Bonny P McClain

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About Bonny P McClain

We read about health literacy and initiatives to improve the understanding of complicated language reserved for discussing medicine. Patients are becoming shared-decision makers and we need to foster and clarify dialogue to improve the translation of research findings, health policy, medical education, and healthcare.

Health literacy measures the ability to comprehend, evaluate, and negotiate the data to make informed healthcare decisions. Although we tend to think of health literacy as central to societal concerns, numeracy crosses both professional and patient populations. For example, peer-reviewed clinical research often discusses risk-benefit analyses without the clarification that "risk" is defined as both benefits and harms. How do we calculate the harms of treatment to arrive at an informed clinical decision central to the patient's best interests, values, and wishes?

How does numeracy influence standard care? What does the data show us about screening healthy individuals upstream from actual medical necessity? What do the "results" in technical medical literature really tell us? Is the message scrambled by the media? We can't consistently blame the pharmaceutical industry. They don't write the prescriptions--doctors do. Let's improve numeracy in medicine.

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Books By Bonny P McClain

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Medical Writing for Smart People: Because Dummies Shouldn't Write About Medicine Jun 21, 2015

by Bonny McClain

( 3 )

$5.99

Most writers aren't looking for platitudes or step by step guides to their craft. A shockingly honest portrayal of wild-but-true stories about writing in the evolving landscape of medicine--immediately useful insights from the crossroads of health policy, health economics, and clinical medicine.

Other Formats: Paperback

Continuing Medical Education: What to do when good outcomes go bad (Content Media & Analytics Book 3) Feb 15, 2016

by Bonny McClain

( 3 )

$2.99

We currently measure how healthcare providers practice medicine and what clinical decisions are being made—how do we determine WHY?

Determining effect sizes by merging outcome data from groups of study participants obscures the reality that clinical interventions rarely work for everyone and under all circumstances. In large part, clinicians are unable to face that reality because they lack information about the biological, experiential and environmental sources of that heterogeneity, and the impact of that heterogeneity on clinical responses.

When an intervention known to be effective in study populations fails to work in a particular patient, clinicians therefore have little choice but to move to alternative interventions on the basis of pragmatic rules of thumb (heuristics).

Assessing knowledge or even behavior by evaluating responses to an isolated clinical presentation forces participant responses into false “finite” siloes not dissimilar to inclusion/exclusion criteria in industry clinical trials—not actually real world or relevant in clinical practice.

Since biological and social heterogeneity among trial participants interferes with the detection of true cause–effect relationships, controlled trials are carefully designed to minimize or eliminate heterogeneity's effects, primarily by aggregating the outcomes from many participants rather than drawing inferences from outcomes in individual persons.

This intentional ‘heterogeneity blindness’ in controlled trials has brought with it a progressive shift from qualitative documentation of the concrete to quantitative assessment of the abstract—sophisticated statistical inferences about summary effect size in average patients.

How do we create educational programs that are indeed measuring the appropriate outcomes? Do we want to limit our discussions to "educational" outcomes or is it possible to link learning objectives to meaningful patient-centric health outcomes?

Other Formats: Paperback

This title and over 1 million more available with Kindle Unlimited.

Blueprint: a scalable healthcare data strategy Dec 1, 2016

by Bonny McClain

( 1 )

$2.99

Data, data, data...big data, small data, its everywhere. What is your data strategy? Are you a cast with a big net sort of professional? Create a big flat file and hope for the best?

Maybe you are a stealth data purveyor--harpoon in hand and a precise plan--ready to implement and analyze.

Between these two extremes we find a variety of strategies. Quite often it seems like everyone is speaking a secret language and you are left strumming your lips in doubt.

What if you had a guide to navigate the road to a better data blueprint? Ambient data is everywhere--are you listening?

Other Formats: Paperback

This title and over 1 million more available with Kindle Unlimited.

Write Better Surveys. Period. Jun 27, 2016

by Bonny P McClain

$5.99

Surveys should suck less--writing them, taking them, and learning from the data they collect. I am writing a book to change all that. Survey development and implementation remains the best way to gather knowledge from a sample that hopefully will provide information about a larger population.

Take heart, survey designers. The journey will be long, but our cause is just

Other Formats: Paperback

This title and over 1 million more available with Kindle Unlimited.

The Learning Objective: Identifying appropriate metrics for improving medical education (Content Media and Analytics Book 2) Jan 4, 2016

by Bonny McClain

( 1 )

$2.99

I want to say a few things up front. I don't have any answers--just the questions. The saying if you want better answers, ask better questions is the rule of thumb for disruptors or individuals or companies attempting to change the status quo. I am also going to go out on a limb and suggest that in healthcare, we are in need of revitalized status quo.

This book is an easy to use resource for writing specific and quantifiable program goals, presentations, or webinar agendas.

Other Formats: Paperback

This title and over 1 million more available with Kindle Unlimited.

Improving Numeracy in Medicine Dec 15, 2015

by Bonny McClain , Saroj Misra

$5.99

Why numeracy? Resources about statistics are numerous. What we need is a travel guide to help navigate the larger statistical texts. We read about health literacy and initiatives to improve the understanding of complicated language reserved for discussing medicine. Patients are becoming shared-decision makers and we need to foster and clarify dialogue to improve the translation of research findings, health policy, medical education, and healthcare.

Should you need to be a statistician to navigate the medical literature? Aren't the clinical studies that drive evidence-based medicine meant to be consumed by clinicians and informed researchers?

Health literacy measures the ability to comprehend, evaluate, and negotiate the data to make informed healthcare decisions. Although we tend to think of health literacy as central to societal concerns, numeracy crosses both professional and patient populations. For example, peer-reviewed clinical research often discusses risk-benefit analyses without the clarification that “risk” is defined as both benefits and harms. How do we calculate the harms of treatment to arrive at an informed clinical decision central to the patient’s best interests, values, and wishes?

How does numeracy influence standard care? What does the data show us about screening healthy individuals upstream from actual medical necessity? What do the “results” in technical medical literature really tell us? Is the message scrambled by the media? We can’t consistently blame the pharmaceutical industry. They don’t write the prescriptions—doctors do. Let’s improve numeracy in medicine.

Other Formats: Paperback

This title and over 1 million more available with Kindle Unlimited.

5 Sources for the Right Healthcare Data: Bigger isn't Always Better (Content Media and Analytics Book 1) Apr 28, 2015

by Bonny McClain

( 1 )

$7.99

A curated topic-specific book to help identify potential sources of freely available healthcare data for content media, white papers, blogs, brand or content marketing, funding proposals, or be-spoke content creation.

Data is everywhere and it seems that everyone has a handle on this new source of useable information—but do they? In healthcare especially much of the data is behind a firewall, proprietary and/or access is monetized as part of a business model or opportunity. Perhaps there are glimpses here and there visible at conferences or embedded in news articles but what do you do if you would like to analyze your own data?

Unless you have deep pockets and can afford the industry data access it isn’t likely that you are going to want to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to access IMS data, a leader in the billion dollar pharmaceutical data industry.

I observed my bookshelf and although I have quite a few books about healthcare data I rely on only a chapter here and there from each book. That is where the idea for short chapter books specific to a business need was generated. I curated the most frequent questions from my blog at www.dataanddonuts.org and created a publication strategy for short topics as an introduction and a quick how-to resource. This format is also easily updated and can be integrated into a curated series based on your own level and interests.

Let’s see where we can find some useful data for our proposals, websites, corporate blogs, brand content, and digital communication strategies.

Other Formats: Paperback

This title and over 1 million more available with Kindle Unlimited.

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