I had the great good fortune of being tagged as an ePatient Scholar for the 2013 edition of Stanford Medicine X. That allowed me to sit at the feet – literally, since the ePatients were the mosh-pit for the three day conference plenary stage – of some of the best and brightest minds in healthcare. And guess what? Many of those best/brightest were … PATIENTS. MedicineX (a/k/a MedX and #medx) is the uber Patients Included medical conference. It grew from seeds planted at conferences like Health 2.0 and Patients 2.0, for which seeds-to-beautiful-flowers gardener credit goes to Dr. Larry Chu and his team from Stanford Anesthesiology AIM Lab, who seem to prestidigitate rabbits out of hats without breaking a sweat. Or the hats. Or the rabbits. MedX – in my opinion, at least – trumps every other Patients Included event by not just including patients, but by putting them front and center throughout the program. In fact, I cannot think of a session that I attended that didn’t have someone who was there primarily as a customer of healthcare (commonly called “a patient”) on the platform, presenting or participating in a panel discussion. My ePatient socks were knocked off from jump thanks to the opening keynote by Michael Seres and Marion O’Connor on “The New Engaged Patient,” which was the morning keynote on Friday. Michael uses his blog as his personal health record, up to and through a lifetime battle with Crohn’s disease that led to his becoming the 11th patient to ever receive a bowel transplant, and only the 6th to survive that transplant experience. Michael is hilarious, and Marion is exactly the sort of caring brainiac any patient would like bedside as s/he battled a life-threatening illness. Here’s the video of their session: The rest of the day played out as a firehose of ePatient awesome,…
