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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Barriers to Health 2.0
December 13, 2007
According to part two of the series on Health 2.0 in Modern Healthcare, barrier to Health 2.0 include: an age gap (Health 2.0 appeals to a younger demographic) and privacy according to David Brailer. Privacy is a big concern because these sites are not covered by HIPAA and contain lots of private health information although one’s identity can be hidden. Even without creating an account in sites such as, PatientsLikeMe.com, one can view detail about symptom status and drugs for individuals with ALS, MS and Parkinsons. But this appears to be a trade off many patients are willing to take.
Can these site be hacked? Have they already? To what extent are they being using for targeted advertising?
One can only hope that users read the site usage policies before plunging into revealing their disease status.
