innovators to get at. (And innovators are doing so, fast, as that post describes.) Here’s how Gary started his write-up: Read more

HHS posts Consumer e-Health job. Apply by 8/16.

July 15, 2010 · Filed Under key people, positive patterns, pts as teachers, reforming hc, trends & principles · 6 Comments

Josh Seidman, Director of Meaningful Use, sent this. It’s for a two year full time job in DC, possibly extendable. No relocation costs will be paid – you’re on yer own. :–)

From what I hear, talking to people working in HHS these days, “full time” is an understatement. Don’t apply for this unless you want to work like a maniac for a long time. But those same people say they love it: change is happening!
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Please send the message far and wide that ONC is looking for the very best consumer e-health person out there to work on the most exciting work imaginable. Let me know if you have any suggestions or questions.

The Office of Policy & Planning’s consumer e-health job posting has just gone public.

It is open for 30 days, from 7/15 – 8/16.

Please spread the word.

External Hire Posting here. Same listing for existing govt employees here.

A project of the