Tomorrow

On November 26, 2013 I arrived in the city of Saskatoon in the province Saskatchewan, Canada.  It was close to midnight when I passed through security.  The agent looked at my passport and asked about my business in Canada.  I told her I was speaking at the university.  She asked for proof.  I was taken aback as I have never had to prove what I was doing before on a speaking engagement.  I responded, “Are you asking to see my speaker’s contract?” She smiled a tight smile and said, “Yes, unless you want to come with me to the back office.”  Fortunately, I print out my speaker’s contracts and take them with me on trips.  So I handed over the correct papers.

Then she noticed I had declared that I had tools with me.  She asked what type of tools.  I responded paintbrushes, as I am an artist. She looked at me. 

“I thought you were a speaker, “ she said.  I said, “I am both.”  She asked if I would paint while in Canada.” I told her yes.  She then said, “You won’t be leaving any paintings in this country will you?”  I responded,  “No.” I usually leave paintings where I create them; but I could see discretion was the better part of valor in this situation.

So now it is February and I am preparing to mail a painting to the Academic Health Sciences Network at the College of Health Sciences in Saskatoon.  My contact asked me to explain the painting entitled: “Tomorrow.”

At most venues, I get to listen to other speakers and I paint about their words and the thoughts of the audience members.  At this event it was a pre-conference day and I was the only speaker.  So I set up in the hallway outside of the university library.  I began to paint on a gallery jacket to bide my time until the students spoke to me.   After painting for a while in silence, the custodial staff came over.  They asked some great questions and I told them about patient empowerment.  The students mostly walked by. They occasionally shared shy smiles and quickly averted their eyes. 

I have painted in pathways and hallways in South Korea, the United States and Australia.  It usually takes folks a while to walk up and start asking questions.  In Saskatoon, I spent most of my hours in the hallway alone.

So I painted the hallway.  I painted it with rapid brushstrokes as though life itself is zipping by.  I painted the snowy expanse outside.  There is little difference between the snowy ground and snowy sky.  I painted myself painting. 

Then I added the janitor who spoke to me.  He stands indistinct with one hand clenched and the other holding a mop.

Finally, I added the scholar behind me diploma in hand. She stands where I cannot see her.  The wind of the corridor whips at her hair and robe.  Her cap has been blown away. She firmly grasps her diploma high above her head, as if to say: “My eye was on the prize. I never lost sight of the goal.”

The scholar is based upon the twitter stream.

I tweeted my dismay that no one was stopping to talk to me.  One student tweeted back saying I should not judge so harshly.  She had seen me painting but did not want to interrupt.

I later spoke before a room filled with students and faculty.  Many people tweeted to the hashtag #sahsn13 that day, quite a few were professors, medical providers and patient advocates.  I even got to see a dear twitter friend @bonnycastle live tweet in person. Thanks to @symplur you can still see those tweets.  I looked up all the handles that were tweeting and it looks like only two students tweeted to the hashtag.  Only two students shared their thoughts publically with wider world during this opportunity.

So if this painting can tell you one thing let it be: Please interrupt!  Please speak out to the world that wants to speak with you.  Please set aside raised hands and patient waiting and embrace your voice.  Life is passing by so quickly.

Before you know it, it will be Tomorrow. 

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. 

Attack of the Living Meme

The Holliday family had a great Halloween this year.  When my late husband Fred was alive, we had so much fun with this holiday.  I always made our costumes and they were very creative, complex and based upon a family theme.  There was an Egyptian year, a Marvel year and of course a Halloween theme around Doctor Who.  We would trick or treat down the avenue by the toy store where I worked as a happy family.

Then Fred died and it was so hard to enjoy Halloween.

I would do my best to sew costumes with a large hole in my heart.  Last year I even missed trick or treating with the kids as I flew cross-country to give a speech in Oregon.  But this year Halloween was great!  Our theme was internet memes.  6-year-old Isaac was a TNT block from Minecraft, 14-year-old Freddie was a creepypasta known as Slenderman and I was “Binders full of Women.”

I wore one of my speaking outfits that is reminiscent of a 1940’s cigarette girl.  I created a carry tray of binders.  People asked me if the binders were full of women. I said, “Yes. Each binder was full of the profiles of women who are SpeakerLink speakers and major voices in Health Information Technology.”  Binders Full Of Women was a very popular costume idea this year, but I was excited to wear it because of an exchange on Twitter.

Many of you are aware that the hashtag #BindersFullofWomen became very popular on twitter on October 16^th.  The next day I was tweeting from a conference in South Dakota, when I noticed that the mHealth summit in Washington, DC was promoting their keynote speaker line up.  I attended and enjoyed mHealth 2011 so I was following their posts closely.  I saw pictures of six men who were delivering keynotes, and not one woman.

So I tweeted, "Do not see any Women or Patient keynote speakers at @HIMSS @mhealthsummit mhealthsummit.org #mhealth #bindersfullofwomen #mhs12"

A conversation began about this issue on twitter between Neil Versel and I.  Very soon after Richard Scarfo, Vice President of Vender Events at HIMSS Media was messaging me.  He wanted to talk about my tweet.  We had a phone conversation about the seeming lack of women and/or patient speakers.  He told me they had reached out to many women but all of them declined for some reason or another.  He told me the schedule was not final and they were still looking for women speakers and would consider my recommendations for patient speakers as well.  I told Rich how happy I was that he had responded.  I told him about speakerlink.  Then I sent him profiles of several very strong women speakers who were patients, caregivers and focused on mHealth.

Soon I was able to tweet the good news.  The folks at HIMSS and mHealth were working with me and using @Speakerlink to ensure a greater balance in speakers.

From the profiles I sent Rich, he reached out to the MaryAnne Sterling, a local advocate well versed in elder care and patient data access.   

He also contacted Donna Cryer who is Patient in Chief to the oldest and largest advocacy organization focused on needs of those living with liver disease and she has a strong background in HIT.

They both agreed to speak and will present on Tuesday, December 4^th, at the mHealthSummit held at the Gaylord Hotel right outside of Washington, DC.  I hope you can attend December 3-5, 2012 and hear their wonderful presentations.  Thank you Rich for responding to a tweet and making the world a better place!  And for helping me have a very Happy Halloween!