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Researcher

Jul 31 2016
Love0

Harmonic Convergence

By Advocate, Caregiver, ePatient, Informaticist, Researcher

Consider the fabric of best health. The Quadruple Aim (Best patient and clinician experience, best population health, reduced cost) is that fabric. The weave of that fabric is information about our personal and collective health and health journeys. The warp is learning and continual improvement.

Quadruple Aim: Improving the patient experience of care, improving the health of populations, reducing the per capita cost of health care, and improving the work life of clinicians and staff.

Health information includes the data in our health records (paper or electronic),  patient generated health data (PGHD) (vital signs, activity, experiences, symptoms, history, etc.), census and community data, and perceptions collected from surveys, focus groups, and chatter.  Learning can be formal and structured as in research and analysis, clinician consultation and advice, education and training, and tests of change as in Plan, Do, Study, Act  (PDSA) or informal as in social and traditional media, child rearing, personal experiments (try something, see how it works, try something else), family, neighborhood, and water-cooler conversations. Read More

Jul 10 2016
Love1

Your Communities Need You!

By Advocate, Caregiver, ePatient, Informaticist, Leader, Researcher

Black Lives Matter! Disability Rights! Women’s Right to Choose! Gimme My DaM Data! Calls to action. In the early 60’s my parents were Fair Housing activists. They were the first whites in Illinois to adopt mixed race children and were the first whites in their all white neighborhood to sell  their house to an African American couple. They successfully invited Martin Luther King to speak in their suburban high school.  In the late 60’s I marched against the Vietnam War, sat in, and became a draft counselor. Now I advocate for people at the center of health care.

What motivates people to advocate for change?  What actions do people take? For my immigrant parents, , the Civil Rights Movement opened their eyes to discrimination in their community. As holocaust survivors they knew discrimination. Some of my heroes in healthcare transformation, such as @CristinLind, @ePatientDave, @ReginaHolliday, Mary Anne Sterling, and @JackWhelan experience the craziness of healthcare. They take political, community, and personal action.

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Jun 19 2016
Love0

AACH: Communication and Relationships

By Advocate, Clinician, ePatient, Researcher

I attended the American Academy of Communication in Healthcare Conference in New Haven. The AACH is the professional home for all committed to improving communication and relationships in healthcare. About 200 people attended from US, Canada, Israel, Brazil, Belgium, Australia. Although most attendees were physicians, I met nurses, therapists, coaches, office managers, patients, sociologists, medical students, and researchers. A couple of very low-key sponsors but no vendors present. A pleasant relief. The conference was designed to maximize interaction, learn from each other, and build skills within work groups and special interest groups. Met several venerable experts. Very open and quite humble: We have a lot to learn. Especially about patient centeredness. Most exciting for me was a presentation by Sharon Schindler Rising, a nurse midwife, talking about Centering Groups – facilitated groups of 6-10 young moms/couples preparing for the impending birth of a child. A wonderful example of people-centered design with participants directing much of the flow of the monthly small groups. Professionals and services came to them. Groups often kept meeting on their own after the children reach one year old, sometimes for 8-10 years. New groups have been starting for decades. Evidence over that time showed significant increase in proportion of pregnancies going to full term and decrease in the proportion of low birth weight babies. One sad piece of the presentation was the description of the barrier caused by the advent of the electronic health record. One participant-generated practice had been for moms and dads to enter their own health data into the paper record: instant empowerment!  Not so with electronic record. People could no longer enter their own data into the health record. Shadow records had to be created. Lord, I was crushed when I heard this. I participated in several subsequent discussions about the infrastructure and skill set that would be needed to spread the Centering Group model to other settings. Instant learning!! Read More

May 15 2016
Love0

A Roller Coaster of Love

By Advocate, Caregiver, Clinician, ePatient, Informaticist, Leader, Researcher

225 weekly blog posts.  How do I do it?, a reader recently asked me. The health journey provides me endless material: fascination, intrigue, tragedy, empathy, frustration, wonder, curiosity, fear, and inspiration. As a nurse I’m blessed to participate in some of people’s most intimate moments as a guide, helper, ear, hand holder, and translator. As a team member and leader I study the puzzle of how people think, emote, decide, and relate trying to get anything done safely and ethically in the most consuming, illogical, nonsensical, complex system imaginable. My palette includes the desire and dilemma of habit change, the tangled web of cultures, the enticing potential and hype of technology, the flood and inaccessibility of data, the vital impossibility of policy change, and the insane contradiction of money surrounding,  driving, tempting, confounding health. Can I tease out the simple and illusive filaments of the magic levers of best health? What works, how do we know? How do we find, share, and use evidence? How is uncertainty communicated, how does information about groups of people relate to me, a single person?  I love sharing my broad and thin knowledge of health as a coach and a writer. As a person on my own health journey, writing this blog stokes my fire – feeding and renewing my pathological optimism. Actually, I start with a nut of an idea, sit down with that idea on Sunday and write. Takes about an hour. I used to read the drafts to my mom, now my wife. It never turns out the way I think it will. The post writes itself. I’m an old hippie – at the end of the day the health journey is a roller coaster of love. Thanks for the ride.  See you next week.

This week my son, Mike Funk, would have been 40. Lord, I miss you, Mike. You still inspire me. You’d be proud of your seasoning family.

May 08 2016
Love0

Clinical Practice Guidelines – Oh My Aching Brain

By Advocate, Caregiver, Clinician, ePatient, Informaticist, Leader, Researcher

Last time I saw my Primary Care Provider I asked if I needed to keep taking my Crestor, a drug to reduce cholesterol. She pulled out the clinical practice guideline for the treatment of blood cholesterol released by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. Every couple of years I ask her the same question. Do I really need this? Does it have long-term side effects I should worry about? I’m 63 years old, when can I stop because I’m too old? With insurance it costs me $300 a year out-of-pocket.

How many clinical practice guidelines are there? I could find no specific count – thousands I’m sure. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)’s National Guideline Clearinghouse lists 1975 guidelines.

Who writes guidelines? What is the evidence to support guidelines? Which guidelines apply to me? How often do guideline writers  rewrite them when new evidence comes to light? How long does it take for people at the center to become aware of guidelines and use them? Read More

Apr 17 2016
Love0

Experiences, experiments, reflection, action

By Advocate, Caregiver, Consumer, ePatient, Leader, Researcher

This week people told me stories about a moment in their health journey – Symptoms, people, relationships, procedures, thresholds, feelings.  Completely fascinating, inspiring, and gut wrenching windows into life’s challenges and tragedies. I heard,  I’m worried, the surgery worked, I can’t find a clinician who listens to me, my condition recurred – worse, my family’s supportive and grieving, how will I manage my job, I fell, my mother went into assisted living  (all from different people). Other people told me about work they’re doing – research, businesses, experiments.  I heard, let me tell you about the study I’ve been doing about multiple sclerosis, I’ve learned a lot about the stages that a person goes through as they gather information about chronic illness, I’m helping people succeed in their startup, I’ve found 5 people who have had the same success managing their chronic fatigue.  I read studies this week about reducing opioid use,  predicting resource use in chronic illness,  and improving the ability of individuals and clinicians to communicate and set mutual health goals.

Actually, this is a normal week. Experiences, experiments, reflection, action. All tie together. Each necessary, none sufficient.

Apr 10 2016
Love0

A caregiver is [not] a caregiver, is [not] a caregiver

By Advocate, Caregiver, Family man, Researcher

When my mother was dying I was a long distance caregiver.  My mom made her own decisions, shared them with us, sought advice from me, asking me to research meds and treatments, wanted help with scheduling, wanted me to attend some of her appointments with her (mostly by phone) and gave me access to her electronic health record. Our family had open and dynamic communication. I was the health coordinator, my older sister helped manage business, my younger sister was her companion. These roles evolved over the years and solidified as our mom declined. Read More

Feb 21 2016
Love0

Not collected? Not studied.

By Advocate, Caregiver, Clinician, Consumer, ePatient, Informaticist, Researcher

What do people consider to be clinical data, when they’re not wearing the hat of clinician, academic, researcher, insurer or EHR vendor? We can all agree that pulse, weight, diagnosis, procedure, medication are all clinical data. But what about data that answers questions like:

  • What does feeling worse (or better) look like?
  • What works for me when I’m in pain (or scared)?
  • Where will I sleep tonight?
  • Are my kids safe? Am I?
  • Am I treated with respect?
  • Do I understand what doctors and nurses say to me?
  • Where do I go when I have a question or I forget what I’ve been told?
  • How do I get food from the grocery store?
  • How much can I afford out-of-pocket for my medicine?
  • What are the most important things in my life, for my future, for my health?
  • Can I live with this amount of pain or discomfort or indignity?
  • Do I have access to a computer or a phone?

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Feb 14 2016
Love0

What’s Pokeman Got to Do With It?

By Advocate, Caregiver, Clinician, ePatient, Family man, Informaticist, Leader, Researcher

I went to a meeting in Chinatown attended by parents with children on the autism spectrum going to Boston Public Schools. The attendees spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, English, and Bureaucrat-ese. The parents helped each other advocate for services for their kids. Most only spoke one of those languages. After 2-3 minutes of speaking in one language, someone would raise their hand and there was cross-translation by the 2 or 3 people who spoke more than one language.  This repeated for about an hour.  I went home and my 7-year-old grandson tried to teach me to play Pokémon.  I understood less than I did in Chinatown.  Opa, you don’t understand this at all!! Read More

Jan 17 2016
Love1

Learning from What Doesn’t Work

By Advocate, Caregiver, ePatient, Leader, Researcher

Notice how young kids learn to walk. Try, fail, try again, over and over until they get it right. On the other end of the continuum are politicians accusing each other of changing their minds. Dragging up statements from years ago to slap each other with a change in direction. When did they lose their ability to be proud of learning? When did voters start expecting politicians not to learn, recognize failure, and try something else? I don’t understand this. I once said I would never get married, I would never have kids. Now I’ve been married for 40 years and have a fabulous family. I learned much since my ignorant adolescent days. Living successfully with chronic illness requires trying, failing, getting up again and trying something else. Diagnosis depends on testing, trying a treatment, measuring its success or failure, and repeating the cycle until something works to decrease suffering. The tragedies are when trying never leads to a better life, or the team stops trying. Research faces a similar dilemma. Supposedly research tests hypotheses. One treatment or approach works better than another. Yet peer-reviewed journals publish articles that prove the hypothesis and doesn’t publish articles that disproves the hypothesis. What is this bias? I know that I have learned more from my mistakes than my successes. What if I couldn’t recognize a mistake or a failure and kept sticking with it? Thank God I can shift and try something else. I’m more skeptical when th change is degeneration of values. Less empathy, more fear, less generosity, more cruelty. I could appreciate more empathy, less fear, more generosity, less cruelty. Let’s honor rapid discovery of and learning from mistakes and courage to try something else. Let’s learn from those kids.

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