Skip to main content
Tag

Community Health

Mar 14 2021
Love0

Covid-19 Testing. Still Complicated.

By Advocate, Clinician, ePatient, Podcasts

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:35 — 24.8MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Email | TuneIn | RSS | More

Following my person-first approach to health, let’s start with people’s circumstances and life flow, put testing into a context of managing the risk of COVID-19. Then let’s tackle what testing even means, what to expect from testing, and then circle back to the person – how do the results impact our circumstances and life flow? Read More

Oct 10 2016
Love0

Community/Technology Partnerships @ Health 2.0

By Advocate, Caregiver, Consumer, ePatient, Informaticist

ribboncutting-icI’m a technology nerd and early adopter while also a profound technology skeptic.  My heart sings when communities of people solve problems that matter to them and theirs and then look for technology partners to automate and share their solutions. By community, I mean partnerships of people at the center of care (people, care partners, clinicians) and neighborhoods, counties and states.

Recently, I spent a few days with big data, technology, entrepreneurs, and healthcare under the big top of  Health 2.0 in Palo Alto. CA – a relatively low-key festival of mostly entrepreneurs trying to sell big data and apps with the edge of worry about engaging patients in their data and products. I felt at home with my advocacy and community browsing new ideas and new uses for technology Read More

Sep 04 2016
Love0

Nowhere We Can’t Get to in an Hour

By Advocate, Family man

In our 30’s we lived in West Virginia – very rural, back-to-the-land hippies, eight miles up a dirt road. We participated in many communities. Our intentional community of families shared 180 acres of land, helped each other build our houses, raised our kids together, home schooled, with some facsimile of farming – garden, bees, fruit trees, chickens. Another community was the town emergency squad where I volunteered as a paramedic and my wife drove the ambulance. Read More

Aug 28 2016
Love0

The Minnow Who Thought He was the Ocean

By Advocate, Caregiver, Clinician, Consumer, ePatient, Leader

Have I written about the Quadruple Aim of healthcare?
1. Improving the patient experience of care,
2. Improving the health of populations,
3. Reducing the per capita cost of health care, and
4. Improving the work life of clinicians and staff.
I live to compete in this quadrathlon. While my focus is the first and fourth – experience of patients and work life of clinicians and staff – the finish line is the second – improving the health of populations. I fear that wild success in experience, cost, and work life might not result in improving the health of populations. Improving the health and well-being of neighborhoods, counties, teens, professional athletes, diabetics, etc. may not be the sum of improving the health of each individual in those populations.

In 2007, I worked for St. Peter’s Recovery Center in Guilderland, NY. My boss, Bob Doherty, had the vision, the foresight, and the stones to engage a whole community to improve the care of persons most disabled by substance abuse.  He convened the homeless shelters, religious communities, law enforcement, social services, ambulance companies, emergency rooms, and other community services to take on this intractable puzzle together. Brilliant! Read More