To read about the previous Stanford MedX days, click here: Day 1 and Day 2.

The third and last day of MedX started off with a strong cup of coffee and multiple attempts to put up my poster without having it roll back around me.

It was exciting to get to talk about Doctors Who Create in a formalized way on the last day. My poster was about the importance of keeping creativity alive in medicine—and how that mission helped me start Doctors Who Create.

A patient with Multiple Sclerosis presented her project to improve the waiting room experience by showcasing portraits of people struggling with chronic illness and accompanying text to prompt reflection and conversation. (Rather than pictures of landscapes or baby animals).

I was a bit nervous standing by my poster waiting for people to stop by and ask me about it. It was not a research poster, like most of the others – there was no formal hypothesis, data, collection, or results. But I had explored all those concepts, informally—I had identified challenges in medicine today, interviewed many, many creative physicians in an attempt to understand how they overcame those challenges, and as a result formed the Doctors Who Create community. It was exciting to see people walk by the poster, have it catch their eye, and get into long and interesting conversations with them about burnout, risk-taking, and innovation in medicine. Many even asked to take pictures of the poster.

A patient advocate describes how she formulated her medication to be delivered via TPN.

Overall, I think Stanford MedX is a great fit for anyone—patient, provider, or developer—interested in collaborative innovation in healthcare. The organizers also run a conference in the spring, Med EdX, on the topic of innovation in medical education. We’ll post the application to present at the 2018 conferences in our “Opportunities” section when it comes out—it’s the perfect medical conference for the Doctors Who Create community.

That mass of jumbled thing is supposed to resemble the modern EHR; and how it’s a patchwork of things that make sense individually but come together to make a really tangled, messy whole.

Thanks for following along for my ramblings this weekend. Feel free to tweet your reactions or questions to @doctorscreate!

On the last day, I also fulfilled my goal of taking a picture with the conference mascot, Zoe.