Interview of Matthew Holt by Missy Krasner – Great Combination
February 12, 2009
On the Disruptive Women in Health Care blog, Missy interviews Matthew on, what else, Health 2.0 – defining it, discussing the long tail, and what this means in health care. How is Health 2.0 disruptive? Search, social network and tools – he gives some examples of each.
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HIMSS eHealth SIG to present on PHRs
February 11, 2009
The Webex will occur on Wednesday, February 18, 2009 at 3pm EST. They made a good choice of presenters:
- Wes Rishel, VP and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner, Inc.
- Matt Guldin, Product Manager, HealthNet, former Industry Analyst with Frost & Sullivan
I’ve known Matt for some time now – he brings a broad perspective on this and, of course, Gartner always has its hands on the pulse of things.
If you are interested in attending, contact Ben Dillion at ben.dillon@geonetric.com.
The HIMSS eHealth Special Interest Group will also meet in person at the Annual HIMSS conference in Chicago. The meeting will be Monday, April 6, 2009 from 1:00 – 2:30pm at the Hyatt Conference Center in room 12AB. The topic is “Health 2.0.” Watch this blog for more info. I will be there.
Share this:The State of Physician Social Networks
February 9, 2009
In a new report from Manhattan Research discusses the adoption of social networks by physicians. Clearly there is growth in the number of these networks available which potentially dilutes their impact. The survey showed about 60% of physicians were interested in social networks and 40% not. Sermo and Medscape Physician Connect have 100,000 each but it is unclear how many of these are duplicates or active users. With any social network, the effectiveness can be measured by the activity rather than shear numbers of members.
Participating members were more likely to be:
- primary care physicians;
- female;
- Own a PDA or smartphone;
- Go online during or between patient consultations; and
- slightly younger than the average physician.
To me, the most unique finding is that the participation of female physicians. I haven’t heard any previous report focusing on female physician participation on social networks. This topic is worth more research.
Share this:PHRs going way of online banking?
February 8, 2009
According to Roni Zeiger of Google Health, PHRs may follow the pattern of online banking. Speaking at the Towards an Electronic Patient Record conference, he predicted that like the early suspicions about online banking and now general acceptance, a similar adoption of PHRs will occur as consumers find utility in the tools which are available. He rejected the idea that stronger privacy laws will bring wider adoption. He also notes the concerns of physicians interacting with PHRs – if they are going to view patient data from these, it needs to be simple and fit into their current workflow of information.
While we’re not there yet, the is some progress in adoption and he emphasized Google’s long term commitment to this initiative.
Health Care Summit Conversations
January 28, 2009
A major summit begins tomorrow in Florida on health care reform. With Donna Shalala moderating, this summit. There will be a dedicated topic on Health Information Technology with one of the key speakers C. Martin Harris of the Cleveland Clinic. The conference website notes the recent Rand Corporation study stating,
“that properly implemented and widely adopted, HIT would save money and significantly improve health care quality. Annual savings from efficiency alone could be $77 billion or more, and health and safety benefits could double savings while reducing illness and prolonging life.”
Will this conference result in a general consensus on health care reform which can be implemented by the new administration?
A webcast will be available at 630pm EST.
Share this:Twitter for Healthcare
January 18, 2009
Phil Baumann has posted 140 uses of Twitter for healthcare. He does preface the list with challenges including privacy and the oath to do no harm. Yet his main point is the true potential for innovation using microblogging in healthcare.
It reminded me that my hospital has used text paging actively for years through the phone directory lookup, anyone can send a text page. But with the growing pervalence of smart phones, email and twitter are becoming more prevalent.
Two-way paging never caught on. The transition to smart phones has mostly meant a greater dependence on email. How to make the shift to Twitter’s possibilities in an organization that blocks YouTube and Facebook? As with blogs, the innovation will need to be outside of the official channels with individuals as champions on new technology by demonstrating its usefulness.
Perhaps I’m as optimistic as Phil. The outcome remains to be seen.
Share this:Web 2.0 as a Disruptive Technology
January 8, 2009
Imitation as a form of flattery – on SlideShare, Len Starnes has picked up on one of my slides on Web 2.0 in Health Care on disruptive technology. See the embedded slide show, slide #8 showing some of the similarities between healthcare organizations and pharma in terms of being risk adverse, requiring long lead times and intellectual property being closely guarded vs. Web 2.0 values.
Later in the presentation, there is a discussion of Wiks, “Doctors like wikis” and “Wikis can streamline project management.”
I am glad that pharma is adopting Web 2.0 strategies and I hope it will lead to listening to consumers and providers rather then just marketing to them.
Share this:Hospital Social Networking
January 8, 2009
Ed Bennett of the University of Maryland has put together a very comprehensive list of social networking sites hosted by hospitals including their use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. YouTube looks like the most common but many are moving forward with Twitter. Some have clearer strategies with Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools than others. Most are using Twitter for health advice, others as an abbreviated version of press releases. It remains to be seen where this will go in the future – how it might be used in emergency communication (MD Anderson during the hurricane) or employee communication.
Once hospitals begin to really exploit smart phones, the possibilities are endless except for the limitation of paying attention to patients first.
Share this:Twitter in Healthcare
January 2, 2009
Twitter’s popularity continues to grow. My main use for Twitter is hearing and sharing the latest trends in Health 2.0. It began at the Medicine 2.0 Congress with several people actively twittering during the conference and afterward. Since then my blogging has suffered as my activity on Twitter has increased.
John Halamka has posted about his adoption of Twitter on The Health Care Blog. He concludes that:
“then I’ve met my goal of overcommunicating with all my stakeholders to ensure they understand my strategy, priorities, and important healthcare IT news of the day.”
I am not sure overcommunicating is an appropriate goal for me. Hoping for some efficiencies in the near future as a result of social network aggregators like FriendFeed improve and offer new features.
Share this:Patient-centered Care – Let citizens manage their health
December 21, 2008
In a well-written post about the problem with healthcare, Dr. Kenneth H. Cohn talks about his recent personal experience with a medical problem while he was between PCPs. Sounds like a nightmare but that’s what too much of healthcare is today. Specifically, he identifies these problems as presented by the Health Finance Forum:
- The (non)-system does not encourage social benefit, such as access to care.
- It does not reward wellness or high-quality care.
- It creates financial instability by adding cost and complexity to health administration, rewarding high-cost practices and focusing on expensive sickness-focused interventions rather than wellness.
He suggests some solutions:
- Stop the insurance company micromanagement; it adds not only cost and complexity
- Let citizens manage their health with their physicians through a variety of channels, such as website interactions that do not force us to drive to our doctor’s office for prescriptions when we are in acute pain and know what we need to do to recover.
- Design systems using interdependent, rather than fragmented, processes, that improve patients’ healthcare outcomes, rather than tolerating arbitrary rules that exist for the convenience of insurers.
Great ideas – read the whole post.
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