Category: eBook

Predicting the Next 10 Years of Patient Engagement Tech: eBook is LIVE

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While I started covering patient engagement as part of my broader foray into healthcare technology in late 2009, my interest in the topic picked up a few years later. On a whim, I decided to turn an article I’d written for CIO.com into a workshop proposal for HIMSS 2015 – and on an even greater whim, they accepted it. I then managed to parlay that speaking appearance (along with a few clips) into landing a role as an analyst at Chilmark Research looking at patient engagement technology.

Last summer, I was feeling slightly nostalgic when the calendar approached 10 years since I’d taken that job. I was quickly feeling puzzled, though – not because of life choices, mind you, but because the state of patient engagement technology was in such disarray. I’d been (perhaps a little too) wide-eyed in 2015 and was downright jaded by 2025.

Naturally, I turned those feelings into an eBook: Predicting the Next 10 Years of Patient Engagement. As the title suggests, my aim was less to rehash the past and more to try to figure out what the industry could learn from the technology’s disjointed journey.

Lessons learned, but far too late

The biggest thing I realized was that patient engagement technology isn’t a market segment. It’s a guiding principle for how healthcare providers should interact with patients, inside and (especially) outside the care delivery system.

The reason I don’t consider it a market segment – not any more, at least – is because patient engagement is too damn complicated for a single technology tool (or even suite of tools) to suddenly swoop in and make everything better. The proverbial road is littered with the wrecks of thousands of vendors who promised to do that and failed, some more miserably than others.

Once I figured this out, it wasn’t too hard to see where things went wrong for those trying to innovate in the space. Incumbent options got better, or at least less worse. New vendors fell short, while others operating in tangential spaces succeeded quickly. Pesky problems like application validation and interoperability didn’t go away. Above all, enthusiasm on the part of providers and patients failed to reach the same heights as inspiring conference keynotes.

Eventually, the industry learned valuable lessons about ROI, friction, change management, and the difficulties of standardization. By then, though, it was too late, and everyone was talking about AI.

Change can happen, but it will take work

The crux of my patient engagement eBook is what I expect the next 10 or so years of patient engagement technology to look like. (I say 10 or so years because it’s been more than a decade since I started exploring the space with scrutiny. It’s also a handy excuse for taking way, way too long to finish this thing.)

I’d love to be able to say I feel super optimistic, but I’ve never been a very good liar. Yes, things will continue to get better, and the future will likely see innovations that we cannot imagine in 2026. I just don’t think the pace will match the degree of innovation we’ll see in the rest of healthcare technology, let alone all the consumer industries healthcare is smitten with emulating. There are a few reasons I feel this way.

  • Since 2015, nearly everyone who’s claimed to have solved the patient engagement problem has been wrong, and nearly everyone who’s been right has run out of money.
  • Numerous external forces are making care delivery even more difficult than it needs to be; this strains the ability to engage with patients in any modality, analog or digital.
  • The industry maintains its nagging tendency to gravitate toward seemingly easy solutions in lieu of attempting the lay the groundwork for meaningful progress.
  • With income inequality on the rise, it’s easy to foresee a system where the wealthy have concierge physicians and the uninsured turn to chatbots – a trend the Pew Research Center noted is already playing itself out. Increased use of technology largely detached from the care delivery system (for now at least) isn’t going to make the engagement experience any better; in fact, it may only lead to further frustration for everyone.

In simple terms, making progress will come down to avoiding the mistakes that have been repeated almost ad nauseum since 2015. I think the industry can do it. The question is whether folks are willing to do the hard work to make change happen.

Predicting the Next 10 Years of Patient Engagement is free to download until May 31. Give it a read and let me know what you think.

On the Other Side of the Microphone

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Recently, Healthcare IT Today (a client of mine) was gracious enough to interview me about all things telehealth. The podcast is live, and you can give it listen here. As I’m often the one asking the questions, it was a nice change of pace to be the interview subject this time around.

Naturally, a good chunk of the conversation focused on my eBook – namely, why telehealth hasn’t had the post-pandemic comeback that so many healthcare stakeholders expected. Host John Lynn and I also tried to think of where and how telehealth might be able to expand these days without much heavy lifting.

To celebrate my appearance on the Healthcare IT Today podcast, I’m offering the eBook at a discounted price of $14.99. The discount applies until Sept. 9, which is when I’ll be back in the office after a bit of time off at the end of the summer. The half-off price applies to everyone, whether you graced the podcast with a listen or not. I’ve toyed with the idea of discount codes, but I wasn’t about to do that for the first time before I go traipsing around the woods in New Hampshire and Maine with limited Internet access, on the off chance I ended up breaking something on my website (again).

As always, there’s more information on the product page for Telehealth’s Next Chapter: A Tale of Volume and Value.

I hope you have a pleasant rest of the summer.

The Beastwood Files: Spring 2025

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I’ve had an interesting few months. I finally bit the bullet, upgrading my website and selecting a hosting provider. The former was a good idea, and long overdue, as it let me set up a store where I could get rich selling digital content. The latter turned out not to be such a good idea since 1) it somehow managed to create a second WordPress log-in for me and 2) said log-in was linked to me staging site, not my actual website.

This meant the blog posts I created on what I thought was my existing website were in fact on the new version, which is also were I happened to create the product page for my eBook (which I also happened to edit and design over the course of the spring).

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to get the new blog posts – namely, the April and May roundups you’ve come to know and love, or at the very least tolerate – to appear on the page that listed all the blog posts. That seemed like kind of a big deal. There were also some quirky tweaks to my new (or maybe existing?) website that weren’t the best, and it wasn’t clear whether they were the result of the site migration or user error.

As a result, I scrapped the hosting plan and stuck with a Business version of my old WordPress site. I didn’t lose any necessary functionality, and I didn’t end up spending more. What I’d been paying for the hosting service basically now pays for a business email address, with the added bonus that it’s not Webmail, which as far as I can tell no one actually likes.

The issue – and this is where it gets interesting, folks – is that I decided to do this a few days after I launched my eBook, which meant to link to it was dead. It also meant the April and May roundups disappeared, along with my heartfelt look back at five years of full-time freelancing. I was able to repost the eBook product page (which was easy enough to rewrite) and the career retrospective (which I’d drafted in Word), and I managed to rewrite the blog post introducing the eBook to the world.

That said, I didn’t bother redoing the roundups. To be blunt, I didn’t feel like it. Plus, the list of Stuff I Read was a bit short, and my Adventures in Fatherhood were a bit repetitive, redundant, and repetitive.

So, instead, I present to you, my loving audience, a quarterly roundup. This includes links to everything published in the last three months, along with some fun tales of raising a child that I may or may not have shared with you already.

Stuff I Wrote

Dang, this list looks a lot more impressive when it covers three months instead of one, doesn’t it?

Adventures in Fatherhood

  • Over Memorial Day weekend, I ran a marathon in Burlington, Vermont. The course was two Figure-8 loops. All told, I went through downtown Burlington four times. This meant I ran up the hill on Main Street four times. My wife told my son this was a mean thing to make the runners do. She wasn’t wrong – and for the next two weeks, my son, who has entered the phase of asking so, so many questions – humored me a few times a day by asking, “Why did the marathon do a mean thing to the runners?”
  • Meanwhile, over Fourth of July weekend in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, my son was introduced to the idea that Daddy attracts mosquitos almost immediately upon going outside. (Don’t ask me why. They always have.) He then proceeded to humor us by repeatedly saying, “The bugs love Daddy.”
  • We’ve recently discovered store-bought frozen water- and fruit-based confections. This is lovely – but, as my son prefers to eat approximately three bites of things before declaring, “All done,” it also means at any given time there are at least two unfinished treats in the freezer. That also means there are often at least two child-sized bowls or plates in the freezer, which is a challenge when, say, we arbitrarily decide the Cheerios need their own bowl.

With any luck, I’ll get back to monthly posts starting in August, just in time for everyone to stop caring about work until Labor Day.

The Future of Telehealth: eBook Is LIVE

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My first eBook – Telehealth’s Next Chapter: A Tale of Volume and Value – is officially live and available for download.

The eBook is a couple years in the making. Back in 2023, telehealth utilization was two years into a plateau following a mid-pandemic peak. In a lengthy blog post, I speculated on what that meant for telehealth’s future, and whether there was anything the healthcare industry could do to shape that fate. The post got a lot of positive feedback, including several recommendations for what I could add to augment my thesis and turn the post into an eBook.

If you’ve known me for even a short time, you know I like challenges. You also know I tend to overextend myself juuuuust a little bit – which is why, amid building a freelance business, raising a child, running marathons, hiking up mountains, and doing my best to clean the house, the eBook has finally arrived.

From a blog post to an eBook

So, what separates Telehealth’s Next Chapter: A Tale of Volume and Value from the blog post that preceded it?

  • There’s some historical perspective. This demonstrates that telehealth has pretty much always been about episodic care and explains why utilization has been on a plateau for four years running.
  • There’s a brief unpacking of the struggles of digital health companies not named Hinge Health, Omada Health, and (at the time I was writing at least) Hims & Hers. This offers perspective about why the road ahead for telehealth is a bit bumpy.
  • There’s a Debbie Downer take that the best time to act has passed us by. I think it’s because the industry’s bevy of stakeholders weren’t sufficiently motivated to act to remove barriers to adoption in the summer of 2021.
  • There’s an offer of a path forward – telehealth utilization that supplements value-based, purposeful in-person care in a wide range of scenarios – and a set of suggestions for how the many stakeholders involved will need to collaborate.
  • There are some lovely graphics, which I designed myself, and some of the best stock art that a free Canva account can buy.

Incredibly, over the course of 42 pages, there’s only one reference to running, and it’s in my bio. If I’m being honest, this very well might be the eBook’s greatest achievement.

Free for a little while longer

Initially, I planned to make the eBook available as a free download over Father’s Day weekend, complete with a great dad joke about it being my gift to you, and then charge folks for it. I even came up with a price of 73 cents per page, as a nod to Regina Holliday.

The idea, as I stated in a LinkedIn post I’ve since deleted as well as a blog post that has since disappeared for reasons I’ll explain, was to see if creating and publishing my own content would be a worthwhile extension of my freelance business.

Then, a few things happened in rapid succession.

  • I stopped using my web hosting service, which I’d decided wasn’t really meeting my needs. In doing so, I wiped out the version of my website that included the product page for the eBook and the blog post announcing it to the world. Oops.
  • As I transitioned back to WordPress, my website was down for a few days. At this point, I offered to send the eBook to anyone who asked me for it, as I had no way to collect anyone’s hard-earned money.
  • Sometime between finishing our Monday morning viewing of Daniel Tiger and attempting to start the work week, the wires that bring the Internet into our house got clipped. Even if I wanted to update my website, I couldn’t. (Unless I wanted to roll the dice with the open Wi-Fi at the public library, which I didn’t.)
  • I came to realize I never really gave a lot of thought – any, really – to how I planned to promote the eBook once I’d launched it.

Given all that, I’ve decided to make the eBook free for a bit longer, either as a download on this here website or by asking my nicely on LinkedIn or via email. The $30.66 cost will go into effect on July 8, after we’ve all recovered from the long weekend. 

The first of more to come

My rationale for charging for the eBook is partly to try to cover expenses (I paid my reviewers, got professional headshots, and upgraded my website) and partly to see if there’s true demand for this type of thing. It’s not the end of the world if I take a loss. For good or ill, in the back of my head this was as much of a passion project as it was a business venture, along with a fairly low-stress way to revive my rudimentary graphic design skills. Plus, it’s already had more views than my graduate thesis, which took a lot longer to write and cost a lot more to boot.

That said, it’s hard for me not to scratch the itch for longform writing. One of my Internet-less tasks this week was starting the outline for the next eBook I hope to write, which I’d previously scrawled on a few Post-It notes in my planner. The topic: Why the philosophy of patient engagement has made great strides in the last decade even if the market for patient engagement technology kinda sorta floundered. It probably won’t be 42 pages, but it also probably (hopefully?) won’t take me more than two years to write.

As long as my schedule allows for it, I intend to create more content of interest to the digital health community.

The Beastwood Files: December 2024

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I’m embracing a bit of a different format this month, partly to keep y’all on your toes as January begins and partly to hold myself accountable for the things I hope to accomplish in 2025.

Professional Goals for the Year Ahead

Make this a Big Boy Website. I created this site several years ago but did about 86% of the work on it in the first week of April 2020, when I decided to use being laid off as an excuse to try full-time freelancing. It’s due for a refresh and, more importantly, I think I’m ready for a Big Boy Corporate Email Address, too.

Finish the eBook that’s been 18 months in the making. Remember that blog post I wrote about telehealth’s day of reckoning back in April 2023? A few of you said it was good enough, with some additions and updates, to be an eBook. Well, I’m taking y’all up on that. Let’s see what happens.

Stick to what I do best. It’s not all sunshine and roses up here. I had a few projects go sideways in 2024. A few factors were at play in each case, but one thing that unified them all was a focus outside of what I think I do best: Healthcare, healthcare tech, and executive leadership. If I decide to take on more work, I’m going to be very particular about it.

Personal Goals for the Year Ahead

Be more systematic about running. After taking about two months off to recover from Morton’s neuroma in my right foot, I finished the year strong. I hit my time goals and snagged a couple age group prizes in some lovely little suburban races. More importantly, I found shoes (and insoles) that work and settled into a good rhythm. If all goes well, this might be the first year since 2015 I manage a marathon in the spring AND the fall.

Be as good a person as my kid things I am. I’m at the great stage where my son, at three and a half, wants nothing more than to hang out with me and do what I do. I hope other people will feel the same way. At the same time, I need to make sure that being there for him and with him doesn’t drain me emotionally. I can’t be afraid to take a break here and there.

Eat more hot sauce. My wife gave some really good hot sauce for Christmas. It was delicious. I see no reason not to have more.

Adventures in Fatherhood

You may recall that I taught my son the emblematic Boston phrase “bang a U-ey.” Now, whenever we see a sign prohibiting U-turns, he screams “DON’T BANG A U-EY!” He’s quite proud of himself, though he hasn’t fully grasped the linguistics of the phrase and believes “bang a” is one word, like the city in Maine.

We recently had the following exchange. “Daddy, I love you!” “Aw, I love you too. That makes me feel special.” “I love the songs you sing.” “I’m glad. Do you even love the silly ones I sing?” “I love the songs you sing on your phone.” (Dear reader, that would be the YouTube videos of children’s songs that we play at 10- to 15-minute intervals a few times a day.)

Happy January, everyone. I’ll return to the regular format next time, since I know everyone’s chomping at the bit to read something with my name at the top.