. Sometimes a little verse goes a longer way. Just in case you want to die in peace:
American Hospital Association Wants to Keep Your Medical Records from you
Inexplicable. Why would the American Hospital Association balk at moving into the 21st century like a batch of other countries’ health systems have done, and get up to speed using electronic patient records? Federal law requires hospitals to continue e-record development and to provide patients with their e-records soon after discharge. Now comes a letter […]
A Small Glimpse into Nurse Overload
Beth Boynton’s short video documents a training session this RN consultant conducted with some nurses exploring the nature and effect of constant interruption on their emotional and cognitive well-being (hint: negative). This is a most important issue. I can tell you that nurse understaffing is one root cause of harm (where “root” means patient-family experience/outcome, […]
Why Do We Buy Off-the-Shelf Dying?
The following is a 750-word op-ed that originally appeared in the Boulder Daily Camera on 4.8.12. At first I didn’t think I could condense a day-long conversation into 1150 words (I mimicked the word count that paid freelance columnists get). I did—but papers really do enforce their word counts for you and me so that […]
“Buyer Beware” Doesn’t Cover Healthcare Purchases
As an experienced patient advocate—I served as medical proxy for each of my parents during their terminal hospitalizations and for my sister during a midlife curative hospitalization—I’m comfortable asking myriad questions in an effort to uncover medical and procedural facts. Since my family tries to act prudently when buying health treatment services, probing questioning is […]
Sleuthing to Control Your Personal Healthcare Costs
e-Patient Dave deBronkart’s blogpost chronicling his ongoing journey to find affordable prices for his healthcare needs is particularly pithy because it begins to untangle the ratsnest otherwise known as “healthcare shopping” today. By “ratsnest” I mean what any of us may encounter when trying to find the best value—that is, price for quality services—when we need […]
Organ Donation and the State of Death
This is a fascinating examination of issues around what it is to be dead, in the context of organ donation and harvesting. Terry Gross’s Fresh Air single-show, successive interviews with author Dick Teresi (The Undead) and transplant surgeon Richard Freeman, MD. Quicker to read but can be listened to. Do it.
RIP Dr. Peter Goodwin, author of Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act
On March 11 2012 Dr. Peter Goodwin ended his life under the law he helped create—the Oregon Death With Dignity Act. A short video interview with him is available here. Self-directed dying, for those diagnosed by several physicians as terminal with 6 months or less to live, offers a peaceful demise to those who are […]
Apple’s iBooks Author Heads-up
This blog post is especially for my fellow patient advocate independent authors. An an author, new distribution platforms interest me. As do new Macintosh/Apple content creation tools, because I’m a Macintosh user since 1987, when I began converting my paper and wax graphic design operation to the desktop. Apple yesterday released a new book authoring […]
The Fourth and Fifth End of Life Trajectories
In 2003 the renowned palliative nurse JoAnn Lynne published a set of 3 graphs. They’re called End of Life Trajectories; you can see them here. They depict how 3 of the primary causes of death in America unfold over time; the Y (up) axis is vitality and the X (across) axis is some amount of […]