Curing Cancer One Masterpiece at a Time!™

Battling leukemia at Ohio State, UNC, and Duke, each showed brilliance, but the University of Cincinnati (UC) Health earned my trust for the rest of my life. Their compact urban campus feels worlds away from winding mega-centers losing human scale. Bauhaus facilities feel familiar, not maze-like. They are beautiful, intimate healing and research spaces and not sterile towers.

Credit inspirational CEO Cory Shaw for catalyzing UC Health's emerging patient-first culture and ascendance on their way to NCI Cancer Center designation. Luring cancer-crushing superhero blood cancer researcher Dr. John Byrd from Ohio State, Shaw swings for fences and aggressive goals like achieving elite National Cancer Institute designation. But he also champions the small touches distinguishing excellent treatment from transformative experience. This growth mindset and Dr. Byrd's Newave Pharma clinical trial earns my loyalty despite local marquee competitors. 

I also love UC's embrace of patients as collaborators, not just cases. If only they had accessed our skills, passions, and networks to advance clinical care, operational logistics, and outreach innovation! With guidance, motivated patients offer immense creativity and know-how to transform systems that define our care, as my friend and former boss Mary Kay O'Connor proves with Patients Voices. While my website partnership with UC idea stalled internally, I envision the day this scrappy stalwart finally taps its community's full power by proactively partnering around a shared purpose.

I'm grateful for the human heroes who repeatedly rescue me with skill and soul. Together, we cure cancer in our lifetime, and by "together," I mean patients helping as we attempt to repay impossible debts. Understand. I don't want to BE Dr. Byrd. Half of what he says I'll never understand, just as half of what I'd share about web design and content marketing wouldn't make sense to the Byrdman, but we are brighter together than apart. And "smarter" regarding saving lives is always a good idea. 

If any healthcare institution reads this page, I will point out that in web marketing platforms, beat websites and networks, crush platforms. The most potent untapped network available to every cancer center is their patients - people predisposed to help because our lives are getting saved. Why does the North Carolina Museum of Art offer a way to work together before I'm dead, yet every hospital I've pitched on tapping the sweat equity myself and many other patients would gladly contribute pushes me back into a one-dimensional box labeled "patient?"

Together, we cure cancer in our lifetime when cancer centers learn to crowdsource and tap their most valuable and largely untapped gold - patients as strategic partners contributing expertise, ideas, feedback, and money. Of course, that list is in reverse order of how things are now. Every hospital has a development team focused on what happens to my estate after I'm gone. The first hospital to create a team to pool the intellectual capital and willingness to help from their patients will define the next healthcare era, though it feels lonely atop this particular soap box. 

Since complaints are easy while change is hard, I'll put my estate's money where my mouth is and pledge $1M to support the first cancer center to tap their patient network, crowdsource their content, and create an online community where we cure cancer together. Since that pledge can only get paid when I'm gone, know that my sweat equity stands ready to help, and I'm betting there are hundreds and thousands of other "patients" whose intellectual capital is only an ask away. So, here's hoping someone asks.

UC Website