Posts Tagged ‘Health 2.0’
Appropriate Use of Social Media in Healthcare Organizations
April 14, 2011
A question during a presentation on social media in healthcare about the appropriate use of social media in patient care areas. Social media can be an effective tool for engaging patients online. But what about the use of social media in patient care areas. Should nurses, physicians and other healthcare providers be online interacting with colleagues or family during active patient care? With busy clinics and busier hospital units and greater concern about patient safety, is there time for what administrators might view as a distraction? Would you want your nurse to be updating Facebook while you are waiting for post-op pain medication? Yet there may be some advantages to direct caregivers utilizing social media. How about the oncology nurse interacting with the cancer patient discharged last week? Or nurses within a hospital exchanging ideas about improving patient safety? Yet stories of abusive use of social media in health care persist.
Clear answers are hard to come by. Each hospital will need to develop its own policy and implementation of that policy in the use of social media in patient care environments. But when face time with the patient is the highest priority, social media may need to take a back seat.
Slides are here:
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TEDxMaastricht – Hope in technology and participatory medicine
April 7, 2011
April 4 in Maastricht, Netherlands, was an event full of optimism but not simply about how technology can transform healthcare. Lucien Engelen envisioned this conference as about health, not healthcare and full participation by the patient as an equal partner. To what extent was this accomplished?
The answer is in much of what was said:
- health as homeostasis rather than disease and cure
- you can’t outsource your health
- inforgs -by Luciano Floridi
- society has seen the separation passion and profitability
- in education ere are too many questions for faculty to answer, students must be full participants
- use of a flight simulator as a safety team building tool
- add travel history to your personal health record
- singularity – artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, implantables, genomics, robotics, regenerative medicine
- the shock of the possible – unexpected connections
- doing the impossible – climbing a mountain six times, curing cancer in 10 years
- everyone with a chronic disease is part of a community, they just need to be invited and join
- integrate Google Body with personal health records
- Recognizing healthcare failures and learning from them
- reducing fear of disease, hospital, blindness, etc. As a major goal of a medical practice
Although these quotes may not be exact or make up a coherent whole, the point is that creative optimism gouged by new, openly available technology like social media, can be transformational now.
This was no less true than the patient stories heard throughout the day of facing disease but triumphing over it through community (often online) and hope.
As I process this event, watch for more posts on these themes.
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Year in Review – Books of 2010
December 31, 2010
Following Kent Bottle’s lead in influential books in 2010, I decided to compose my own list:
- Chasing Medical Miracles The Promise and Perils of Clinical Trials. Tells it like it is – to be a participant in a clinical trial.
- Googled-The End of the World as We Know It – somewhat disappointing in that it discussed the advertising side of the business and less about the history of its technical evolution.
- DIYU: Epunks, Edupeneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. This book was recommended by a speaker at the J. Boye conference in Philadelphia. Questions the future viability of universities as they are undermined by Web 2.0 technology.
- Leading Geeks – Required reading for anyone who manages geeks, especially programmers. Helpful for anyone to understand the culture of geekdom, understanding the mindset of managing ambiguity and tearing down some stereotypes.
- The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil – mind blowing futurism and undying optimism in technology even though this is from 2005 and 650 pages. The law of accelerating returns puts us on a fast track to the future. I am now following Kurweil’s Accelerating Intelligence blog.
- A Little Booklet About Health 2.0 – by Lucien Engelen. Brief but advancing health 2.0 concepts with a peak to the future from a European perspective.
- Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More – this lead to my blog post on Partnerships with Online Communities – The Long Tail, discussing some of the implications of the long tail in healthcare.
- The Collapse of Complex Societies – a venture into history and anthropology which I enjoy and blogged about: Declining Marginal Returns of Complexity
- Laugh, Sing and Eat Like a Pig by e-Patient Dave – a personal, signed gift from Dave himself when he visited Cleveland and had dinner with us.
- Connected for Health: The KP HealthConnect Story – Probably the best story of successful implementation of an EMR on a large scale basis with honest, realistic discussion of struggles and successes.
- Program or Be Programmed – Ten Commandments of the Digital Age – read appropriately as an ebook, makes some good points without being paranoid about technology’s growing role in our lives.
- The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can be Done About It. Recommended by @Ciscoiii when visiting the World Bank in Washington, DC. Excellent analysis of failed states with recommendations at the UN level for solutions.
- Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom – found this in Philadelphia at the Liberty Bell bookstore.
One on my shelf is Reading in the Brain: the New Science of How We Read.
More book reviews to come next year and many more will be on my Sony Reader.
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Innovative Informatics for Clinical and Translational Researchers
October 18, 2010
On Friday, I attended this symposium sponsored by the National Center for Research Resources of the National Institutes of Health where the meeting was held. The symposium presented some of the latest software development for supporting research in academic medical centers. Topic areas included:
- Data Repositories for Research
- Participant Recruitment Tools and Strategies
- Clinical Information Systems and Research Study Management Systems
- Research Portal Innovations
Some highlights include
- i2b2 as a data repository (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside)
- REDCap for research study management (Research Electronic Data Capture) – used in over 160 centers
- Vivo – enabling scientific collaboration – an impressive development using semantic technology.
The scope of these technologies are impressive and on the cusp of enabling great strides in medical research. Through the NIH and CTSA grant process, this parallel development to the Health 2.0 startup process is ongoing. When will these academic tools converge with the Health 2.0 and social media explosion to transform medicine together?
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Social Media in Health Care – Latest Presentation
October 4, 2010
This is more of an introductory presentation I gave at Toledo Hospital for social workers, including information on hospital policies, prescribing social media to patients, and some of the risks of social media. At the end of the presentation, I discussed the dilemma of managing the professional and personal identities. Links to website mentioned are on Delicious.com
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Social Media Season
September 28, 2010
It must be Fall because the conference season is ramping up. Two social media conferences going on at the same time:
- ePatient 2010 in Philadelphia with the likes of ePatient Dave and Susannah Fox
- Health Care Social Media Summit in Jacksonville, Fl
Notable is the announcement by Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands and the Mayo Clinic of a Global Social Media Health Network.
All of this reflects the maturity of the healthcare social media, ePatient and Health 2.0 community. A kind of convergence is occurring bringing technology to the focus on the patient with full participation of the epatient. Greater attention by mainstream media and the scientific community is only accelerating the movement – see last week’s Scientific American Pathways article, “The Rise of the Empowered Patient“, which quotes Lucien Engelen of Radboud University among others. Can this convergence be sustained? Will the enthusiasm and energy be focused to create real change in healthcare? This level of optimism can only do good.
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Impact of Accelerating Technologies
September 23, 2010
Singularity University is teaching the importance of accelerating technologies. It is teaching its students “to take advantage of exponential growth trends in order to create global change.” Salim Ismail, CEO of SU points out that many startups turn into billion dollar businesses in ever shortening time frames, sometimes as little as two years. And he says that many of the technologies we are learning today will be outdated by the time they are completed.
How will we manage this accelerated growth in technology? Is there anyway to keep abreast of it? Will only rapid development approaches be successful in the near term? What about legacy systems (like many EMRs) which take years to upgrade? Maybe events like the upcoming Health 2.o Hackathon will be the real future of healthcare technology.
What the Singularity video here:
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Health 2.0 – a Double Dutch Treat
June 30, 2010
Lucien Engelen of Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL, and his team (Tom Van De Belt is the first author) have struck two goals in the world cup of Health 2.0. In the Journal of Medical Internet Research, they have published “Definition of Health 2.0 and Medicine 2.0: A Systematic Review.” This broad review of published literature and blogs included a post by me and many others. They note no consensus on these definitions but some recurring themes:
- Web 2.0/technology
- patients
- professionals
- social networking
- health information/content
- collaboration
- health care change.
The second publication is “A Little Booklet About Health 2.0“, originally available in Dutch, now in English for the Kindle, soon to have an English paper edition. This modest title provides a good introduction to Health 2.0 for beginners and those who may have concerns about venturing into this growing field. It is a quick read and dives right into the key topics, using the example of MyCareNet, an innovative interactive platform for IVF patients and providers and leads us to the concept of participatory healthcare and bringing in the patient’s perspective on service design.
These two publications demonstrate some of the growing Dutch leadership in Health 2.0 which will culminate in the Medicine 2.0 conference in Maastricht this November and the TEDxMaastricht program.
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Partnerships with Online Communities – The Long Tail
June 4, 2010
Chris Anderson in writing Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, popularized this concept particularly in viewing markets in the wired world. How does it apply to health care? Probably in many ways. But specifically it came to mind in thinking about the relationship of provider organizations like hospitals and online communities. While many online communities may attract large numbers, for instance, in diabetes and breast cancer, many more condition specific communities are relatively small even though they may have a national or international scope. Gilles Frydman of ACOR recognized this early by encouraging the proliferation of online communities through his listserv.
Provider organizations are moving into social media but struggling to identify meaningful ways to connect with their patients through Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps the struggle has to do with a broad stroke strategy of trying to appeal to all comers. The real opportunity is in the Long Tail of small online communities who know the best hospitals, information sources, physicians for their disease or condition and talk to each other about it all the time. Certainly PatientsLikeMe.com has found this in the specialize community of ALS and others like it have found the value in the long tail. What about groups like Marfan Syndrome or others that fall under the umbrella of the National Organization of Rare Diseases (NORD). Specialist who treat these diseases in the long tail of healthcare have a unique opportunity to become online partners potentially contributing to blogs, social networks or listservs and inviting patients to post blogs about their experiences on the hospital’s blog or Facebook page. There are many possibilities to explore – meetups, suggestions for improving care – hope to see some take up this challenge.
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Technology and the Future of Chronic Care
May 24, 2010
Accenture has published a report on “Connected How Technology Will Transform the Future of Chronic Care.” From the Accenture Innovation Center for Health, a good source for research white papers. The paper reports that “a broad range of consumer health electronics at home, a two-way, direct-to-consumer infrastructure” and smart devices which set the stage for health care connectivity. Analytics and predictive modeling provide a second layer and visualization, decision support and collaboration provide the third. Connect health examples include the HealthVault and Cleveland Clinic home monitoring pilot and a remote monitoring trial by the VA system.
There is no doubt that the convergence of technologies have the potential for revolutionizing chronic care, however, we must go past the pilot stage and initial startups to broader change. Partnerships between consumer electronics, startups, providers and insurers need to come together with government support. Perhaps after the first wave of meaningful use EHRs, this new level of innovation can flourish.
