Patient advocacy. Face of the e-Patient movement started by the late Tom Furgeson, e-Patient Dave is an advocate for patients' rights in the traditional sense: he lobbies for dignity, autonomy, and self-determination in their care. As the name implies, he pushes social media as the tool to use. But it is an economic argument Dave makes that matters most to us. Dave agrees that patients belong at the center of care, where things are "done for them, not to them" (as one enlightened doctor put it here). But Dave goes further. Patients should do things for the system, too. As he learned from his own cancer ordeal, patients are a source of knowledge and authority that even the best doctors can only pretend to. Medicine is still mostly experimental, so doctors need all the data they can get. It's why doctors crowd source with each other. So why can't we do a better of job of leveraging the latent resource in patient-knowledge, too? This is more than patients being engaged. It is about the system recognizing patients as a necessary actor in a more efficient utilization of healthcare resources. With a system strapped to the point of breaking, we can't afford to leave any asset untapped.

One tip, learned the hard way, on data: "We need to be clearer about what we’re reading. Plus, it appears we could be more vigilant about what our own professional policymakers – and even our MDs – are thinking. [There are] uncomplicated ways to improve our comprehension. First among them is to stop talking in percentages and talk instead in raw numbers."

"Use your arithmetic skills; don’t settle for ten year figures. You can do it. Your first assignment: when you hear someone say “over the next ten years,” divide by ten."