My motivations

I am a physician and researcher passionate about about “new” patient-health care provider relationship, specifically on topics of patient engagement and empowerment, virtual communities and support groups, new models of care, remote patient monitoring, shared decision making, healthy behavours, wellness and equity.

I am a ’survivor’ of three near-death experiences in early 2006 (an accident, a medical error, and a complicated surgery). My body shows the scars of lessons learned and my mind is filled with ideas and solutions on how to improve the patient experience and outcomes.

I have witnessed the demise of my very own eHealth Innovation. Under the guidance and mentorship of Dr. Alex Jadad, I had the opportunity to lead the creation, development, implementation and evaluation of the first virtual clinic for cancer patient follow up in Canada. Despite the good momentum, patient interest and promising results, the virtual clinic was never adopted by any of the hospitals where it was tested. I learned that the path to success is filled with many failures and how to potentially avoid them became the topic of my thesis dissertation.

I consider myself a big picture thinker, a creative problem solver, and a provocateur. Projects such as the “Virtual Clinic” from 2002-2006 and the “Physician Office of the Future”,  in late 2006 helped me gain a deeper understanding into on the conflicting issues of physician willingness and patient expectations to use information, communication and community technologies in healthcare. Working to clear the barriers that hinder adoption of innovations and to reconcile the perspectives of physicians and patients to use health technologies are both my passion and duty. There is critical imbalance of knowledge and power, and patients need not be at a disadvantage.

What I can do:

I think am best qualified to engage in thought-provoking work on:

• Personalized medicine (virtual and personal knowledge brokers for patients, virtual coaches, patient navigators, apomediation, self-management, concierge medicine, patients as reverse mentors to their doctors, ethical issues, end of life, and death);
• Converging and disruptive technologies (social networks, the Web n+1, semantic web, location aware applications);
• Health services research (Systematic reviews, randomized controlled trials, follow up studies, environmental scans, applied research);
• Telemedicine (remote patient monitoring both synchronous and asynchronous); and
• Electronic patient records (patient created health records, patient and physicians social networks, issues of health information access, accountability, usability);

My blogs are http://carlosrizo.tumblr.com/ and http://im-patient.blogspot.com/