Archive for December, 2009
The Quantified Self, ePatients and Participatory Medicine
December 29, 2009
Kevin Kelly has posted “The Quantified Self, Tools for knowing yourself and your body” which links to a more extensive paper entitled, “A Billion Little Experiments,” The concept of the Quantified Self points to patient empowerment and specifically ePatient activism which takes control of one’s health or illness by understanding one’s body and its processes. It seems that communities, such as, PatientsLikeMe and OrganizedWisdom, provide a real opportunity for quantifying life and sharing that life in real time. Quantifying the self opens the door to participatory medicine – by knowing yourself, you can engage your physician in a dialog on what you know about your body. We are a billion little experiments.
I hope that the concept of the Quantified Self becomes part of the medical lexicon along with ePatients and participatory medicine.
Share this: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.
Share this:Why Michael Porter Makes So Much Sense
December 17, 2009
Last night I heard Michael Porter speak at the Cleveland Clinic. Author of Redefining Healthcare, among other books, he drove home his approach to value-based competition in health care. He has many quotable, provocative statements on health care:
- fee for service model is toxic to improving health outcomes
- Competition must be based on results.
- Competition should center on medical conditions over the full cycle of care.
- Results information to support value-based competition must be widely available. (aka, disease registries)
- increasing value actual reduces cost.
He also reemphasizes some basic principles that are strongly backed by evidence – high volume regional medical centers typically have better outcomes that low volume centers. But he acknowledged that consumers must realize that local care may not be the best care for especially for complex conditions. Do you want to get your total knee replacement at a hospital which does one a week or 1400 per year? Not that volume is everything but consumers need to have the data available to make wise choices, outcomes data in particular.
He admitted some disappointment in the current health care reform because it does not change the incentives toward value-based competition. See How Reform Went Wrong.
Share this: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.
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