The progeny of the iPhone and the iPad will change the shape of your institution — and your balance sheet.
One of the more striking images, to me, out of the online spew in the last few months was from the inauguration. It was a wide view of an inaugural ball. There was the president waltzing with the first lady, and a crowd of several hundred watching them. What was striking …
Medical apps: We are approaching the tipping point
Dear mobile health app developers,
We—patients and caregivers—need your help to reduce the demands of self care. Mobile health (mHealth) apps have enormous potential to lessen our burdens. But our needs are often only loosely related to what clinicians and/or the evidence expect us to do. Most mobile app developers have ignored this fact by designing tools that primarily reflect the imperatives of …
What patients want from mobile apps
An excerpt from Pet Goats and Pap Smears.
Phoning isn’t an option. Nor is e-mail. So I write a letter to the head elder, asking that the Amish community meet with me. He agrees.
Today is the day. I accompany Steve, the hospital CEO, to an Upper Midwest town so tiny that the post office is inside the grocery store. On the third floor of a local bank, we …
The first meeting with a group of Amish patients
Be empowered. Get informed. Be engaged. Get involved. We’re exhorted to help make our medical decisions, to speak up, to ask questions, to say how we feel. But if we’re going to get the hang of being engaged patients, we could use a way to practice our role in the privacy of our own homes.
Well, read on my fellow patient. I give …
Practice being an engaged patient: Choose your own adventure
A presentation to patients is an excellent tool to communicate your message. However, the material must be presented in an effective and powerful manner. These tips will help you deliver dazzling presentations.
1. Know your audience. Sounds obvious, but unfortunately I have seen many presentations delivered to patient groups that were full of medical jargon and complex slides. Think about how people speak …
7 tips to improve your patient presentations
Everyone knows that life in the ER is fast-faced, extremely busy, and ever-challenging. When things get crazy, it becomes habit for busy physicians to see patients as “the chest pain in room 6” or “the broken wrist in the hallway.” We turn people with their amazing lives and fascinating stories into a nameless number and a “chief complaint”.
It’s a practice that’s easy to justify—after all, taking a long …
Embrace the gift that our patients are giving us
As we embark on our cancer journey, writing can be a way to help us understand, work out issues, and help us accept and come to terms with our fate. The wide variety of blogs and discussion fora, whether religious or secular in outlook, optimistic or pessimistic in tone, medical or emotional in emphasis, all reflect the richness of our individual lives, circumstances and perspectives.
My cancer journey was no different. …
The evolution of writing during a cancer journey
Suffering from chronic pain or illness—or, as is often the case, both—can feel like a full-time job. One reason for this is that we must constantly assess and evaluate if we’re managing our health and our relationships as skillfully as possible. This ongoing decision making makes up a major part of the workload in this full-time job—a position we certainly never applied …
Being chronically ill or in pain can feel like a full-time job
The link to a recent article in Forbes magazine entitled, “Why Rating Your Doctor is Bad for Your Health” keeps showing up in my inbox with the subject, “thought you would find this interesting.” The reason is because I’m responsible for overseeing education and training related to physician communication and patient satisfaction for a large national hospitalist practice.
The article isn’t so much interesting as it is unfortunate. Its …
Is the goal of patient satisfaction to make patients happy?
There’s been a lot of talk over the last year or so about the benefits (and some drawbacks) of physicians using social media. Social media use by physicians has become so widespread here in Canada that the Canadian Medical Association has actually developed guidelines to help physicians understand the rules of engagement on the web. But while there has been a lot of attention paid to physicians and social media, …
3 reasons why patients should use social media
Wikipedia defines patient portals as “… healthcare-related online applications that allow patients to interact and communicate with their healthcare providers. Some patient portal applications exist as stand-alone websites and sell their services to healthcare providers. Other portal applications are integrated into the existing web site of a healthcare provider. Still others are modules added onto an existing electronic medical record system. What all of these services …
Do patient portals increase patient engagement?
”Email is the killer app of patient portals.”
I heard a variation of that quote when interviewing people for the patient-provider communication chapter of the book I’ve been co-editing and writing for HIMSS with Jan Oldenburg, Brad Tritle and Kate Christensen. For the organizations who’ve pushed patient portals the furthest into their patient base, email is always the place where things started. In other words, email is the gateway drug for …
How secure messaging and email benefit patients and improve outcomes
I am a cystic fibrosis (CF) patient with a complex medical history that either intrigues or intimidates medical providers. At 40, I’ve dealt with a lifetime of progressive lung disease, gastrointestinal complications and other later onset issues from CF such as osteopenia, diabetes and bowel cancer. I often joke that the recessive CF gene that my identical twin sister and I inherited from our Japanese mother and German father is …
Organ recipients need strong partnerships with their doctors
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The Affordable Care Act comes with the promise of a dramatic overhaul in what many see as a broken health care system. It promotes the potential for “better all around” – better care, easier access to hospitals, and affordable treatment. It also comes with a price. For one reason or another, the turbulence within the American health care system is causing doctors to shut down, downsizing or sell their practices …
Your doctor has sold his practice: 6 tips for patients
Most of us would agree that doctors should not treat patients without their consent, except in special cases like emergency care for an unconscious patient. It’s not enough for doctors to ask “Is it OK with you if I do this?” They should get informed consent from patients who understand the facts, the odds of success, and the risk/benefit ratio of treatments. The ethical principle of autonomy requires that they …
Patients have trouble giving true informed consent
Each of us wears many different “hats” throughout the course of the day. We are an employee, a wife, a father, a club member, a consumer and so on. It comes as no surprise that our thinking, what we say, and how we say it at any particular time coincides with the hat we are wearing at that moment. The thing about these “hats” or roles is that they come …
When patients are socialized into the sick role
A guest column by the American Medical Association, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
When health plans have merged, they’ve said that a bigger insurance company would drive down premiums. The casual acceptance of this economic fallacy led to more than a decade of unchecked megamergers that helped health plans cement dominant market positions across the country.
It’s now clear that when health insurers talk …
AMA: Patients are vulnerable to health plan monopoly power
Recently, millions of people around the world witnessed a remarkable feat. Daredevil Felix Baumgartner rose to remarkable heights in a capsule tethered to a helium filled balloon. At approximately 128,100 ft (24 miles) and a speed in excess of mach one (faster than sound), he leapt from his capsule and endured a free fall of 119,846 feet. At one point in the dive, he began to spin dangerously …
Heroics in medicine involve both a team and an empowered patient
The other day I landed on the website of 23andMe. To my surprise, I learned that if I wanted to send the company a sample of my DNA, I’d have to swear under penalty of law neither to collect my sample nor mail it from New York State. That’s because New York State requires a laboratory license and direct interaction with a physician for mail order DNA testing.
New York, it …
DTC genetic tests and the wilds of personal medical information
It is not an easy time to be a physician in the United States. Attempt to order an expensive test for a patient and an insurance company is likely to second guess your decision. Try upholding the bottom line for your medical practice and the government will probably start questioning whether you are overcharging for your services. To make matters worse, …
Don’t overwhelm patients with unnecessary detail
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