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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The Quantified Self, ePatients and Participatory Medicine
December 29, 2009
Kevin Kelly has posted “The Quantified Self, Tools for knowing yourself and your body” which links to a more extensive paper entitled, “A Billion Little Experiments,” The concept of the Quantified Self points to patient empowerment and specifically ePatient activism which takes control of one’s health or illness by understanding one’s body and its processes. It seems that communities, such as, PatientsLikeMe and OrganizedWisdom, provide a real opportunity for quantifying life and sharing that life in real time. Quantifying the self opens the door to participatory medicine – by knowing yourself, you can engage your physician in a dialog on what you know about your body. We are a billion little experiments.
I hope that the concept of the Quantified Self becomes part of the medical lexicon along with ePatients and participatory medicine.
