That's not what our patient portal is for

Our first experience with a patient portal was in Pittsburgh in about 2008, and when we moved to San Diego in 2010, although both institutions had an Epic patient portal, we weren't able to get our data transferred from one to the other. These were the early days of patients accessing their clinical data, and when Brian wanted to send a picture of a rash to his GP, they told him unapologetically, "That's not what the patient portal is for." Funny--we thought that was exactly what a patient portal was for.

Many of you have met the lead of our Collective Impact Incubator Kara Burns and being impressed, as I am, with her research and industry acumen. But did you know she started her career as a medical photographer? If you search on her, you will find news and research articles like How a selfie can save your life: Photographing moles, rashes and other imperfections are helping doctors quickly diagnose potentially dangerous medical conditions and Clinicians and their cameras: policy, ethics and practice in an Australian tertiary hospital. According to Kara, "the medical selfie is all part of the participatory medicine revolution." The idea of participatory health has shaped the vision of our Centre, which is connected health. This will be a thread running through our activities, like the virtual care symposium and workshop we are offering at the end of the month, and the Validitron. We need all of your passion and good ideas to make a dent in this space.

I've been recently introduced to Sian Slade, who is a researcher in health services who happens to be getting her PhD at the University of Melbourne. Her interest is in "personalised evidence-based health that ensures equity of access and ease of system navigability to deliver outcomes that are important to the patient." She will be speaking at the virtual care symposium. I am inspired by the drawing she sent me about justice, and I think it's extremely relevant to our aspiration to support the participatory partnership of person/carer & clinicians with the right information at the right time in the right form:

Partnership is the key to our having impact, and we are in the process of forming an international partnership with the University of Manchester and University of Toronto that would involve joint PhD students as well as collaborative research and education. We will be looking for participation and leadership and see great opportunities and synergy. More to come!

I finally have plans to return to the US in May to visit the two children we left behind and go to the AMIA Clinical Informatics Conference. I hope you are also catching up with long-lost family and friends as we open up.

RLQ #13 A phrase new to me that I have heard from my first week here is "flat chat" as in "I was flat chat this week and couldn't get to that." This is an Australian phrase that came about in 1986. The Oz Words publication says it started as "flat as a strap, flat as a tack, and flat to the boards...all in the sense ‘at the limit of one’s powers or resources’." The hypothesis is that the "as" got dropped and the final word migrated to "chat". Midnight Oil has a compilation album called Flat Chat. In the US, we might say, "I was swamped" for the same meaning - do they say that here?