I will be heading to San Francisco this week to attend the Chronic Disease Care conference sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation. Registration is closed but I promise to take notes on as many panels as possible. Please help me choose from the smorgasbord of topics and I’ll make you a plate.
Activating and Involving Patients: Going Beyond Lip Service vs. Spreading Improvement: After the Innovators/Early Adopters
Patient Voices: Managing Chronic Conditions: Living our Lives (luckily, a stand-alone session)
Care Transitions: Making Care Seamless for Patients vs. Sharing Medical Records with Patients: Why It Supports Better Care vs. Self Management Support: Ways to Make It Work vs. Making the Care Experience Patient Centered: Whose Time Is It? vs. Virtual Outreach Using Everyday Technology
Engaging Diverse Populations in Self Management: Beyond “Cultural Competence” vs. Turning Data into Action: Guiding Improvement Efforts vs. Addressing End of Life Care: Having Meaningful Conversations Across Cultures
My own session will take place on the second day and is titled Emerging Trends: Health 2.0: The Power of Participation. I get to moderate a discussion with Jay Parkinson, MD, of Hello Health; Amy Tenderich of DiabetesMine; and David Williams, MBA, of PatientsLikeMe. Suggestions for questions are welcome!
I know some of these overlap.
1.01 Transforming Care Using Lean Techniques: Stopping to Observe and Listen
1.02 Activating and Involving Patients: Going Beyond Lip Service
12:15 Patient Voices – Managing Chronic Conditions: Living our Lives. (Particularly interested in your thoughts on the patient advisors, here and in other sessions. Are e-patient principles at work? Any potential stories to post?)
1:30 2.02 Care Transitions: Making Care Seamless for Patients. (What do they mean by “seamless”? Do they include minimizing handoff errors? Does it include really conveying who the patient is and all their issues, so the patient family doesn’t have to start over?)
2.06 Making the Care Experience Patient Centered: Whose Time Is It?
Day 2, after lunch: Making Our Care Patient Centered
Thanks for asking –
The first one is a very tough choice. But you may have more interest in “Spreading Improvement: After the Innovators/Early Adopters” because the presenters are not from entities we (or at least me) are used to see at conferences.
For example the California Health Care Safety Net Institute has 3 primary initiatives. “The ‘Improving Chronic Care’ initiative seeks to increase the number of chronic care champions in public hospital systems and to assist these champions in transforming their individual efforts into systemwide change.” This seems very much like an organization who should hear about the budding principles of Participatory Medicine and who could help us formulate better these principles to get faster dissemination of the principles in large health care systems.
The California Quality Collaborative has a Chronic Disease Learning Exchanges program. This one doesn’t look very patient centric and could represent a great opportunity to radically change the mindset of someone:-)
Like everybody else, I’m crazy about Ted Eytan but I think I would choose the other session, “Making Care Seamless for Patients”. 2 reasons.
1. Ted Presentation will probably be similar to what he presented on his blog a while back, and if it is different I’m sure he will let you know what is new in his mindset.
2. The session has 2 “Patient Advisors”. There is much to learn to see how they present what they do (I have no clue). Becuae eventually PM will need to be promoted by anyone who is a patient advisor.
From a purely selfish viewpoint — because I am a beta tester for Zweena, an online record provider, and because I am the record keeper for a cancer patient — I would choose Sharing Medical Records with Patients: Why It Supports Better Care. But I suspect that panel would be preaching to the choir and that Virtual Outreach Using Everyday Technology might have more new ideas.
For the last panel choice, surely the End of Life cultural discussions would be important. Aside from the philosophically sorting out the “right” way to leave this world, there is the financial aspect. Everyone — the insurance companies, the hospitals, the patients, the families — have so much at stake.
To close the loop on this discussion: I ended up being able to attend the Spreading Improvement panel, Patient Voices, Self-Management Support, and Addressing End-of-life Care. All four were fantastic, not least because Caron Lee and her team had recruited patients as well as providers to talk about the issues. And in the case of the last panel, two providers shared their own patient experiences to illustrate how their work is influenced by their own life journeys.
I constantly had the feeling that I was in the best room — until I walked out and heard everyone else saying that, too. There was not a bare spot on the agenda.