The quote in the title is from Susan Daniels, PhD, who I was fortunate to serve on a panel at the Consumer Health Informatics Symposium, on the topic of Consumer Health Informatics for Diverse Populations. Susan has extensive experience working with disabled individuals, and spoke eloquently about the needs of the disabled population, beyond managing health, to managing disability determinations, which are critical. I like the statement because it speaks the importance of patient, family, and community involvement in health care and health services.

The image displayed here is from another impressive demonstration, by David Williams from patientslikeme.com. I really liked the feature where patients can document the doses of drugs they are actually taking for various conditions.

There currently isn’t an area dealing with cardiovascular disease, but I would be really interested in an area focusing here, especially when it comes to anti-hypertensives. What if we could have a real sense, across a population, of how well certain drugs work and how long they take to take effect? It is one of those things in primary care where it’s a little unclear exactly when a blood pressure drug will have an impact for a specific patient.

From The Mission of Southwest Airlines. I flew Southwest from Oakland to Ontario yesterday, and I was impressed with the CEO’s apology in the Spirit magazine about recent events concerning Southwest’s maintenance policy. I was reminded of the mission of Southwest, which I admire so much, specifically the second part.

The Mission of Southwest Airlines

The mission of Southwest Airlines is dedication to the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit.

To Our Employees

We are committed to provide our Employees a stable work environment with equal opportunity for learning and personal growth. Creativity and innovation are encouraged for improving the effectiveness of Southwest Airlines. Above all, Employees will be provided the same concern, respect, and caring attitude within the organization that they are expected to share externally with every Southwest Customer.

January 1988

April 5th through April 8th:

• Headzoo » WP Anti-Wares - Now it looks like we have to worry about insecure wordpress themes, too.
• Electronic Prevention - washingtonpost.com - Nice writeup of the New York PCIP program. What the writer doesn’t realize, is that a patient portal is coming, so a visit isn’t always going to be required….
• Jack and Suzy Welch: Leader vs. Manager - ‘We’d wager it only comes into play when you don’t want to offend an employee who crosses t’s and dots i’s but couldn’t excite a busload of kids bound for Disney World. In such a case, what do you say? You got it. “You’re a good manager.”‘
• Generation Y’s Bad Rap - It’s not really that bad, according to Jack Welch. I agree.
• The National Physicians Alliance encourages all doctors to join our Unbranded Doctor Campaign — a national network of physicians committed to reducing the influence of pharmaceutical marketing on our profession. - NPA appears to be a grown up version of AMSA. They include consumers in their governance
• Macworld | Mac OS X Hints | Add more power to 10.5’s screen sharing - Economical screen sharing alternatives using Leopard
• Total Value, Total Return: Invest in Health Management Programs -
• Office 2004 for Mac Solution Center - Office 2004 downloads for Mac. Time to upgrade

Who wouldn’t want to be in a meeting with this billboard slogan staring at you through the plate glass. In Oakland, California.

I am in the great state of California this week, talking about self-management and thinking about the next generation of patient access applications at the Consumer Health Informatics Symposium, in Claremont, California.

As part of the journey, I got to meet Neil Sofian, MSPH the Director of Behavioral Interventions for Resolution Health. Neil’s a believer in the power of social networking, and has extensive experience applying social networking tools to different patient populations, as well as in corporate health applications. In the discussion of next generation of patient self-management tools, I think we both agree that this is a trend to be nurtured and brought closer into our health systems.

Beyond this discussion, I was impressed by the fact that Neil uses the patient portal operated by Group Health to manage his own health, and told me of his experience accessing his lab test results (which he gave me permission to write about here). What he is able to do is get his test results posted to his secure web site, so he’s able to contact his doctor about values that are out of range with the knowledge of what the values are. The impressive part is that at times, he has reviewed these values before his doctor because the system is set up to give the patient nearly the same access as the doctor does. He said that when he lets her know about the results, she listens and works with him to interpret them. It doesn’t sound like a big deal that he has seen them first in some cases.

This is what we envisioned 3 years ago when we decided to share most lab results, even those, out of reference range, with patient online, at almost the same time as the physician gets them in the electronic health record (Actually, there’s a 24 hour delay). We wanted patients to be involved and engaged in their care, and doctors to support this by being where the patient wanted them to be.

I love it.