It is time to “flip the clinic.”  Patients with multi-system disorders of regulation, such as dysautonomias, should have more power and responsibility to manage their own health.  Flip the clinic addresses this need.  It is where patients and health care practitioners improve medical care together.

Flipping the clinic is an attempt to achieve two goals.  The first goal is to empower patients, family, and caregivers to be more informed and engaged in their own health and healthcare.  The second goals is to enable healthcare providers to improve the ways they communicate with patients and support them better during and between office visits.    This new mindset requires two essentials:

1. A health care provider and patient who are willing to work together in managing the treatment plan.
2. A patient who is willing to learn about their dysautonomia and monitor their own symptoms.

Monitoring your own symptoms can be as simple as keeping a list of symptoms experienced on a notepad to as complex as recording daily symptoms and severities using a formal symptom monitoring application such as the “Symple Symptom Tracker” or other symptom tracking tool which can produce sharable reports with your doctor about how your symptoms vary from day to day.

At the Dysautonomia Project we recommend patients work with their health care providers in a collaborative way and learn as much as they can about autonomic disorders because education is the number one form of treatment.

*Flip the Clinic is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program to improve the patient-clinician experience through collaboration.