Posts Tagged ‘Web 2.0’
Social Networking Enabling Healthcare via Web 2.0
February 13, 2007
Jack Mason on the IBM Healthnex blog discusses the potential for social networking in healthcare with possibilities like using tools inherent in Digg.com and Google and others, to become “a mother-of-all-healthcare-data mashup unlock the molecular basis of diseases, it could also function as a global biosurveillance system, so that we could better predict, track and thwart outbreaks of infectious diseases or pandemics.” One could accuse Jack of hyperbole but it is true that the potential for social networking in healthcare has yet to be fully realized.
He also notes a new Web 2.0 term, new to me at least, “Maybe what we learn from Web 2.0 about collective intelligence and crowdsourcing in other spheres will help us get over the cultural hurdles that might impede a global network for electronic healthcare innovation.” Crowdsourcing is defined as a business model dependent on volunteers and low paid amateurs. Sounds like linux, Firefox or even Wikipedia. What is the potential for crowdsourcing in healthcare?
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Meeting with editor from the Lancet
January 16, 2007
On Friday, I had the pleasant opportunity to meet with Faith McLellan, Ph. D., North American Senior Editor of The Lancet. Her interest was in Web 2.0 in medicine and also how it might be utilized in medical journals such as her own. To their credit, The Lancet has been experimenting with their own blog, but only have a rare article on Web 2.0 or Healthcare IT in general. I hope we will see a change in that.
Also attend a presentation by the senior editor, Richard Horton, on fraud in medical research and how journals have to deal with it when discovered.
Share this:Web 2.0 invades Corporate Computing
December 27, 2006
An article from the Economist details both how universities and corporations are adopting Web 2.0 technologies and also dealing with unauthorized use of those technologies. One example is Arizona State University adopting Gmail accounts through Google Apps for your domain thereby giving students all the innovations which Google will include in the future (and offloading the problem of managing email servers). Browser-based services are going to be used by employees so the IT strategy should be to make them secure, not try to prevent them. Salesforce.com is also cited as a browser based tool which is upsetting the CRM market. “Big companies will probably keep “mission critical” systems in-house.
But as everything else migrates to web-based services, software will increasingly resemble the web technologies of the consumer market.”
The article does not address healthcare where HIPAA looms large and privacy concerns result in more conservative attitudes toward these “consumer technologies.”
Share this:eHealth Progress
October 6, 2006
In an editorial by Henry Potts of London, he raises the question, “Is E-health Progressing Faster Than E-health Researchers?” Some of the quotable answer includes: “Traditional healthcare, given its safety critical context, utilises an evidence base and a process of risk management that generally involves some sort of governance. These are conflicting trends: the great value of the Internet is how easy it is to make material available, but the strictures of safety and proof of efficacy run counter to that. How do we garner the benefits of the Internet – the democratization of production and distribution that has produced so much content – while maintaining safe and good practice?”
And in an acknowledgment to social networking, “Beyond healthcare, there are many more innovations that draw on user-generated content and the Internet’s democratization of production and distribution. The “killer application” in e-health will perhaps be something that can marry the democratized nature of MySpace or Wikipedia with the safety critical nature of healthcare.”
These conflicting values of control and freedom are particularly acute in web-based consumer directed healthcare. Web 2.0 values need a way to take root within healthcare.
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