One of the most remarkable people I’ve met this year is Dave deBronkart, better
known as ePatient Dave (fourth from left on top of the e-Patients.net blog). Dave has had a remarkable recovery from cancer and has probably used as many Health 2.0 tools as any patient.His blog is here.
I got the chance this week to talk at length with Dave and his GP Danny Sands. Danny is not only a practicing doctor in the BIDMC system in (Boston, yes that one with the blogging CEO and blogging CIO!) but also the Director of Medical Informatics for Cisco (FD, Cisco is a Health 2.0 sponsor and I’ve done consulting work for them in the past).
We covered a lot of ground in this conversation—starting with Dave’s illness, Danny’s role as a physician working with a very savvy patient, and the role of ACOR. But then we moved onto some critical questions about who will control the patient experience in the future in a world of Health 2.0 and what providers, patients and physicians need to do to prepare for it.
A fascinating conversation recorded via Cisco’s Webex technology that you can listen to here.
PS Dave asked me, what the most important issue raised in this interview was. I said "who is going to perform the function you performed for yourself for people who
don’t grab the bull by the horns the way you did? Because apparently it won’t be the Danny’s or
the BIDMCs of the world"
Categories: Matthew Holt
e-Patient Dave gave a guest lecture to my Online Consumer Health course at Tufts University School of Medicine and provided personal insights as well as a view on the role and value of physician-patient partnerships. He was fantastic and my students learned a lot from him, as did I.
So, Matthew, I didn’t get clear what you meant by “apparently it won’t be the Danny’s or the BIDMCs of the world.” What did you mean?
When Danny and I told a different angle of the story at Connected Health, the conclusions slide for docs said “Embrace knowledge symmetry,” and so did the one for patients. Danny also said that a key role docs can play is to guide & train the pt on how to use Web resources well, not get suckered, etc. That’s empowering – it’s the difference between saying “It’s dangerous out there” and saying “Be careful out there – here’s how.”
If providers act that way, it *would* be done by the BIDMCs and Dannys of the world, n’est-ce pas?
…Nice: as I was writing this, instinct called me to Twitter, where I found that a few minutes ago @timoreilly tweeted: “Info asymmetries work as long as only one side understands power of tool.”