Join us on Monday, Feb. 9 from 1 to 2:30 p.m. at the Boothbay Harbor Memorial Library for the first session in our new monthly series of free Empowered Patient Forums.
Dr. Steve Cook and Patty Seybold, board members of the Boothbay Region Health & Wellness Foundation, will lead participants through a discussion and show and tell about “How To Gather & Organize your Medical Records.” Members of the Empowered Patient Study Group will provide examples from their own experiences.
According to “e-Patient Dave,” Dave deBronkart, empowered and engaged patients live longer and have much better quality of life. As Dave told our community last July, “an empowered person knows what she wants and speaks up. A dis-empowered person, faced with a challenge, will say: ‘There’s nothing I can do about it.’ That’s the hallmark of being powerless. Facing the same challenge, an empowered person will say, ‘what can I do?’ no matter what the odds. To be engaged is to be involved, active, responding. An engaged patient listens, responds, asks questions, thinks for herself, and acts. A disengaged patient treats healthcare like a car wash: rolls up the window, sits back and gets things sprayed on him.”
So become empowered and engaged! Please join this free educational and informal discussion, which will cover:

• Why it’s important to have control of your (and your family members’) medical records
• Who should have access to them
• How to gain access to them (patient portal and hard copy records)
• How should you organize them to be of use to you, your primary care physician, an ER physician, a hospitalist, a specialist
• How should you keep them up-to-date and accurate (in paper and/or electronically)
• How do you make corrections to them?
• How to keep progress notes and a medical diary using the SOAP notes format
• The importance of having a personal profile (who you are and what matters to you) and detailed Advance Directives readily available