Best Practices Every Medical Conference Should Embrace

(I rarely do a list post, but could not help myself today (blame it on my daily reading of @Cracked…)

I often attend medical conferences and hear about the best practices applied within medicine, but I rarely hear about best practices applied to the medical conference itself.  In a world of often shrinking budgets and limited bandwidth, we must choose carefully which conferences we should attend.  Embracing some of the suggestions below can make an event a must attend inspirational and renewing moment in our lives and careers.

1.     The standing table, lounging chair and the walking meeting

I recently returned from a wonderful roundtable discussion on clinical trials in Indianapolis.  We had great conversations about open data and patient participation.  The only bad part of the meeting was the back pain I began to suffer after sitting for a few hours.  I am among the ever-growing group of people who work at standing desks.  So staying seated is a special kind of agony.  Fortunately, I am also without a modicum of decorum and had access to my huge suitcase, so I made a standing table MacGyver style during the meeting.       

Some conferences already provide standing tables around the back of the room and I say kudos to you!  Health 2.0 is one, but if you know of others please give them a shout out in the comments section.

On the flip side of the coin of attendee comfort is the lounging couch.  As we invite more and more patients to medical conferences it behooves us to remember, many attendees are listening while in pain.  I applaud the all the conferences that offer a cool down or comfort room where attendees can recline.  But sadly, such rooms rarely have access to the content feed of the live sessions that are ongoing.  Medicine X is the first conference I have attended that offered lounging couches to any who needed to rest while taking part in the live event.   It was rather epic to see that level of inclusion.

Another great addition to the conference venue is the walking meeting.  My friend Ted Eytan, MD introduced me to this gem.  Don't feel your conference has to be contained within four walls.  Go "on the lam" in a official capacity and have some of your breakout sessions outside while walking.  It is incredibly refreshing!  

2.     Inviting e-Patient Scholars and Patient Advocates

The ePatient movement is really expanding.  More and more patients are taking a hand in their own medical futures and helping shape health policy.   Their questions during Q&A sessions often change the direction of the conversation of the conference itself. Their keynotes and panel speeches help other attendees to express their own personal health stories.  Many of these patients and advocates have very strong social media profiles and their live-tweeting of events has exposed conference conversations to the wider world.  Look no further than Medicine X to see the enormous potential of e-Patients to spread the content of a conference.  

“But where do I find such e-Patients?” I often hear in response. Well @speakerlink is a great place to start looking for potential attendees and speakers.  Another avenue is participation in online discussion groups on Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn.  The future in medicine is "Patients Included." 

3.     You must list your #hashtag on Symplur

I can talk about the power of twitter to spread your conference message until I am blue in the face, but without analytics to support my point it is only so much hot air.  Thank you Symplur Hashtag project for providing proof of the power of conversations.  For free.  I ask conference managers to please to list their conference hashtag on Symplur.  Symplur will archive those tweets for easy access and provide  analysis of the day.  Your data will add to the ever-greater haul of big data available for analysis to determine trends within healthcare. If you do this prior to your conference it is a great tool for pre-promotion.  (If you wait till the day of the event attendees like myself will often do it for you, but don’t count on that as a back-up plan)  

It is a win/win situation.   Now all those ePatients can tweet and spread the conversation and you have proof of the level of spread.  You just have to focus on how to fund those e-Patient Scholars.

4.     Crowdfunding at the Medical Conference

Hosting a medical conference is expensive.   It is somewhat terrifying to know you have to come with thousands of dollars to make your vision of a conference a reality.  Even a conference run on a bare bones budget will cost about 25K.  Sponsors are great if you can get them (thank you Cerner!) and a well established conference often can.  For the rest of us crowdfunding is a godsend.  I personally have worked with both @medstartr and @Healthtechhatch for crowdunding in the conference world.  We focused the crowdfunding effort on travel and lodging scholarships for e-Patient scholars.  Working in partnership with a non-profit in line with our conference mission was a great help in securing funds.  

But the power of crowdfunding attendance to enable participation in continuing medical education is not limited to conference organizers.   E-Patient scholars and patient advocates should consider this route to cover their participation expenses in health conferences and classes that do not offer sufficient scholarship options.  A proof of concept is our dear friend @AfternoonNapper who has done so much for the role of the patient in the world of medicine.

5.     Traitwise surveys are the way to go.

So how many of you look at that after-conference response survey in your email in box and whoop with joy?  I bet very few of you do, unless it is a @Traitwise survey.   Not only does Traitwise have a pleasing graphic interface and font selection not reminiscent of the early 1990’s, their surveys are fun.  They keep you in the loop and informed on how your response fits into the greater data set of the conference.  And after you complete your conference survey, you can keep going, filling out survey after survey for the good of mankind.  One of my fellow e-Patients did exactly that after the Partnership with Patients conference.  They broke the record for most answers in one session with over a thousand.  (Another reason you should invite e-Patients: We are very giving people.)

6.     Teach attendees how to live-tweet

One of my favorite quotations is probably misattributed to Sen. McCarthy:  “Beware of Artists they mix with all classes of society and are therefore the most dangerous.”  Yeah, artists specialize in mixing it up, but to do that they need a forum. 

Nowadays Twitter is that forum, for artists and everyone else.

If you are running a medical conference for the good of your attendees and the wider world of medicine, you have several goals.  You want to break even.  You want people to have an enjoyable time.  But most of all, you want people to walk away inspired to make this world a better place.  In healthcare, many individuals feel they do not have a voice in policy discussions.  I am not just talking patients here.   I have spoken to a great many doctors and nurses who feel like they have worked to make a better system for 20 years without sufficient progress.  They are discouraged and feel alone.  I challenge all of you conference planners to get them live-tweeting, to help them realize there are hundreds, even thousands who think as they do. 

I have attended two conferences wherein the conference planners designed an entire webinar around teaching attendees how to live-tweet.  One of these events offered a webinar and 1-800 number support to walk attendees through the entire process.  The conference organizer

offered raffle items at the event that attendees who live-tweeted were eligible to win.  So many new twitter voices joined a wider conversation due the efforts of one conference planner. 

Do you want your conference to live beyond the after-conference survey?  Do want your attendees to act upon the content they absorbed?  Then help them tweet; help them discover the voice they always had.

Remember, online the Q&A never has to end and the microphone is accessible to everyone. 

Reporting out from #CHC13

The opening day of the Cerner conference was a wonderful day!

I was honored to meet with Ross Martin, MD from AMIA and member of The Walking Gallery for a quick breakfast.  He told me about the speech that he delivered on Saturday.  I was happy to hear about it as I noticed the twitter stream blew up with positive feedback.  Ross wove technology together with his family patient story in an inspiring presentation that they will talk about at Cerner for years to come.

At lunchtime I met with the wonderful Matt Dunn who often tweets from the Cerner handle.  We had a wide-ranging conversation that covered children’s literature, professional organizations and the future of health informatics. 

As the day progressed, I saw more and more tweets using the conference hashtag: #CHC13.  At 4:15 I met Brian Carter from Cerner and a fellow member of the Walking Gallery.  We headed over to the convention center to sit among the hundreds gathered to hear four visionary keynotes.

Daphne Bascom introduced the night’s speakers and set the inspiring tone of the session as she used the conference motto: “It starts with me.” She reminded us anyone could be a change agent.  Our first speaker was Sajjad Yacoob, MD Chief Medical Information officer of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.  Sajjid mentioned how it was very important to think about system design goals long before you ever involve a vender. He also emphasized focusing on the baby in the bed rather than the tech in the cloud.

Next up was Brian Yeaman, MD Chief Medical Informatics Officer from Norman Regional Health System in Oklahoma.  I was pretty excited to hear him speak as I grew up in Oklahoma and most my family still resides in the state.  He reported out the success of the state Health Information Exchange using the new moniker “Global Medical Record.”  I think that is rather a catchy title. He also spoke to us about the tornadoes that caused such havoc this past year.  He explained how their hospital’s electronic health records coupled with the ease of data exchange allowed for providers to better care for patients in the aftermath.

Next up was Jonathan Bickel, MD Director of Clinical Research Informatics, Boston Children’s Hospital.  Dr. Bickel explained the power of algorithms to predict the paths of hurricanes and discover patients suffering from domestic abuse.  He also pointed out the data set available for EMR use was better than clinical trial data as the data pool was far more diverse.

The last speaker was the amazing Rebecca Onie, co-founder and CEO of Health Leads.  I had the honor of seeing Rebecca present at TedMed in 2012.  She is a big proponent of addressing root causes that make patients suffer.  If a patient needs food to address a state of malnutrition then food should be able to be prescribed.  If a patient is returning to the ED due to asthma attacks brought on by a cockroach infestation in the home, the health system should be able to help remove the pests that are causing the root problem.  I love Rebecca.  She is my kind of disruptor.

That was the first day of the Cerner Conference and I was so glad to be there.           

Returning to Cerner

Returning to Cerner

In a little less than a week, I will return to Kansas City to attend the Cerner Health Conference 2013.  It has been a year since my last visit when Cerner hosted the Partnership with Patients conference.  People in the wider world of patient advocacy are still talking about that amazing event.  For one weekend last September, Cerner’s educational building became a social media hub and epatient epicenter.  We even trended on twitter in Kansas City.  It was the kind of event that stirred hearts and minds.   

This year I will do something very different at Cerner.

I will not paint.

I will not speak.

I will not moderate sessions of a patient conference.

Instead, I will blog and live tweet.  I, who have so long endorsed social media as a powerful voice in and of itself, will stick my courage to the testing place and prove that the online voice is just as powerful as any orator.  Cerner is paying me as a keynote speaker, but my stage will be the internet.

I look forward to seeing old friends and hearing new thoughts.  I look forward to returning to the company that gave me my first speech with listening ears and a questioning mind.  I shall tweet to @Cerner and with the hashtag #CHC13 and spread the word about innovation and new products in Kansas City.  I will report debate.  I will bring with me the questions that I hear at so many conferences regarding EMR systems.  I will listen eagerly for answers, for I have never regretted attending a Cerner event.  I cherish the knowledge I have gained while listening to those so willing to teach me when I was just known as Regina, the widow of Fred Holliday.  Now I may be known as Regina the founder of the Walking Gallery, but I will listen to the wisdom of the staff at Cerner.  Cerner invites patients to sit at their table.  I can think of few venders who can claim the same.

Now, I must admit it will be quite odd for me to sit back and focus just on writing when traditionally I do two or three things at once.  But I think that this event will be an exciting one as things are rapidly changing in electronic health records as the measures of Meaningful Use march forward.

Cerner Health Conference 2013 takes place October 6-9^th and I will be there on the 6^th and 7^th.  Due to a prior commitment I can stay no longer than those days, but I am sure that those hours will be sufficient to report out current Cerner projects.  Happily, I will be able to chirp in with follow-up questions while on the road as @cerner is one of the most responsive corporate twitter accounts within health care.

So dear friends and faithful readers, wish me luck, and follow me on twitter as I explain HIT content and health policy from Kansas City.    

   

#MergeLive

If you visit the corporate offices of Merge in Chicago you will see a well designed space with a touch of candy.  You will see modern tech next to vintage video games.  As wandered around their offices I made the connection, “Oh, I have been in your booth at trade shows!!! You have the candy and the games!  You are the ones that just offer a space to eat and play rather than the hard sell.”

I wondered aloud if they understood the feeling they were evoking in attendees.  Patient or provider, we were once all children.  We once had very little freedom and very little money.  When we infrequently had the freedom and opportunity to spend what little we had our choice was usually between video games or candy. 

So within Merge, a company that specializes in the exchange of digital medical images, we are reminded of the freedom and choice of youth and to choose wisely.

I feel like I attended the Merge conference twice because of the novel way the event was created. 

I flew to Chicago and on August 5^th presented a keynote speech in front of the Merge internal staff.  My speech was filmed and edited to include the slides. Then the speech was presented during #Mergelive via live stream on August 13^th.

Now if you follow my work, you know I paint the conferences I attend.  This was the first time I live-painted a live-stream.  I painted throughout the morning while listening to the other speakers. 

I heard about the Merge Honeycomb Image Sharing and pondered the deep symbolism within that image.  Merge works with radiology departments to quickly and securely transmit images.  This is a big deal for patients.  All too often over-testing can occur when images are not quickly made available within the care environment.  Patients are exposed to additional radiation through unnecessary tests without timely access to such data. 

If we are watching for the first signs of radiation harm, we need look no farther then the bees. 

So within the painting #MergeLive I painted honeybees upon the honeycomb.  I placed a patient in the center.  Her back is to the viewer as she ponders her few coins and looks upon candy machines.  These machines rest upon the spiral of a DNA double helix. 


To our patient’s right a series of video games are displayed with names like Cerner, Surescripts and Epic.  Here is the background service provider the patient does not see; but these venders are a large part of making image access a reality.

After my speech was streamed, I took part in a 40 minute QandA in the internal chat network.  I also tried to tweet as well.  There were very few people tweeting and that made me somewhat sad.   The reason given was many of their facilities blocked social media sites.  So I tweeted:

This caused a rousing debate on privacy and security vs. sharing in the internal chat.  I think a lot of the IT folks did not know what to think of me and my e-patient brethren.  How could we assign such low value to keeping our data private?

I wish all of my twitter friends could see the comments back and forth upon that topic, but it was a private chat.

I enjoyed #MergeLive, but next year I hope they jettison the internal chat and embrace the hashtag. 

Let’s open up, let’s share and let’s do that publically.

The Walking Wall

Did you know that you could help patients by purchasing an art book?  For every copy sold of The Walking Wall: 73 Cents to the Walking Gallery $10 is donated to the PatientTravel Fund of the Society for Participatory Medicine a 501c3 non-profit.

Yep.  10 dollars.  Now you might not think ten dollars is a lot, but it is all the proceeds on the book after costs are covered.  HISA (Health Informatics Society of Australia) published the book with additional help from the Cerner Corporation.  I wrote the text and created the art depicted in the book.  We make no profit from it.  We want those funds to go to the society so patients will be able to attend more conferences and events.  

This book was the wonderful idea of Louise Schaper, CEO of HISA. When she asked me where I would like to donate the proceeds, I told her I could think of no better choice than The Society for Participatory Medicine.

The book begins by explaining the mural 73 Cents and then shows the story jackets of 40 amazing people who have dedicated their lives to helping others.

You will see the stories of:

Jen McCabe, Lygeia Ricciardi, Cindy Throop, Valarie Barnes, Danielle Cass, Susannah Fox, Amy Romano, Christine Kraft, Keith Boone, John O’Brien, Lindsey Hoggle

Clay Patterson, Kait B. Roe, Brian Ahier, Richard Payne,  Paulo Machado, Helen Haskell, Louise Schaper, Dave DeBronkart, Eunita Winkey, Mary Anne Sterling,

Andre Blackman, Craig Lipset,, Kathi  Apostolidis, David Harlow, Alex Albin, David Collins, Sherry Reynolds, Tiffany Peterson, Ben Miller, Jenny Pettit, Wendy Sue Swanson, Ted Eytan, Marsha Goodman, Trisha Torrey, Kathy Nicholls, Matthew Holt, Wen Dombrowski, David Lee Scher

These are only 40 members of The Walking Gallery of healthcare.  There are currently 195 members walking around the world wearing patient stories painted on their back.  I hope there are future books to come that highlight the work of these other wonderful individuals.  Meanwhile, I will keep blogging about them.

The book is a lovely full color book and retails in the US for $40.00 plus shipping. By my count there are 260 books currently at the US distributor.  If all of those books are purchased, The Society for Participatory Medicine would receive $2,600.00 for patient travel!

That would be a lovely gift to the Society this holiday season.

Cerner on September 11th

I often paint at medical conferences in the back of ballrooms or on the exhibition floor.  When I was painting at the HISA conference in Australia, a lovely woman came over to my easel.  She looked at my work and noticed I was painting in the Cerner booth.  She told me she had a story she wanted share with me about a Cerner conference she attended many years before.  That story was so powerful I asked if I could paint it on her jacket so she could join The Walking Gallery.  She said yes.

This is “The Right Thing” a jacket for Lissa.

On September 11^th, 2001 Lissa was at a Cerner health conference in Kansas City entitled “Crossing the Chasm.”  It was a typical conference day and sessions began early.  Doctors and nurses from all over the US were there.  As the morning progressed word spread through the room that something horrible had happened in New York.  Caregivers from the New York area began to call airlines trying to fly back to help.  Quickly they and the folks at Cerner found out all flights were grounded. 

Then the leadership at Cerner contacted a bus company and chartered buses to drive attendees back to New York.  They announced that the buses would be there soon and anyone who wanted to get back could return home in this fashion. 

Next they must decide what to do.  The room was full of attendees and there were speakers prepared to speak; yet at the same moment tragedy was unfolding.  Cerner decided the conference must continue so they set up a screen showing the Twin Towers as speakers spoke of crossing the quality chasm.

Can you imagine that?  Right beside a speaker addressing the future of medicine and the chasm in care, a building burned and lives were extinguished in real time.  This was such a powerful moment.  This is the heart of the matter.  When we talk of death at medical conferences it is often hidden behind statistics and bar charts and does not have the visceral impact of life destroyed before our very eyes.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of hearing Clay Patterson from Cerner speak as part of a vender panel at HHS.  He did not tell us about the newest module available on a Cerner system.  He told us about the challenging care and poor communication his family experienced before his grandmother’s death.

In less than two weeks Cerner will again host a conference in Kansas City in September.  It will be the Partnership with Patients Summit.  We will meet there and discuss the chasm of care with doctors, venders, nurses and patients.  And I hope to see some of you there.  I hope to hold you in my arms and remember all of those we have lost.

People have asked me, “How did you get Cerner to host this?”  I responded, “I asked and they said yes.”  It was the right thing to do.

Cinder Blocks and Patient Summits

When I was a child I went to an elementary school that had few resources.  In fifth grade our class was donated a large amount of books.  We were very pleased to have them, but we had no bookshelves on which to place them.  My teacher was very enterprising though, and she contacted the local lumberyard and requested they donate some two by fours and cinder blocks so we could make shelves.  The lumberyard manger said yes with one caveat, we would have to pick up the supplies.

That year our fifth grade class had a field trip.  

We left the school as a class with our strong backs and eager minds. We walked to the lumberyard.  Some of us grabbed the two by fours, some of us cinder blocks and some us combined the two to make a carry yoke for two students to heft.   We walked those blocks all the way back to school and up three flights of stairs.  Then we assembled those shelves and placed the books upon them.  We stood back and looked proudly at our work.  I cannot believe there was a class anywhere else in the entire nation who cherished their bookshelves as much as we did ours.

We loved those shelves because we overcame adversity and made that which we needed.  It wasn't pretty, it wasn’t perfect, but it was ours.

Recently, I wrote Pecking Order, a post recounting a webinar call on May 22nd between patients, a contracted PR firm and CMS officials.  The call was supposed to be a collaborative webinar session replacing an in person patient summit due to severe restrictions on federal travel. Sadly during the call patients did not have much time to speak. That changed an hour and a half in, when I spoke out. The patients took over the call and spoke about our views on the CMS funded initiative Partnership for Patients. 

It became a call to action.    

In the 22 days hence we have done quite a bit.

On May 22 we grabbed the domain name for Partnership with Patients and began the facebook group.  At this point there are over 300 members in the facebook group from every field of healthcare: patients, nurses, programmers, doctors, venders, transcriptionists and lawyers.

On May 23^rd I posted Pecking Order.

On Thursday May 24^th I spoke with Kathleen Siedlecki on the phone.  I encouraged her and her team to attend Mark Scrimshire’s Healthcamp on June 4^th in DC.  

On Friday May 25^th I spoke to Dennis Wagner, co-director of the Partnership for Patients Initiative.  He apologized about the direction the webinar had taken.  He also said he would be joining the Walking Gallery.  I told Dennis we planned to crowd source patient ideas for how to best promote this patient safety agenda.  We scheduled a meeting with the P4P team at CMS offices on June 13th.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Kathy Nicholls, CMT, AHDI-F, Certified Inbound Marketing Professional, was hard at work volunteering her time to build the Partnership With Patients Web Page.  We bounced emails back all weekend.  I also spoke with advocates such as Helen Haskell and Julia Hallisy by phone.  Many of the advocates like Martin Hatlie, Pat Mastors and Amy Berman, that were part of the original call emailed back and forth throughout this time and in a spirit of sharing I looped the whole PR team into the email thread.  I got Out of Office replies from them all.

It was a holiday weekend, but for many advocates this is more than a job, it is a mission that we ply 24-7.

By May 31^st the Partnership with Patients webpage was up.

Friday June 1st, Kathleen Siedlecki, who ran the P4P webinar call, visited the mural 73cents. I heard about the constraints both she and the government work within.  More than ever, I appreciated the freedom of being an independent advocate that collaborates with others.

Saturday, June 2nd, I spoke with Chuck Denham, MD from TMIT and Jeni Dingman, patient advocate about this new collaboration.

June 3rd -6^th, Lori Nerbonne and Lisa Morrise would attend the IPFCC (Institute for Patient and Family Centered Care) Conference. And crowd source thoughts there.

Monday June 4^th, During the HealthcampDC we created a collaborative dialog in real-time and designed a session on the spot talking about Partnership with Patients and Partnership for Patients.  Kathleen Siedlecki attended, as did many advocates. Attendees included Ted Eytan MD, Whitney Zatzkin, Greg Masters, Kait B. Roe, Susan Hull RN,  Fred Trotter,  Kristen Andrews, Robin Miles-McLean, Tiffany Peterson and Pat Salber MD.

We were trying to build a grass roots strategy aligned with CMS and ONC goals ideally within one week.  We wanted to inspire regular folk to join the movement, like Robin Miles-McLean who jumped in feet first. Gregg Masters spoke about videos that could engage.  We spoke about connecting communities and connecting forces.  We spoke about sharing info on up coming events, as we did not know when meetings and conferences were being held both locally and nationally.

Fred Trotter told us about his focus on writing software for patients that reduced medical error.  We spoke about bringing the e-patient community into this dialog.  Susan Hull shared her experience of sitting on airplane ride beside a mother of 2 kids with cystic fibrosis, the mother had the marvelous idea she should administer drugs at the hospital and receive education she could carry home.

We spoke about creating a patient safety poster series for placing hospitals that are visually stimulating and not patronizing.  These posters could be images donated by artists.  We also could create a competition; young children could enter and receive a prize for best posters that support the Partnership for Patients initiative.  We acknowledged that many patients do not know their rights or safe practices within a hospital setting. We also spoke about QR code hijacking and other edgy ways to get the message across.

1-800 number for healthcare harm was an idea that was very well liked by the group.  We also wondered if that could be used to create a database of regional healthcare harm.  We talked about the potential of viral twitter attacks on hospitals with reports of harm, yet are not responding to those they injure.

We talked about the power of Engage with Grace.  We also talked about Honoring Choices programming from PBS coming out of Minnesota and Gunderson Lutheran’s amazing compliance with Advance Directives.

We spoke about a board certification in patient safety that is now available and wondered if any patient had taken the course.   We also spoke about SpeakerLink.org and the importance of including patients as paid speakers.  We spoke about the Plantree model of care and IHI open school and how that applies to this movement.  We finished up focusing on a photo resource that would show real pictures of patient care.  That has already begun on flickr, but it needs to be on Pinterest as well.

From that discussion and prior phone discussions with other advocates, I created this power point that was presented before CMS: Partnership for Patients meeting yesterday.

Partnership with patients

View more presentations from Regina Holliday

It was well received.

Dennis Wagner said he could see that some of these suggestions were immediately doable.  He said the next slide set he designed would have no stock photography within it, only crowd-sourced real pictures.  He would visit our flickr page and learn more.

The CMS team re-iterated that they did not believe the next meeting would be an in person one and it would need to be webinar again.  I then specified they must try to open it up to more people, so they should create a twitter hashtag so many more voices can be part of this discussion.  Kathleen thanked me for coming to the meeting and said she really enjoyed hearing our strong voice in this space.

I also announced that we were creating our own Partnership With Patients Summit in Kansas City September 21-23, 2012.  I spoke with Clay Patterson and Amy Burgess at Cerner and the folks at Cerner have approved hosting us in their continuing educational facility on the Riverfront property and former address of Sam’s Town Casino in North Kansas City.  


I loved that facility when I visited it one year ago. Think Kaiser Permanente Center for Total Health, but even cooler, with more neon lighting, a town square and some music from Tron.  Some of the Cerner team looked at me quizzically when I told them how much I loved the space, they said, “You do know this is just an old failed casino, right?” 

But I see with new eyes.  I see it with the eyes that saw cinder blocks become bookshelves. 

I see what can be without old prejudice.  When I look at Cerner I don’t see an old legacy EMR system.  I see a future cloud/ legacy composite that could save lives.  I see one company among many, many companies willing to collaborate with patients.  I see what amazing things we can accomplish if we all work together and shoulder this task.  I see a space where we can come together and educate patient speakers about HIT, patient safety and health policy.  I see the potential of helping 200 new patients advocates as the next generation of e-Patient Dave’s, Trisha Torrey’s and Regina Holliday’s.

So here it is the ask:  Who will take up their cinderblock and follow me? Register here.