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That Very Very Thin Line – Do NOT Be Tom!

My husband and I moved two years ago to Florida where we now live in an “active adult” community*. We love it! We’re very happy here. We’ve met and made many new friends – people we have truly come to care about. I’m following in family footsteps. My parents did the same thing decades ago. They lived in a different city, but they, too, lived in an active adult community for 20+ years. My father, in a somewhat macabre voice, always called it “God’s Waiting Room.” And, as I learned again this past week, it turns out that we now […]

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Top 10 “Best Of” APHA Posts: 2017 in Review

As 2017 comes to a close, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the blog posts you, my readers, considered to be most worth your reading time. Using post analytics, I’m able to see how many of you have read each of the 44 posts from 2017. Then, accommodating for the fact that some posts have been online for 11+ months, while others were just posted recently, it’s easy to tell which ones captured your imagination (or google’s search interest) to make the assessment. So here are the top 10 posts (well – OK – I

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SAFE! … or Maybe Not?

Safety has been on my mind this week. It’s one of those concepts that, when related to patient advocacy and care management, can be applied in so many ways, with not so many easy answers. What kind of safety? Physical safety, of course. AND financial safety. Whose safety? Your clients’ safety, of course. AND yours. The questions aren’t so much about what is safe, or what isn’t. The questions are about judgment, timing, and consequences, and recognizing safety issues when the problems are obvious – vs – those times that are less obvious that we might miss all together –

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An Anniversary, Meltdowns, Blessings, and Fuel for Advocates

Please indulge me today. I’m going to share a very personal experience I rarely think about anymore, in hopes it will propel some good advocacy. Sometimes months go by when I barely give it any thought. Other times, like lately, it seems like everywhere I turn, I just can’t escape it. So here you go:

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Sleep Deprivation Spells Opportunity – and Responsibility

AdvoConnection hero

Saturday night (well, OK, in the wee hours of Sunday morning) across most of the US and Canada, we “sprung forward” our clocks, resulting in lost sleep, and at least a day of being totally thrown off because the day seemed… well…. just weird. Since most of us don’t work on a Sunday, the day of adjustment helped us acclimate, and then – life goes on with a longer day of sunshine through next Fall. But what if you had to lose that sleep every few days, then re-acclimate every few days? What if you spent your life in a

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What the Presidential Election Results Mean for Patient Advocates

When President Barack Obama ran for office in 2008, healthcare reform was already an enormous and contentious topic. In those days, I was invited to speak to dozens of groups of patients and caregivers to help audiences sort out the issues that comprised healthcare reform so they could, on their own, decide which aspects (if any) were important to them. From the concept of “universal” healthcare through a public option, to coverage for pre-existing conditions, to portability, tort reform, free vaccinations to develop “herd immunity,” and many more, we looked at the whole of the topic as objectively as possible.

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Would You Draw a Line?

from Wikipedia

Early in my patient empowerment work, I was invited to write a column for my local daily newspaper. Over the next six years, I wrote hundreds of columns on every empowerment topic imaginable from how to get copies of your own medical records, to how to research a drug your doctor prescribed for you, to the (what we called at the time) “healthcare reform”. My column ended in 2011, but much of that work still stands today, some as useful today as it was then.* As a result of those columns, I became a resource person for many locals who

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