One word comes to mind when describing my recent experience at TEDMED 2013 – WOW! Held annually at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., TEDMED is a conference unlike any other. For 3 ½ days you are immersed in the ideas and creativity of people from around the world who bring diverse perspectives to some of our greatest challenges in healthcare.
For me it was especially awesome because I contributed to the ‘wowness.’ I had the privilege of being a TEDMED 2013 speaker – in fact, I was the first nurse to ever take the TEDMED stage.
My talk addressed the question “Does anyone in healthcare want to be understood?” At first glance the answer to this question seems obvious – “yes, of course we all want to be understood.” However, if you consider how many words used in healthcare are Latin or Greek, insider jargon or acronyms, the answer is not so obvious after all.
I reminded the audience that the language of health is missing the words and experiences of those we say are at the center of healthcare – patients. It’s time to move beyond the rhetoric of patient-centeredness to actually include the lexicon of patients in the language of health.
At PatientsLikeMe we have been doing just that for many years. We retain the words and phrases patients use to describe their symptoms and side effects while behind the scenes we match them to the words used by doctors and health professionals. With your help, we are creating the world’s first patient vocabulary.
By the end of my talk I offered the answer to the question “Does anyone in healthcare want to be understood? Yes, patients want to be understood.”
It’s time to humanize the language of health with the lexicon of patients.
