John Sharp is an IT Manager for a major medical center in Northeast Ohio. Areas of expertise include: ehealth, personal health records, Web 2.0 technologies, social media and project management. He is active in the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society and the American Medical Informatics Association. The opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author.
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Another Article on Patient Web Pages
October 2, 2006
This time from USA Today including citations of Carepages and others. “Mehring’s non-profit service is called
CaringBridge and is supported largely through donations, plus some hospital sponsors. The Langshurs’ for-profit service is called CarePages and has licensing agreements with about 500 health care facilities, including top-tier hospitals such as the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic. The participating hospitals add their logos to patients’ pages and get other benefits — including exposure to potential donors. Another service is theStatus.com.
“Though details differ, all the services allow anyone with computer access — in or outside a hospital — to quickly, at
no charge, set up a Web page to post updates and receive messages.
“One important feature: These highly personal sites aren’t detectable by search engines. Users can restrict who sees
them — or broadcast access information as widely as they like.”
Again, security and privacy in the context of social networking is key to the success and boarder adoption of these tools.
