Center for Advancing Health Welcome from Jessie Gruman

Hi, I'm Jessie Gruman, President and Founder of the Center for Advancing Health. CFAH works to increase people's engagement in their health care, knowing that we will not get the full benefit of our care unless we participate actively in it. As someone who has been diagnosed with four different kinds of cancer, I have a lot of experience with health care and understand personally what it means to engage in my care. If you, like me, have visited the doctor or hospital recently, you know that finding good care and making the most of it is a challenge. Advances in medicine mean that tests, drugs and procedures are more effective than ever before. But we often overlook the fact that many of these advances depend on us — patients and caregivers — to make them work. Surgery has improved. You can get a hip replacement or a hysterectomy and come home from the hospital quicker — but also sicker. Then we and our families have to manage the wound care and the diet and the medications and the rehab — all the things that used to be done for us by professionals in the hospital. Drugs have really improved. People with chronic conditions like cancer, diabetes and ***/AIDS can now live long and well with our diseases. But we have to make big changes in our lifestyle and follow complicated instructions if those drugs are going to actually work. When I got my third cancer diagnosis in 2005, my eyes were really opened to how our responsibilities have changed. I was just stunned at what I had to do to get good care and to make it have an impact on my health: I had to find the right surgeon and oncologist, to get the chemotherapy, to care for myself at home and then to make the long recovery. I really struggled to figure everything out. After I got better I talked to hundreds of people about their health care and I heard again and again how surprised they were by what they were expected to do to care for themselves or their wife or their child. And how unprepared they felt to do it. Since I founded the Center for Advancing Health in 1992, we've worked to help people understand their changing role in their health and health care. The work of CFAH focuses on the actions that we — patients and caregivers — must take in order to benefit from our care. In addition to caring for ourselves when we come home from the hospital and managing the drugs and lifestyle demands of illnesses like diabetes and heart disease, we also have to: - Find the right doctors to care for us. - Sometimes we have to get a second opinion. - We have to work with our doctor to figure out which treatment will work best for us and then follow through on it. - We have to make appointments and make sure every doctor has our health records. - We have to get screening tests like mammograms and vaccines like flu shots. - And even if we have insurance, we have to pay for our care — the co-pays, deductibles, and bills. None of us has to do all these things all the time, but all of us have to do them at some point, and we have to know that we have to do them and how to do them in order to get the best results from our health care. If you are a patient or family caregiver, take a look at the Be a Prepared Patient section of our website to learn how you can do this. If you are a scientist or clinician, take a look at the research and programs in the Engagement section of our site. To read important news stories on the latest scientific research on decisions we make about our health care check out the Health Behavior News Service. Our aim is to help people act on their own behalf — and on behalf of those they love — to live as well as they can for as long as they can. We hope our resources will be helpful to you.