eHealth » Health 2.0

What am I working on? Check my Bookmarks

John Sharp — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 04:22:25 +0000

I am glad that Delicious is still around and being enhanced. I have used it for years to organize and tag my bookmarks. Now with almost 1200 bookmarks and several hundred tags, I often search my links to find a resource for a presentation or article. Recent links include:

West Wireless Health Institute which has a good handle on new care delivery models
Secondary Uses Service, description and and access. | The NHS Information Centre - glad to see the National Health Services is utilizing EMR data for quality and research
National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences or NCATS - the new NIH center replacing the NCRR which inlcudes the Clinical and Translational Science Awards which I am now a part of
A post on O’Reilly Radar - Epatients: The hackers of the healthcare world
Eye on FDA - the new FDA blog
CIRD – Partners HealthCare Clinical Informatics R & D

So while links may be low on the priority list in social media with many more dynamic and “sexy” like Twitter and Facebook, Delicious has its place and does allow followers, RSS feeds and other social media features.

So if you are interested in what I am working on, my Delicious may give you a clue.

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More on Health Apps

John Sharp — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 02:32:59 +0000

The Mobile Health LaunchPad will be announce winners who will pitch their products on September 19. They want apps that are more than content, in an early stage and ones that can actualize utilize capital.

The Blue Button initiative from the VA will award $50,000 for a non’government provider to add the Blue Button on a PHR website or create a PHR with one. The blue button is a function to allow patients to download their medical records. Submissions open until Oct. 19th.

The Cleveland Clinic announced a incubator for Health Care Apps. This according to according to Scott Linabarger, the Clinic’s director of Internet marketing, speaking at the World Congress Leadership Summit on mHealth.

Jen McCabe is making news with combine HealthMonth and Contagion Health to make a new company, Habit Labs. She even got attention on TechCrunch for funding from Y Combinator.

Health apps are popping up everywhere. Hoping that the market will sort out or create aggregators to manage our health with multiple tools. Health apps are eclipsing PHRs. The future looks promising.

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Rock Health Report on the State of Digital Health

John Sharp — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 01:51:24 +0000

Rock Health has a great slideshare on their survey of health tech startups including the status of funding for Health 2.0 companies.

Rock Report: State of Digital Health

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Health Apps and Real Time Consults

John Sharp — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:23:01 +0000

There was more on the FDAs decision about health apps today. According to an informative blog post by Brian Dolan on MobileHealth News, the FDA will not regulate most apps. Some specific use cases for apps that won’t be regulated include:

“that are electronic “copies” of medical textbooks, teaching aids or reference materials
“that are solely used to log, record, track, evaluate, or make decisions or suggestions related to developing or maintaining general health and wellness.
“that only automate general office operations with functionalities that include billing, inventory, appointments, or insurance transactions.
“that are generic aids that assist users but are not commercially marketed for a specific medical indication”

As always with the FDA, the concern is how the app influences treatment.

Also announced was the real time iConsult where physician users can “consult” in real time with specialist and others and include photos and xrays in the request. Sounds like twitter consult but more secure.

In a 2010 post by @Berci Mesko, he notes doing consults via Twitter:

What would I do if	in 2000	Now
I need clinical answer	Try to find a collegue who knows it	Post a question on Twitter
I want to hear patient story about a specific condition	Try to find a patient in my town	Read blogs, watch Youtube
I want to be up-to-date	Go to the library once a week	Use RSS and follow hundreds of journals
I want to work on a manuscript with my team	We gather around the table	Use Google Docs without geographical limits

My take is that most physicians are concerned about doing this but early adopters can share their successes and issues for the others.

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Health App Development and Innovation

John Sharp — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 02:54:52 +0000

Two quick notes:

HHS kicks off $5M ‘i2′ Health IT app development program – contracts awarded for this, more innovation opportunities looking to:

Allow an individual to securely and effectively share health information with members of his or her social network.
Provide patients, caregivers and/or clinicians access to rigorous and relevant information that can support real needs and immediate decisions.
Allow individuals to connect during natural disasters and other periods of emergency.
Facilitate exchange of health information while allowing individuals to customize the privacy allowances for their personal health records.

Also announced, the Cleveland Clinic Medical Pavilion on Innocentive and the first challenge posted.

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Google Health Ending – Not Having Broad Impact Expected

John Sharp — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 01:46:02 +0000

Google announced today on its official blog that it is retiring or phasing out Google Health. Stating that it’s original goal was to “our goal was to create a service that would give people access to their personal health and wellness information” using their focus on the consumer, they found a lack of the broad adoption they expected. I was there at HIMSS in 2008 when Google Health was announced by Eric Schmit and Roni Zeiger doing a demo.

They admit that “There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts.” But not enough adoption to make it worthwhile to keep the shop open. They are provide means for users to export their data by January 1, 2012.

Already bloggers are busy speculating on why Google Health failed to gain traction.

Not understanding the healthcare market, especially the challenges of working with payers
Lack of partnerships with physicians
Not partnering with device companies as early as Microsoft did
Lack of incentives to use it
Lack of a means to securely communicate with providers
Not being tethered to EMRs with a few exceptions like Cleveland Clinic.

The reasons can go on and on. But overall, how widely have PHRs been adopted. Seen initially as a disruptive technology, but lack of trust and understand of its value by consumers has led to sluggish adoption overall. How successful is Microsoft HealthVault, Dossia and others? How about PHRs sponsored by payers? It appears that healthcare consumers are stronger adopters of social media and wellness tools and not PHRs.

So where do we go from here? Even the ePatient movement and Quantified Self are not generally strong adopters. If Google Health is worth saving, how about asking Google to hand it over to an open source community to maintain and enhance. In some cases, open source projects can gain more traction that productions by large Silicon Valley companies.

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The Healthcare Social Media Landscape

John Sharp — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 02:33:37 +0000

Here is a slide show I created reflecting on the different communities developing in this space. Although each emerged on its own, there is certainly collaborative projects and people across these communities and a sense of mutual support. I myself attended the first Health 2.0 conference, then Medicine 2.0 and also part of the e-Patient community. More conferences occur each year both in the US and Europe; two recent examples are TEDx Maastricht which had a health focus and Doctors 2.0 taking place later this month in Paris. Also, the Quantified Self movement is coming to health care as well.

I’d be interested in other’s opinions on this.

Health care social media communities

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Promoting Healthcare Innovation through Challenges

John Sharp — Wed, 18 May 2011 20:06:14 +0000

Innovation in healthcare is now pervasive. To continue the wave of innovation, hospitals can now earn new incentives based on competitions. These are government-sponsored, industry-sponsored challenges, and even have the potential for becoming business ventures. Here are some competitions hospitals can enter to help expand industry innovation:

Health Challenges at Challenge.gov – These include video challenges, National Library of Medicine apps, Flu apps and more. Many offer monetary rewards.
Health 2.0 Developer Challenge – Developed by the Health 2.0 Conference folks, this includes online challenges and live competitions including a Code-a-Thon which most recently occurred in February A Code-a-Thon is a day long competition to build an application. Winners included a meta-analysis engine, Healthy people 2020 tracker, and an epidemic finder.
Veterans Affairs Innovation Initiative (VAi2) – This includes everything from equipment sterilization, blue button technology, prosthetics and rehabilitation. It encourages submissions from its own employees, as well as healthcare industry leaders.

A new player in this arena is Innocentive, an online business built around challenge-driven innovation. While not specifically focused on healthcare, it does have a Global Health Pavilion, featuring challenges from cell biology to caregiver communities. These challegnes promote the idea of an Open Innovation Marketplace, which is the topic of its new book.

For each of these healthcare challenge websites, the basic concept is open innovation. By utilizing competition for a financial reward, the government, an NGO, a private sector company and healthcare providers can generate low cost solutions. But the inventor/innovator needs to keep in mind their intellectual property rights if these are not spelled out clearly up front.

Nonetheless , the potential for healthcare innovation and problem solving are yet to be measured. Perhaps someone will some develop a site or app which aggregates these challenges and their successful solutions. Aggregation of healthcare innovation challenges would help inventors find opportunities which are sprouting up from government, conferences and corporations.

This post was originally published on Hospital Impact on May 18, 2011.

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Social Media Moving into Healthcare’s Mainstream

John Sharp — Tue, 03 May 2011 02:10:00 +0000

TuDiabetes Study

Two articles today demonstrate the growth of influence in social media in the healthcare arena.

The first is a research article about TuDiabetes.org 15,000 members on PLosONE permitting data donation to measure H1c in diabetics to demonstrate a model for cohort and translational science and for use as a complementary surveillance approach. This research combined with a recent study of PatientsLikeMe demonstrate the potential power of utilizing patient reported results and outcomes as a research tool.

The second article appears in the Archives of Internal Medicine, “Professionalism in the Digital Age.” Get a copy of the full version if you can. It represents a positive approach to social media for physicians and other healthcare providers while noting some cautions, such as, the difficulty of separating personal from professional in social media. The article does not recommend social media as a means of communicating with patients but unlike some recent articles, does not discourage its use.

“The development of a “dual-citizenship” approach to online social media that separates public and private personae would allow physicians to both leverage networks for professional connections and maintain privacy in other aspects. Although social media posts by physicians enable direct communication with readers, all posts should be considered public and special consideration for patient privacy is necessary.”

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The Rise of Social Media & Participatory Medicine

John Sharp — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:53:03 +0000

Read my latest iHealthbeat Perspective on this topic. The rise of the ePatient feeds off of social media tools.

Two points I would like to reinforce:

every patient with a chronic or life-threatening condition is a member of an online community – they just need to join
social media sites are become a routine source of information on managing one’s disease and engaging one’s physician.

The members of the Society for Participatory Medicine are taking the lead in this area. To read a more extensive treatment, read the e-Patient Whitepaper and the works of Susanna Fox, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn and others. This movement is very dynamic and making strides into the practice of medicine.

This opinion piece was inspired by attending TEDxMaastricht – the videos tell the story of how social media technology is enabling participatory medicine.

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