Home : SuperSmartHealth Vision : 1. You Are the CEO of Your Health

1. You Are the CEO of Your Health

By taking full responsibility and being pro-active you assume a powerful role in facilitating your health and well-being. This mindset includes:

Speaking up and participating in decisions around your care. This involves asking for what you need, clarifying what you don’t understand, making your preferences known and deciding how you want to participate in decisions around your care. Some patients want to make the final decision. Others want their doctors to decide. What’s important is that you decide how you want decisions to be made. This also includes designating someone who can communicate your wishes and make decisions on your behalf in the event you are incapacitated to do so.
Recruiting the best possible healthcare team. As you select your providers consider all the qualities that are important to you. This may include their skill, location, availability, insurance, hospital affiliation, and bedside manner. The qualities you prioritize may be dependent on the particular type of provider you are looking for (the qualities you may want in a general practitioner may be different from that of a surgeon, etc.).
Fully investing providers in your care. This is a balance between being pro-active to benefit from providers’ expertise and respecting the challenges they face. Providers are under immense time pressures, and with both the limitations of what is known in medicine and an overwhelming amount of scientific information published, they may not have answers to all your questions or be familiar with everything you’ve found on the internet. And even when the evidence is known, medicine is not an exact science, but rather a science of probabilities in which clinicians do the best they can to apply the research to the particulars of your situation. As important as it is to ask for what you need and skillfully address any concerns that may arise, reacting with frustration, irritation or resentment on unrealistic expectations can be counterproductive to receiving the best of what your providers have to offer. At the same time, if your clinician is unable to provide the answers or the care you need, you can always seek a second opinion or find another provider who may be able to.
Harnessing the power of the internet. With so many helpful resources available on the internet, it’s easier than ever to be pro-active and participate with your provider in many aspects of your care. In addition to identifying a great team of providers and highly regarded health facilities to begin with, you can learn how to find high quality information on your health condition, manage your health information, optimize your health insurance, find support groups and services, and more.
Following through. Once you have found all the information you need and have worked with your healthcare provider to arrive at a mutually agreeable plan of action it is crucial to follow through. The degree of success of any plan largely rests on adhering to the agreed upon recommendations and following up with your provider.

2. You Define Your Vision for Optimal Health

Super Smart Health

Empowering Health and Wellbeing

1. You Are the CEO of Your Health