Anne Wojcicki Quotes

A modern health and social care system has to be completely focussed on the needs of its users.

I am here on behalf of all the patients that I have ever met, all the ones I haven't met. This is about letting patients play a more active role ... in fixing health care.

Value in medicine depends on information - as I said in 'Let Patients Help,' 'People perform better when they're informed better.' It follows that to make patients and families more effective in care, they need to know more.

There's a culture inside the NHS that is highly paternalistic. You know, 'We give them the service and they are grateful.' We have to move to shared decision-making.

We will empower patients as well as health professionals. We will disempower the hierarchy and bureaucracy.

The patient is the nucleus of the health care system.

Our interaction as patients with the NHS should be on the basis that there's a presumption that all information is shared with us.

I want to be clear: not all patient communities are great, any more than online communities of any sort. But when a good one gets going, boy is it sweet.

We tend not to use the biggest resource in healthcare - the patients themselves. So I'm trying to figure out possible uses for digital technologies like Facebook but also real-life social networks to improve healthcare provision.

I'm an e-patient: equipped, enabled, empowered, engaged. I'm no clinician, but I do everything in my power to help them, to play an active role in my own care, and even in the design of care.

By offering individuals ownership and control of their health care coverage, we return control to the patients; and that is exactly where it should be.

Have a hand in your own treatment. I have nothing but praise for our doctors, but I think they could help us better, and we can help them if we work together.

If I'm serious about patients and their GPs being able to have more control of their health care, I can't have a top-down system that imposes restrictions on the services they need.

I advocate for a totally new view of the role of the patient: patient as engaged partner, not passive recipient.

As patients and consumers, we are better informed today about our health care than any previous generation.

We would like doctors to listen, but the fact is, we better be ready to be able to talk to them. You're going to have to be an active participant in that conversation, so I'd say the American people are going to need ways of stepping up to the conversation.

Please, let patients help improve healthcare. Let patients help steer our decisions, strategic and practical. Let patients help define what value in medicine is.

Brain surgery couldn't happen without the patient's own active voice to guide the work. The patient is part of the surgical team here, perhaps the most important part, and above all, that's what makes neurosurgery different.

I was on the board of the Mayo Clinic. I was diagnosed there, and I could pick up the phone and get a hold of whoever I wanted to. What I learned is that you really have to get proactive and manage your case.

My contention is that if we expand the patient-centered health care approach, we'll have less people that have to go the medical clinic that provides free service or go to the emergency room - they can have their own health care plan.

Fundamentally, the answers to our challenges in healthcare relies in engaging and empowering the individual.

In the first speech I delivered as health secretary, I made one thing perfectly clear: we need a cultural shift in the NHS: from a culture responsive mainly to orders from the top down to one responsive to patients, in which patient safety is put first.

Lets take away the incentives to do 'to' patients and instead create incentives to do 'for' patients, to be 'with' patients. We don't need to do comparative effectiveness trials to see if that works; we can just ask patients.

The vast majority of people who speak to me say they have had brilliant care. When they are critical, their concern tends not to be directed at the medical side but the ancillary things that surround it, such as helping patients to eat meals, cleanliness, and making sure that when patients have a problem, they are listened to.

Ultimately, health care fails the most basic test. It's not organized around the needs of the patient.