Human-less Doctors

April 24, 2014April 25, 2014 / Christopher / Leave a comment

I posed this question to the people following the latest Design for Health class I attended at Stanford.

Question to the Twitter audience. How do you feel about the prospect of no longer needing to see a (human) doctor for a diagnosis? #medx

— Chris | Just Talking (@iam_spartacus) April 25, 2014

For me, my diagnosis is already set in stone. I have type 1 diabetes. But for other situations, for other people, would you be comfortable receiving an accurate diagnosis without having to actually see a person?

Sure, Dr. Google is a term we throw around, somewhat in jest, but what if Dr. Google became a reality? What if you didn’t have to speak to a person, sit in a waiting room, fight traffic to make your appointment on time?

What do you think about that?

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You’re Doing It Wrong

March 14, 2014March 17, 2014 / Christopher / 1 Comment

This is a post that discusses an egregious error of a seemly random pitch I received in my inbox. This one strikes close to home as planning for this year’s Medicine X is underway (I’m on the Advisory Board, remember?).

This April, the Cambridge Healthtech Institute and Bio-IT World will put on the second
annual Medical Informatics World Conference. They have an entire track devoted to “Coordinated Patient Care, Engagement, and Empowerment”.

This track will focus on “connected health, remote monitoring, personalized medicine and analytics to improve outcomes”.

Over the two days of the conference, there will be presenters and panels featuring some impressive job titles and backgrounds.

But none of the scheduled speakers are patients. None of the panelists are patients. As far as I can see, this two-day conference featuring a track dedicated to patients will not feature one patient perspective.

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Department of Motor Vehicles

January 17, 2014January 22, 2014 / Christopher / Leave a comment

Yesterday I took a number of steps to complete my move to California including (somehow) passing a driver’s license test, getting a smog test for my car, getting a new registration and license plates for my car, and registering to vote in California.

For as much flack as the DMV can get, the process was rather efficient considering all that could have gone wrong. Sure, it helped that I made an appointment, thus moving up in the priority queue, but the fact remains that everything but the smog test took place in one building. And even then, once completed, the DMV is automatically notified of a passing grade for my car once the smog test is complete.

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(Just Talking) About Medicine X

October 9, 2013October 14, 2013 / Christopher / 1 Comment

Recapping our time at Stanford for Medicine X, I’m joined by fellow diabetes advocate Sara Nicastro. We discuss Sara’s expectations going into the conference and how they compare to my own, having participated last year. Sara lists her some of her top panels and speakers from the weekend. I share the many contributing factors to my high stress level prior to moderating my panel. And we break down some of the controversial statements made by Sonny Vu and explain why a conference like Medicine X is the perfect place to have an open dialog about those types of topics. Oh, and we talk about cats. Enjoy.

For more information about Medicine X, go to medicinex.stanford.edu.

You can follow Sara on Twitter at @saraknic and read her Medicine X write ups at momentsofwonderful.com.

And if that wasn’t enough, I’m writing about Medicine X on my blog at tobesugarfree.com.

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A Consequence of Hypoglycemia.

What good is an incurable disease if you can’t share it with the rest of the world.

Health Care

Human-less Doctors

You’re Doing It Wrong

Department of Motor Vehicles