Carolyn Oliver, M.D., J.D., is a tireless champion of patient rights, advocacy and empowerment. As founder of the Cautious Patient Foundation, she is committed to educating and empowering patients in their quest for quality healthcare, using her expertise in both medicine and law. With its family of educational programs and technology-based tools, Cari and the Cautious Patient Foundation are working to ensure that people are engaged and proactive in managing their health and healthcare providers.

Driven by a significant change in her philosophy about medicine and patient care, Cari started a non-profit organization in 2004 called PatientAlwaysFirst, and volunteered her time and money to fund a clinic where she saw financially disadvantaged patients who often had no insurance. In 2006, she led the non-profit to a more universal purpose of educating people on how to obtain better healthcare, providing tools that they could use to get better healthcare and worked to educate them on being more participatory and careful in their interactions with physicians. This arm of PatientAlwaysFirst is called the Cautious Patient Foundation (www.CautiousPatient.org).

A 1977 graduate of the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas, with an M.D., Cari lives in Texas with her husband of 26 years and is an avid tennis player. She has three sons, all in their twenties.

After graduating from the U of T in Galveston in 1977, Cari undertook her post-graduate training at Central Texas Medical Foundation in Austin, Texas, concentrating in Internal Medicine, with some Family Medicine electives. She subsequently worked in emergency medicine before setting up a general medical practice in Katy, Texas, where she saw families for acute and chronic care medical problems. She continued her full-time practice until the birth of her second child, and then worked part-time. She also volunteered for the City of Houston and several charitable medical entities while her children were young.

During this time, Cari was undergoing a significant change in her philosophy about medicine and patient care. While in private practice, outside the confines of academic medicine, she noticed a lack of quality and attentiveness to care being given to many patients. She also observed a profit motive that some physicians succumbed to as they treated patients, the inefficient, costly and oftentimes outmoded practices of many doctors and the lack of the patient awareness of these things.  She witnessed innocent patients trusting in the medical system, and not getting good care, but Cari didn’t know of a way to bring this to the public’s attention or how to solve the problem.

In the quest for answers and with the hope there would be a legal way to affect change, Cari earned a law degree in 1999 from South Texas College of Law, Houston, Texas with a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree. Unfortunately, she found no suitable legal solution to impact change.

Through Patient Always First and the Cautious Patient Foundation, Cari has:

• Provided a free personal health record tool for public use
  (PatientAlwaysFirst Health Record at www.pfhr.org);
• Produced a television pilot called Misdiagnosed, about real patients
  who have suffered because of mismanaged and misdiagnosed
  healthcare with advice on how to help others avoid those same problems;
• Founded an education center focusing on practical solutions to help patients
  get better medical care (the Oliver Center for Patient Safety and Quality HealthCare
  at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas);
• Written a book – Cautious Care: A Guide for Patients – outlining all of the ways that
  she’s seen patients taken advantage of (and/or instances where doctors are not
  providing “good enough” care), and how patients can act to prevent those things
  from happening to them and their loved ones;
• Suggested and funded several Texas Family Practice Foundation programs
  on ethical care; and,
• Rolled out a new software service called YourDoctorsAdvice.org, which allows
  patients to make and record verbal notes to themselves at the end of their
  doctor’s visit by dialing up a toll-free number and then having that
  information saved and accessible from their home computer.