Image source: healthit.gov
Dave deBronkart stands at the brim of e-patient-physician collaboration. Best known as e-Patient Dave, Dave is a full-time healthcare evangelist with the sole intention of helping physicians and e-patients forge a harmonious relationship through participatory medicine. It’s quite easy for him to familiarize himself with such a heavy calling because he himself has witnessed the criticality of information access and patient-doctor relationship to healthcare delivery and patient outcomes.
Image source: epatientdave.com
In January 2007, Dave was diagnosed with stage 4 kidney cancer with a median survival time of roughly 24 weeks. His diagnosis looked grim and it appeared that only a miracle could help him survive. Fortunately, miracle wasn’t hard to find in the case of the healthcare activist. His primary physician invited him to the annual retreat of the e-Patient Scholars Working Group founded by the late Tom Ferguson MD, a true visionary in participatory medicine. The event introduced Dave to an online cancer-related community in which other cancer patients share stories of hope and survival. The online community gave him contact information of physicians offering high-dosage interleukin treatment which eventually helped him beat the cancer. Since then, he has become active in sharing the story of how he and his doctor collaborated to fight off his terminal disease.
Image source: wikimedia.org
Today, e-Patient Dave tours the world as a keynote speaker, giving lectures on how information access and patient-physician relationship determine care delivery. With each talk, he makes sure that the “e” in the term e-patient is understood beyond its common notion as “electronic” but also as “empowered, engaged, equipped, and enabled” – the descriptors that Ferguson sought to instil in the medical community.
TSI Healthcare shares the same goal as e-Patient Dave. Visit this website to learn about patient empowerment and digital healthcare.
