Archive for 2008
Patient-centered Care – Let citizens manage their health
December 21, 2008
In a well-written post about the problem with healthcare, Dr. Kenneth H. Cohn talks about his recent personal experience with a medical problem while he was between PCPs. Sounds like a nightmare but that’s what too much of healthcare is today. Specifically, he identifies these problems as presented by the Health Finance Forum:
- The (non)-system does not encourage social benefit, such as access to care.
- It does not reward wellness or high-quality care.
- It creates financial instability by adding cost and complexity to health administration, rewarding high-cost practices and focusing on expensive sickness-focused interventions rather than wellness.
He suggests some solutions:
- Stop the insurance company micromanagement; it adds not only cost and complexity
- Let citizens manage their health with their physicians through a variety of channels, such as website interactions that do not force us to drive to our doctor’s office for prescriptions when we are in acute pain and know what we need to do to recover.
- Design systems using interdependent, rather than fragmented, processes, that improve patients’ healthcare outcomes, rather than tolerating arbitrary rules that exist for the convenience of insurers.
Great ideas – read the whole post.
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The Future of Scientific Journals
December 19, 2008
From ReadWriteWeb, there is an article titled, “Scientific Journal to Authors: Publish in Wikipedia or Perish.” It is a report from the journal RNA Biology which now requires a simultaneous submission to Wikipedia. The initial submission to Wikipedia is also peer-reviewed but after that it can be edited as other entries. This is a brave new world of medical publishing. First there was online journals and now Wikipedia entries. If the entries can be edited, what does that mean for the future of peer reviewed journals?
Another new journal tool in beta is MyFavoriteJournals. It enables managing multiple journals by showing the covers and a click through to the most recent table of contents with links to abstracts using the PubMed API. Worth testing out.
Share this:Health 2.0 and Relationship Centered Care
December 12, 2008
In response the Business Week article on Health 2.0, the Syndicom blog has posted on the importance of relationship centered care and its relationship to Health 2.0. I would agree that Health 2.0 promotes relationships – with many social networking sites, much of the relationships being supported are between patients. But some are also promoting physician/patient communication. The post also notes concerns about the potential relationships with phrama. But overall, this push for openness and away from paternalism enabled by technology will continue.
Share this:What is the Golden Rule of Health IT?
December 10, 2008
The post on ZDNet calls for healthcare standards to improve adoption in health IT. One argument is that “vendors lose control of customers when they adhere to standards. This makes them reluctant to adopt standards” and therefore oppose standards or at least drag their feet. He also argues that “Hospitals and insurers gain bottom line benefits, while doctors do not.”
But the most important statement is “So long as hospital computing systems remain proprietary islands of
information, with proprietary drivers and minimum interoperability, the big winners here are going to be vendors, no one else.”
So what is the golden rule: build for standardization and interoperability or “He who has the gold must make the rules.”
Share this:Short Selling Health 2.0?
December 8, 2008
In a post by Scott Shreeve on Crossover Health, he cites the recent Business Week article on Health 2.0. Although the attention to the topic by Business Week is a boon to the Health 2.0 movement, Scott sees the article as short selling the concept by limiting it to social networking only. I agree that Health 2.0 needs to remain a broad concept encompassing the “full cycle of care” and a broader set of tools which are truly revolutionary to care. Although adoption of Health 2.0 may be gradual in some areas, I agree that we need to keep the long view of the movement.
Share this:Health 2.0 Wiki and People
December 5, 2008
As an outgrowth of the Health 2.0 conference, there is a growing Health 2.0 wiki including some bios of Health 2.0 people. Obviously this listing is not comprehensive but then as an evolving field, Health 2.0 will always have a growing following. It is interesting to compare the definitions of Health 2.0 on this wiki vs. Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia: “A concise definition of Health 2.0 is the participatory healthcare characterized by the ability to rapidly share, classify and summarize individual health information with the goals of improving health care systems, experiences and outcomes via integration of patients and stakeholders.“
- Health 2.0 wiki: “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.”
Immersive Internet
December 3, 2008
ThinkBalm is a blog focusing on the concept of immersive internet. Virtual worlds and other tools provide “A combination of these technologies and an emerging culture with roots in gaming is opening up new dimensions in collaboration, engagement, and context.” In a work context, they propose the following value propositions:
- Minimizing costs
- going green
- Recruiting and retaining employees
- Creating a culture of bottom-up innovation
Are they overpromising? Maybe, but the exploration of these technologies including in health care workplaces, need further exploration.
Also, check out the new post on the appropriateness of anonymity in the work place.
Share this:Change Health Care
December 2, 2008
Here’s a good idea – change health care. This may be one of the promises of the new administration but it is also a website to help consumers and insurers with dealing with the cost of health care and healthcare decisions. The concept is a social network for employers and employees to share their healthcare experiences. Checkout the free ebook: My Healthcare is Killing Me available on the site.
Share this:Web 2.0 and Health 2.0 links found today
November 24, 2008
I came across several resources today in no particular order:
- New York Times Magazine on Visual Literacy lead me to Wikipedia on the topic
- Many Eyes – a visualization site from IBM
- Guy Kawasaki’s website with his books and presentations on start ups
- Health 2.0 from a diabetic’s perspective on year later
- TwitterEarth
Hot, Flat and Crowded – Ideas for Innovation
November 20, 2008
Tom Friedman’s latest book, Hot, Flat and Crowded, gives an excellent overview of some of the crises facing us – over consumption, energy poverty by many nations, and the wrong incentives for fixing the energy crisis. His suggested solutions are many including 10,000 innovations. Sounds like Health 2.0 and the health care system in crisis. I wonder if Health 2.0 is reaching the level of 10,000 innovations. However, Health 2.0 cannot solve the health care system problems alone. There need to be changes in government regulations and incentives just as there needs to be in energy.
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