2009 Engage With Grace Thanksgiving Weekend Blog Rally

Last year Paul Levy, Matthew Holt and Alexandra Drane asked me to participate in the Engage With Grace Thanksgiving Blog Rally. My post last year describes the Engage with Grace project and tells my personal story of why end of life care is important for all of us to discuss with our family and loved ones.

Along with my friends and health blogging colleagues, Paul, Matthew, Alexandra, Adam Bosworth, Christian Sinclair, Drew Rosielle, e-Patient Dave deBronkart, Jessica Lipnack, Ted Eytan and many others - we ask that you to take time to talk to your loved ones over this holiday weekend about these important end of life questions and carry out your wishes by executing a living will and medical power of attorney.

How else can you participate in the Engage With Grace Thanksgiving Blog Rally?

If you are a blogger, spread the word about the project by adding your own post about Engage With Grace. You can use the text below (download a ready-made html version here) or tell your own story of the importance of communicating your end of life wishes. We suggest you post it starting on Tuesday, November 24 and leave it up over the entire holiday weekend.

Second, you can donate your Facebook and/or Twitter status to the rally. Post a link to your post and post a status update. You can create your own status update or use the following universal update (use the following hashtag #EWG so that we can track the rally:

Pssssst - Engage with Grace at www.engagewithgrace. Join the Blog Rally. Pass it on. #EWG

Following is the 2009 Engage With Grace Thanksgiving Weekend Blog Rally blog post:

Some Conversations Are Easier Than Others

Last Thanksgiving weekend, many of us bloggers participated in the first documented “blog rally” to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes.

It was a great success, with over 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations – our closest friends and family.

Our original mission – to get more and more people talking about their end of life wishes – hasn’t changed. But it’s been quite a year – so we thought this holiday, we’d try something different.

A bit of levity.

At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions designed to get the conversation started. We’ve included them at the end of this post. They’re not easy questions, but they are important.

To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, we thought we’d start with five parallel questions that ARE pretty easy to answer:



Silly? Maybe. But it underscores how having a template like this – just five questions in plain, simple language – can deflate some of the complexity, formality and even misnomers that have sometimes surrounded the end-of-life discussion.

So with that, we’ve included the five questions from Engage With Grace below. Think about them, document them, share them.

Over the past year there’s been a lot of discussion around end of life. And we’ve been fortunate to hear a lot of the more uplifting stories, as folks have used these five questions to initiate the conversation.

One man shared how surprised he was to learn that his wife’s preferences were not what he expected. Befitting this holiday, The One Slide now stands sentry on their fridge.

Wishing you and yours a holiday that’s fulfilling in all the right ways.



(To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team. )

X PRIZE: $10M Incentive to Innovate In Health Care (Reform)

Scott Shreeve, MD, Senior Health Advisor at the X PRIZE Foundation sent out a call last week to all health care bloggers to participate in a blog rally to promote the idea and effort behind the Healthcare X PRIZE competition. Below is a message from Dr. Sheeve being post around the blogosphere today. Please spread the word via your blog, Facebook, Twitter or the old fashion way -- telling someone face to face.

We are entering an unprecedented season of change for the United States health care system. Americans are united by their desire to fundamentally reform our current system into one that delivers on the promise of freedom, equity, and best outcomes for best value. In this season of reform, we will see all kinds of ideas presented from all across the political spectrum. Many of these ideas will be prescriptive, and don’t harness the power of innovation to create the dramatic breakthroughs required to create a next generation health system.

We believe there is a better way.

This belief is founded in the idea that aligned incentives can be a powerful way to spur innovation and seek breakthrough ideas from the most unlikely sources. Many of the reform ideas being put forward may not include some of the best thinking, the collective experience, and the most meaningful ways to truly implement change. To address this issue, the X PRIZE Foundation, along with WellPoint Inc. and WellPoint Foundation as sponsor, has introduced a $10M prize for health care innovators to implement a new model of health. The focus of the prize is to increase health care value by 50% in a 10,000 person community over a three year period.

The Healthcare X PRIZE team has released an Initial Prize Design and is actively seeking public comment. We are hoping, and encouraging everyone at every opportunity, to engage in this effort to help design a system of care that can produce dramatic breakthroughs at both an individual vitality and community health level.

Here is your opportunity to contribute:

1. Download the Initial Prize Design
2. Share you comments regarding the prize concept, the measurement framework, and the likelihood of this prize to impact health and health care reform.
3. Share the Initial Prize Design document with as many of your health, innovation, design, technology, academic, business, political, and patient friends as you can to provide an opportunity for their participation

We hope this blog rally amplifyies our efforts to solicit feedback from every source possible as we understand that innovation does not always have a corporate address. We hope your engagement starts a viral movement of interest driven by individual people who realize their voice can and must be included. Let’s ensure that all of us - and the people we love - can have a health system that aligns health finance, care delivery, and individual incentives in a way that optimizes individual vitality and community health. Together, we can ensure the best ideas are able to come forward in a transparent competition designed to accelerate health innovation. We look forward to your participation.

This post was written by Scott Shreeve, MD in behalf of the X PRIZE Foundation. Special thanks to Paul Levy for both demonstrating the value of collaborative effort and suggesting we utilize a blog rally for this crowdsourcing effort.