Here’s your prescription. Don’t drive if you take it. Call your surgeon if you have a temperature or are worried about anything. See your doctor in two weeks. Want a flu shot? If you need a wheelchair to take you to the door, I’ll call. If not, you can go. Take care of yourself. You’ll do great!”

These were my nurse’s parting words before I left the hospital after a weeklong stay and surgery to remove my stomach and the tumor in it. I said goodbye. Then I panicked. What did I need to know about my new digestive system? What about that big scar? Until then I’d been closely monitored and checked on every 90 minutes.

Now it was 8:45 in the morning. My husband hadn’t arrived. I was supposed to move on.

Jessie Gruman

That’s the start of our July Viewpoint column, “Preparing Patients to Care for Themselves,” written by Jessie Gruman, president and founder of the the Center for Advancing Health, a nonpartisan policy institute that’s played an important role in the growing patient engagement movement.

In this essay and elsewhere, Gruman draws on her own experience as a cancer patient as well as her public health expertise to bring insight and clarity to the often nebulous concept […]