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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Posts Tagged ‘Health 2.0’
Updated Blog with Updated Thoughts
December 27, 2009
Thanks to my daughter, I have moved my blog to WordPress and have an updated skin. This will certainly encourage me to post more frequently in the new year. The focus of my posts in the coming year will include:
- e-Patients, participatory medicine and particularly the lethal lag time in research
- Health 2.0 specifically research related tools both for patients and providers
- eHealth and its convergence with Health 2.0, mHealth and telemedicine
- health policy issues including comparative effectiveness research and medical home, two key directions in research and policy
What for changes to the blog as I get used to WordPress and add widgets which are helpful to my readers.
Thanks for reading and share your thoughts about the new year in ehealth and Health 2.0.
Convergence of PHRs and Social Networking
December 3, 2009
In an article titled “Socialize Medicine:How Personal Health Records and Social Networks Are Changing Healthcare“, Darin Stewart traces the parallel growth of social networking for health conditions and personal health records. He notes the important role of family health manager (aka, mom) in healthcare being transformed through PHRs. Yet I see also a family internet health manager who may search for health content for a newly diagnosed condition in the family and also search online health communities for support. But can Google Health and Microsoft Health Vault and other full-feature PHRs including provider supported PHRs integrate social networks like PatientsLikeMe.com and 23andMe.com. The article proposes that signs like the 20,000 downloads of downloads of the HealthVault software development kit. With the amount of innovation in the Health 2.0 space, he may be right.
Interview for Significant Science
November 6, 2009
Having met Hope Leman at Medicine 2.0, I was impressed with her Scan Grants website. Hope asked me for an interview for her new blog Significant Science. Who could refuse to be a part of significant science.
The interview appeared today. It made me think about how my thinking about the web has evolved from early websites in the 1990s through more interactive web applications to this age of social media. Social media in health care is evolving quickly as more join the experience and some push the envelope.
Journal of Participatory Medicine Launched
October 21, 2009
The Journal of Participatory Medicine was lauched today with a webinar by ePatient Dave. The webinar, titled “How Great EHRs can Empower Participatory Medicine” included a quote from my blog post stating that “If you hav, not read the e-Patient White Paper, you do not understand the future of medicine.”
On a related note, Roni Zeiger of Google Health posted on Huffington Post “Mission: Transform the Culture of Medicine.” He notes that ” Participatory Medicine is a new approach that encourages and expects active patient involvement in all aspects of care.
In a more surprising development, ePatient Dave notes in today’s post a quote by Marcia Angell, MD, previously of the New England Journal of Medicine, stating “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical
research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted
physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in
this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two
decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” This bombshell is part of an article by her from earlier this year titled, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption” Dave calls this A quote I won’t soon forget.
How is this connected with paticipatory medicine and epatients? Perhaps a shift a trust from traditional culture of medicine to one which is patient-focused and patient driven rather than driven by money.
Stakeholders in Health 2.0 Innovation
October 20, 2009
One question I received at the Health 2.0 conference in the Netherlands (Reshape 2009) was about stakeholders in Health 2.0 initiatives. Stakeholders in any project depend on the project scope and potential impact. So the potential stakeholders include:
- hospitals and healthcare providers
- insurers including HMOs
- entrepreneurs
- patients and especially ePatients
- Pharma and device companies.
Here is the slide presentation:
How is Health 2.0 Different in Europe versus the US?
October 5, 2009
In planning for the Health 2.0 conference in Nijmegen, Netherlands, I am wonder what to expect approaches to Health 2.0. Here are a few differences I expect:
- Marketing – generally less important to EU hospitals with socialized medicine. US hospitals are interested in using social media to recruit new patients, while EU hospitals are more interested in connecting to patients in their district.
- A different attitude toward entrepreneurs. I expect a growing interest in startups in the Netherlands including in mobile health.
- Google and Google health – while there has been some opposition to Google Health in the UK, and opposition to some Google initiatives in the EU, what is the attitude toward Google Health as a platform for ehealth
- What is the current thinking of integrating eHealth and Health 2.0
- Health care Reform – not an issue in the Netherlands which is rated the best healthcare system in Europe versus the ongoing debate in the US as to whether health care is a basic human right.
I am looking forward to meeting my Dutch colleagues and others to find answers to these and new ideas.
Guest Blog Post on e-Patients Blog
September 30, 2009
I was privileged to be asked by ePatientDave to post an enhanced version of my blog post on the Journal of Participatory Medicine on the e-Patients blog yesterday. I stand by my claim that everyone in health care needs to understand the e-patient movement and participatory medicine to understand the future of medicine.
Forget Medical Privacy?
September 29, 2009
On the blog for PatientsLikeMe is a brief comment about a provocative statement by Wired Magazine to “Forget Medical Privacy.” Wired published this as part of their “12 Shocking Ideas That Will Change the World.” PatientsLikeMe which is the only Health 2.0 site I know of that values openness and has an openness policy believing that it will contribute to health care instead of holding privacy so tightly that it inhibits the ability to use valuable clinical data. A video on the blog post addresses the question of openness directly: “Given my status, what is the best outcome I can achieve and how do I get there?”
From Wired: “And that lack of openness, Heywood argues, is making us sicker: With
data scarce, there’s no clear way for physicians to know what
treatments are working for other practitioners.” In fact, hospitals are allowed to use data from the Electronic Medical Record with the approval of their Institutional Review Board.
At the Medicine 2.0 Congress, a award winning presentation by PatientsLikeMe demonstrated how they can utilize data shared by patients to quickly address drug side effects and other commonly shared problems. A combination of using existing data, such as, from an EMR and patient shared data, such as, from social networking sites, can certainly accelerate medical research while not totally abandoning privacy.
Technorati: Health 2.0
Upcoming Conferences On Medicine 2.0 and Health 2.0
August 31, 2009
I have two presentations in the next two months at conferences full of great content.
- Medicine 2.0 Congress in Toronto, September 17 and 18 – will be presenting on “Hospital Adoption of Medicine 2.0 – a Culture Shift” Twitter hashtag: #med2
- Reshape 09 - Second Health 2.0 Conference: Healthcare Communication is Changing in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, October 12 & 13. Presenting as a keynote on Health 2.0 trends. Twitter account @Reshape09
Health 1.0, Health 2.0, Health 3.0
July 30, 2009
In Health 1.0, the ePatient would search the Internet the night before a doctors visit for a serious illness and print out hundreds of pages and insist that the physician address each page.
In Health 2.0, the ePatient goes to to social networking sites to research how others made treatment decisions and coped with their illness. They securely email their physicians for second opinions, and checks the ratings of physicians and hospitals online.
In the future Health 3.0, the ePatient obtains their genetic profiles, sets up semantic agents to monitor for new treatments for the conditions their are at risk for and develops micro-communities of others with similar risk profiles. Health messages to manage the risk profile are delivered to a mobile device which also monitors blood pressure, blood sugar and other vital signs.
Question – where is the physician in Health 3.0?
