For those of you who aren’t aware, I wrote a brief post a little over a week ago talking about how I would be attending and participating in a patient engagement conference. I was part of a panel with an amazingly inspirational health activist Christine, along with a woman who worked for Pfizer, and new member of the WEGO Health team.

I wanted to share with you a little bit about how it went.

It was such a great feeling to be there. It was not only nice to feel like I am part of something that has the potential to bring great changes to patient care but it was also wonderful to see that things were being done about the way patients are treated. It is awesome to know and see with my own eyes that it isn’t just all of us patients talking about how things need to be changed (with no real ability to change the system directly.) But instead, to see that there are people in the industry who do have the ability to elicit change and are actually doing the research because they seemingly care about helping people.

I think the majority of us would agree that at least in the United States, we need an entire overhaul with the way our health care system is. But all of that aside, listening to a medical psychologist, along with many other people in the healthcare industry talk about their findings and acknowledging the real need for change was liberating. It made me think – maybe it isn’t JUST patients who feel that things need to be done so that patients, doctors, pharmacutical companies, and healthcare extenders can work as a team to help every patient get through whatever they are dealing with.

Some of the things that were discussed during my panel was what exactly it means to be a “patient-centric” company, what companies, if any, are doing it right and which ones are failing, along with ways we think we could help ease the gap between patients and pharmaceutical companies. I was also able to show a minute of my absolute favorite awareness video, Get Your Belly Out, to try and hone in on the fact that patients are real human beings. Not numbers and not statistics but real people with lives, friends, families and emotions.

Link to the awareness video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-4h0x1wlf8

I felt really honored to be able to share my opinions during this event. I also want to thank Jack from WEGO for being such a great moderator, as well as Christine, Carrie and Todd for helping to make the panel so informative and fun!

Jack, Christine, Carrie, Todd and I