Stepping Through a Patient’s Experience with Hypertension: Should It Continue This Way? (Intro)

We recently facilitated an exercise involving a patient, a clinical expert, and interested stakeholders at the California Healthcare Foundation, to look at the way a chronic condition (in this case, high blood pressure) is managed.

Over the next several days on this blog, I will step through our patient’s real story, along with clinical and public health commentary.

I created this cartoon from the exercise, suitable for downloading and discussion (
PDF version can be downloaded using this link
or click on the image directly to see a larger version):


lifecycle-htn-eytan

The cartoon is based on this output of our exercise which began with our patient’s story, clinical commentary, and the creative use of paper:

Patient Experience walkthrough - 1

Feel free to answer the question in the title of the post at any point.

I will explain the meaning of the symbols and the meaning as we go along.

By the way, the exercise resulted in this future state, which I’ll go over on the last day:


Patient Experience walkthrough - 2

Tomorrow: Step 1 – Initial Discovery

Ted Eytan, MD