I've been reading the book "The Art of Empowerment" and have found it to be completely in-line with my beliefs on patient "education": With ongoing, lifestyle-related disease (e.g. diabetes, CHF), the key to successful control is a system which enables you to care for yourself the way that works best for you (with, of course, knowledge about how your choices affect your health outcomes). Perhaps we should be asking patients what barriers they see to being able to care for themselves the way they would like to - and putting effort into removing (or at least changing the system to minimize) those barriers. Just a thought.. inspired by the book.

Nancy has wonderfully summarized actions as recommended by this book.

2:50:17 PM     comment []   Google It!  

Here's a link to the paper version of the Care Plan as it is scheduled to go out for July. I'll add more links here once I track down the specification files.

The Web Services crew is getting a bit antsy about the amount of work that will be required to establish the electronic shared care plan. In particular, what appears to be holding things up at the moment is a lack of specifications from the users: questions like "What will the process be for creating and handing out passwords?", "Who will decide who has access to a given patient care plan?", "How will identity of the patient be verified?", "Are there varying levels of access? and, if so, who decides/assigns these levels?"... lots of process-type questions that must be responded to, probably from members of the participating clinics and "visionaries" with the patient perspective from the project.

I'll be meeting with Jayson Olsen in an attempt to identify more specifically what issues need to be addressed early on. If you know someone who may be able to respond to some of these sorts of concerns, please refer them to me for input -- we hope to develop some basic specifications Thursday afternoon.

2:45:41 PM     comment []   Google It!