David Harlow

Paint and patients, pills and policy all come together within The Walking Gallery of Healthcare. This walking wall of hundreds of individuals who wear personal patient narrative paintings on their backs is changing minds and opening hearts. They are attending medical conferences where often there isn’t a patient speaker on the dais or in the audience. They are providing a patient voice, and by doing so, are changing the conversation.

While creating national health policy medical… Show more

Paint and patients, pills and policy all come together within The Walking Gallery of Healthcare. This walking wall of hundreds of individuals who wear personal patient narrative paintings on their backs is changing minds and opening hearts. They are attending medical conferences where often there isn’t a patient speaker on the dais or in the audience. They are providing a patient voice, and by doing so, are changing the conversation.

While creating national health policy medical professionals and government officials are often more reliant on aggregate data sets, bar charts, graphs and statistics, rather than the whole picture of care, the personal patient narrative and the individual human face.

The Walking Gallery movement hopes to diversify the source content that is used to create the foundation for patient centered care policy, by infusing art imagery depicting a unique patient history or personal story.

An artist or artists will interview medical professionals and lay individuals to form a patient centric narrative. The artist will then create representational imagery and paint that picture story upon the business jacket of the provider of the narrative account. The provider of the patient story aka “Walker” will wear the jacket to medical conferences and events in order to disseminate the patient story to a large group of policy minded attendees and to represent the individual patient voice in venues where they are underrepresented. Further, both artist and Walker will support the spread of the story and image via social media. Show less

The Consumer Technology Workgroup is charged with providing recommendations on standards and interoperability issues and opportunities related to strengthening the ability of consumers, patients, and lay caregivers to manage health and health care for themselves or others.