An Empowered Patient!
WE WANT YOU! to enter your story for the 2015 Patient Voice Impact Award. The Patient Voice Institute (PVI) and the Leapfrog Group are honoring impactful patient stories, with a top prize of $1,000 and a trip to the award ceremony in Washington, DC. Please share your health care experience here.
The premise? How much more effective the patient voice can be if we channel our impact.
Everyone has a story to tell about health care: a friend’s diagnosis; a question we didn’t ask; a helpful nurse; a surgery gone bad; a “miracle” cure; a bill that leaves us scratching our heads. We end up sharing our medical experiences with whoever will listen. Unfortunately, most of our families and Facebook friends, however sympathetic and well-meaning, can’t alter policy, or make it better for the next person.
We love those providers, payers and systems that work well with us (you know who you are!), but frankly, there aren’t enough of you. In our search to find you, or make sense of our encounters with others in your world, we can easily become lost, intimidated, frustrated, exhausted, and sometimes, hurt. It baffles us that, considering our many talented medical practitioners, state-of-the-art technologies, best intentions, and the fact we’re spending boatloads of money, medical harm remains the nation’s third-leading cause of death. We read that our country’s medical outcomes lag behind those of similar nations, and don’t get it. We’re saddened to hear that clinicians are burning out, and leaving the profession. It tells us you must want things to change, too.
Fortunately, new trends offer new opportunity. With consumers paying more for our care, using new online tools to check for cost and quality, and a burgeoning array of patient-friendly products and services to choose from, we patients are beginning to flex our nascent muscles as rightful drivers in the ecosystem of health care. The story-gathering platform offered by PVI gives patients an unprecedented opportunity to speak through a common megaphone.
PVI’s pledge is to build a searchable database that can be mined for truth and trends by industry, education, policy makers, researchers, social services and the public. We know truths can be uncomfortable, and change can be hard on those who like things “the way they are”. But the patient voice is only destined to gain strength and impact. Everyone will have a choice to make: to embrace this new Superhero…or stockpile the Kryptonite.
Here’s to all of us using our Superpowers for the good of generations to come.
