WEGO Health Awards

The WEGO Health Awards are up and running again, and this year, I have been nominated for one award: Healthcare Collaborator.

I've been nominated a few times for WEGO Health Awards (like Best in Show: Blog), but never for this one. It's kind of cool, though -- my advocacy work has been turning in that direction, trying to find ways to collaborate with the healthcare industry to make sure the patient's voice is heard in as many ways as possible.

Here's the description for the award:

Fortunately, more than ever the healthcare industry is seeing just how valuable patient leaders can be! Our Healthcare Collaborator category is for the advocates bridging the gaps between industry stakeholders and healthcare consumers. Whether speaking at conferences, consulting with healthcare companies, using their education or research to help make change in the healthcare industry, or creating apps and products to fulfill needs in the current system, these patient leaders are impacting the healthcare landscape at large. 

 I haven't created an app (sorry- don't have the skills for that one), but I have tried to find opportunities to work with different parts of the healthcare industry in ways that match up with my skills. 

In the last year, I was a member of the HealtheVoices Impact Award Advisory Committee (that's me at about 1:45 in this video!), which gave out grant money to advocates to work on projects to help patients  in their health communities. I was on the 2019 advisory committee, too, and they asked me to come back for 2020. The grants are funded by Janssen, the pharmaceutical company, and I worked with their Director of Community Impact on the project. It was a very satisfying experience. 

I also worked on a couple of grant programs sponsored by the Department of Defense, the Peer-Reviewed Cancer Research Program and the Rare Cancers Research Program. For both, I was a patient representative on a panel that made recommendations grant applications for cancer researchers. Working with oncologists and cancer biologists, I described how the research would affect patients' lives -- something only another patient, not a doctor or a scientist, could fully understand.

I've done some other work as a healthcare collaborator, too, like working with the National Board of Medical Examiners' Video-Based Communication Assessment, giving feedback to doctors on how well they communicate with patients in certain scenarios.  I've done some advising with pharmaceutical businesses, too, giving them feedback on how they present information to patients.

It's all been very interesting work, and I've enjoyed being able to make sure our voices are being heard. Patients have been talked TO for so long, it's important that they are being talked WITH. And I'm happy to be a part of that.

If you are inclined to endorse me, you can click on the icon at the top of the page, or click here to go to my Awards profile. 

When you get there, you can click on the "Endorse This Patient Leader" to give me your vote. If you can't find that, click the "Awards" tab and it should come up. And if you want to nominate me for a different award than Healthcare Collaborator, you can do that, too.

  

WEGO will ask you to give an email address, so be aware of that before you go into it. 

Thanks for your consideration.