Posts Tagged ‘Health 2.0’
Healthcare 100
July 1, 2008
Looks like I am still listed in the Healthcare 100 blogs but not in the first 100, but number 200. Interesting mix at the top: Bad Medicine, Medgadget, WSJ Health blog, Kevin MD and the Healthcare blog. Worth reviewing the list from time to time to see what rises to the top. If I had time, I would work on the algorithm.
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More Than a Reminder to take your Pills
June 27, 2008
From the Boston xconomy is a story about a start up which does more than remind people to take their medication. Non-adherence with medication is a real problem. InnovationRx first does a 20 minute interview to determine the best strategy to get past the roadblocks to medication compliance. They use text messages and emails to encourage adherence and send reminders. The cost is $7.99 per month, or $96 per year and may be something that health plans will be willing to pay for.
Share this:New Oncology Website
June 26, 2008
OncologyStat is a relatively new website with loads of information on cancer. Oriented toward the medical professional, the site boasts of 12,000 users since launching in September 2007. It has a depth of content including journal scans, drug and treatment info, news, blogs and a tab specifically for ASCO 2008. Looks like a worthwhile offering. Registration is required to view most content but there is no fee. The site is produced by Elsevier.
Share this:Presentation Tomorrow on Web 2.0 in Health Care
June 25, 2008
The Health Management Congress invited me to give this talk as a webinar tomorrow at 2pm EST. The full title is: “Emerging Trends & Opportunities for Healthcare Organizations to Leverage Web 2.0″.
Details from the website:
The social-networking revolution is coming to health care, at the same time that new Internet technologies and software programs are making it easier than ever for consumers to find timely, personalized health information online. Patients who once connected mainly through email discussion groups and chat rooms are building more sophisticated virtual communities that enable them to share information about treatment and coping and build a personal network of friends.
At the same time, traditional Web sites that once offered cumbersome pages of static data are developing blogs, podcasts, and customized search engines to deliver the most relevant and timely information on health
topics.
What you will learn by attending:
- Improve care self-management using Web 2.0 strategies & resources
- Analyze the impact of Web 2.0 on healthcare stakeholders
- Leverage Web 2.0 content to drive traffic to your site and customers to your facility
- Explore the return on investment for these technologies
Updated Health 2.0 definition
June 23, 2008
From Ted Eytan, MD, who invited commentors to suggest edits to a previous definition. As always, Health 2.0 is person-centric:
“Health 2.0 is participatory health care. The combination of content and community enables the patient to be an active partner in their own health care and the citizen to be an equal partner in improving the health system.”
I like the “combination of content and community” – it speaks to the importance of reliable content in health care and the importance of mutual support. Also, the definition avoids the overused term empowerment and focuses on partnership with the provider and system.
Good job.
Share this:Health 2.0 for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
June 11, 2008
A relatively new site called rVita provides what looks like a fair evaluation of CAM. Subtitled “trusted information, natural healing”, the site offers information on a broad range of topics organized by symptoms and treatments and rates the medical evidence for each. For instance, the page on green tea, the ever popular treatment with many claims to its name, reports that for everything from reducing cholesterol and treating diabetes that the evidence is unclear or conflicting. For each such treatment there are comments from blogs, reviews and links.
Most importantly, there is a page on How the scientific evidence is derived which includes ratings from strong evidence (randomized controlled clinical trials) to no evidence.
The site is well designed and also offers a trusted practitioner network and a sign up to be a blogger.
Share this:Moment of Complexity
June 10, 2008
On the World Healthcare Blog, there is a discussion of a new book The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, an its application to health care. The bottom line is this quote: “the moment of complexity is the point at which self-organizing systems emerge to create new patterns of coherence and structures of relations.”
Is Health 2.0 helping to achieve this moment?
Share this:Healthcare and Emerging Rich Web Technologies
May 29, 2008
In this post on the European site, OBBeC, subtitled, “The WEB 2.0/Semantic Web Challenge and Opportunity”
gives a good overview of Web 2.0 in health care. It describes both how social networking and semantic technologies are an opportunity and a caution for health care. He notes that adoption of these web technologies is slower than in other industries because “the care process is fundamentally more complex” in health care. There are the usual concerns about privacy but also health care’s dependence on a face-to-face process. The driving forces of Web 2.0 in health care are seen as the need to aggregate the volumes of information physicians must wade through and the “power patients” becoming more commonplace.
Three specific semantic technologies are noted:
- semantic wikis
- semantic blogs
- semantic desktop
While there isn’t time to describe these here, it does show the potential for moving into the complex world of Web 3.0 to simplify our knowledge gathering and distribution.
The author cautions that these technologies could lead to “over reliance on external information, a process of disintermediation between patients and healthcare professionals and erosion of the patient-physician relationship.”
Share this:Privacy 2.0
May 26, 2008
Fred Frotin on the World Healthcare Blog has introduced the concept of Privacy 2.0. Privacy and confidentiality have been growing concerns for Web 2.0 in health care. The post, titled, “Coming to Health Care: The Challenge of Privacy 2.0″ He notes that “confidential information predominately resides today in slow moving, conservative institutions that dominate health care delivery.” Privacy 1.0 was focused on, “how to impose rules and sanctions regarding things like disclosure, notice, encryption etc.”
He asks, “Do we have to accept a diminished private space to gain the benefits of social media?” Will the technology of control enable a Privacy 2.0 or will a backlash by consumers overreach and squelch Health 2.0, Google Health and others?
Share this:Health 2.0 – Clinical Trials
May 15, 2008
A new way to search for clinical trials is now available through Emerging Med. Wrapping clinical trials information from the NIH with a set of tools and services, this new site offers a range of services. You can create a profile to be notified of clinical trials and utilize the matching system to get a referral for treatment. Phone support is also available. There are some good suggestions on when to search, for instance,
- Just before a biopsy (to study tissue from a tumor)
- Just before the first surgery or radiation treatment (neo-adjuvant studies)
- Just after surgery or radiation treatment (adjuvant studies)
To protect privacy, they suggest that “Create a Patient Profile form can also be filled out anonymously”.
The service is now integrated into Revolution Health’s cancer pages. There was a recent article in the Wall Street Journal as well. Perhaps utilizing this tool within the context of a broader set of tools such as Rev Health is a better route to go. But the set of services appear unique.
