Patients For a Moment: The Recipe

I'm a day late sharing this, but Patients for a Moment, a blog carnival written by and about patients, is a good place to visit every other Wednesday. This week it's hosted at The Single Gal's Guide to Rheumatoid Arthritis.

Last week I saw Francis Collins, of The Human Genome Project and NIH fame, quoted in a tweet. I like what I think he said, so I'm passing it along:

"If you want to find a cure for cancer, you don't need to research just cancer. The answers may come from somewhere else."

I took this to mean that non-linear approaches to problem-solving have merit. Being something of a non-linear queen myself, I thought this was a good reason to share something wonderful that came from this approach. It's my recipe for The Best Meatloaf You Will Ever Eat. A bit off of the "patient safety" message, for sure, but since I'm giving a nod to the gathering of patients here, I think some comfort food may be in order.

To begin:

• Purchase more whole wheat buns and white bagels than you mean to. Just before they reach the consistency of refrigerator missiles, freeze them. Some weeks later, defrost them, cut them into cubes the size of a die, and toast them in a 350 degree oven until they are mostly done.
• Use about 1/2 in a recipe, then place the remainder in a medium sized Gladware container, seal tightly and cure on the kitchen counter for 2 days.

Shop for:

• About 1 lb of ground pork. Mine had a "Reduced for quick sale" sticker, but this is optional. (If you don't eat pork, I'm sure that another ground meat product will taste just as good. If your meat doesn't have much fat, add an extra egg)
• About 1 lb of ground turkey

Make sure you have:

• 1 egg
• some fresh Italian parsley from your garden, your neighbor's garden, a farmer's market, a food co-op, or from where I rescued mine: the bottom drawer of your refrigerator. Chop it pretty fine.
• 1 small small, single-serving size cup of horseradish in sour cream sauce (usually served along with prime rib). My little container was leftover from take-out my son refused to eat last weekend.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees

Wash you hands really well. Place all of these things, in no particular order, into a good sized mixing bowl, then mix thoroughly. Form into a nice oblong loaf, trying not to let the ends of the loaf be too much narrower than the midsection.

Place the loaf on a cookie sheet you couldn't really afford but felt obligated to buy because you really like the person who was hosting the party. Remember that the cookie sheet turned out to be a really reliable product and remind yourself to say "yes," the next time you're invited to another party. Bake for 60 minutes. Cut the meatloaf in half, and it will be nearly done, juices flowing. Let it stay in the oven for 5 minutes longer if you like it a little drier or take it out and let it rest for 5 minutes.

Slice, serve, and enjoy!

Blog carnivals & car dating

I'm always on the lookout for stories, research, and information that says something about where we are in the quest to attain the IOM's "Big 6." (That would be healthcare that's safe, effective, timely, efficient, patient-centered, and equitable). This makes me something of a cheap date since pretty much everything about healthcare worth reading is going to take on at least one of these things.

So I screen a bit harder on the second date, looking for ideas and experiences that I find authentic and those that push me to reflect on these issues in a deeper way. Blog carnivals provide the "Readers Digest" version of what bloggers have written over the past week or so. Sometimes carnival hosts ask for posts on a particular topic, others just ask authors submit their favorites. I've found blog carnivals are a good place to go on a second date.

Here are two that published this week: Grand Rounds and Patients for a Moment. If you go, you'll find front line clinicians and patients telling stories about how the rubber meets the road in healthcare. They're authentic and, if you're like me, you'll probably find some that push you to think more about what, and why, you believe what you do about healthcare reform.

Patients for a Moment: The cupcake edition

Check out the 5th edition of Patients for a Moment, the bi-weekly blogging carnival by, for, and about patients. You'll find insightful posts, shared by people who have first-hand experience with what's good, bad, and ugly about healthcare.

Here's the post the caused me to look up the correct use of ROTFLMAO: How'd she die? Duncan Cross gets Flo's over-achiever award this week because he managed to pack good, bad, and ugly all in one post!

Americans have been visible in town halls this week sharing, and in some cases shouting, their positions on healthcare insurance reform. I've been surprised that we haven't seen or heard much from business people, like folks in the US auto industry. This would be a good time for a reminder about what happens when an enterprise spends more to insure its workers and retirees than it spends on the raw materials needed to make a car (or a cupcake). And then has to compete in the global economy.

More than a moment for patients

The third edition of Patients for a Moment is up at Duncan Cross' place. I get fresh insight every time I visit patient blogs and wonder if the healthcare system wouldn't improve if every single blogger shared their most recent experience about being a patient. I have a working title for a post I'm going to write called, If I didn't give birth to you, resist the urge to call me "Mom."

I learned this week about Twitter's potential to provide aggregate data that could be useful in disease management and research. (The majority of people I know still think Twitter is for people who care whether Ashton Kusher buys one or two ply toilet paper.)

In addition to providing real-time information about the bathroom habits of the stars, Twitter could help inform "nature versus nurture" issues. Say you have a child with a difficult-to-manage-and-treat condition, like autism. A condition that could be influenced by things like weather, season, age, stress, medications, exposure to certain foods, chemicals, and so forth.

140 character tweets allow parents and caregivers to send real-time, structured observations to a central repository where others with similar conditions are also tweeting. Data can be aggregated and overlaid with other variables (like barometric pressure; temperature; phase of the moon) with the net effect being more comprehensive information about the state of individuals within the state of the environment they're in.

Sweet. (Tsweet?)

Medication safety: It's hard to be (a) patient!

Patients for a Moment is a new blogging round-up, one that collects stories from patients and people interested in the experiences of patients. I joined in this week and shared a short piece about what safer prescribing would look like. There's a lot going on with medication safety in other venues as well. The FDA just heard recommendations from an advisory panel, and it's looking like consumers are going to get some help in managing risks associated with acetaminophen.

A few weeks ago, I listened to an excellent webcast about medication management and safety aimed at health care professionals (click here to go to the link to hear the re-broadcast). In the U.S., approximately 25% of all reported medical errors involve medications. The most important "take-away" I heard occurred when Peter Angood, a physician leader in the patient safety movement (someone intimately familiar with medication safety risk points), shared how his drug history had been botched during a recent outpatient procedure.

The communication infrastructure surrounding medication use is so poor that the system breaks down for patient safety experts with relatively uncomplicated medication profiles undergoing scheduled diagnostic procedures? Yes. Routinely. Bet on it. Good luck to the rest of us.

Dr. Angood's story serves as yet another "call to action" as people in the United States consider how to spend $20 billion dollars to make healthcare IT serve patients and providers in meaningful ways.

Here's the take-away for now: While we await better integration of electronic medication data, go ahead and establish an electronic medication record of your own. ISMP's Consumer Med Safety website, in conjunction with iGuard, offers a free MedSafetyAlert! service for listing and tracking your medications. It's easy to use, and iGuard's medication platform is being adopted by larger electronic medical record systems, meaning that the data you enter will likely "flow through" to more sophisticated e-health record keeping systems (maintained by you, your caregivers, or a healthcare facility).

Based on the information you enter into MedSafetyAlert!, you'll receive tailored alerts and monthly summaries via e-mail. I've used the service for several months, and found it to be simple, non-invasive, and easy-to-access.