Posts Tagged ‘Health 2.0’

Health Apps and Real Time Consults

July 19, 2011

There was more on the FDAs decision about health apps today. According to an informative blog post by Brian Dolan on MobileHealth News, the FDA will not regulate most apps. Some specific use cases for apps that won’t be regulated include:

  • “that are electronic “copies” of medical textbooks, teaching aids or reference materials
  • “that are solely used to log, record, track, evaluate, or make decisions or suggestions related to developing or maintaining general health and wellness.
  • “that only automate general office operations with functionalities that include billing, inventory, appointments, or insurance transactions.
  • “that are generic aids that assist users but are not commercially marketed for a specific medical indication”

As always with the FDA, the concern is how the app influences treatment.

Also announced was the real time iConsult where physician users can “consult” in real time with specialist and others and include photos and xrays in the request. Sounds like twitter consult but more secure.

In a 2010 post by @Berci Mesko, he notes doing consults via Twitter:

What would I do if in 2000 Now
I need clinical answer Try to find a collegue who knows it Post a question on Twitter
I want to hear patient story about a specific condition Try to find a patient in my town Read blogs, watch Youtube
I want to be up-to-date Go to the library once a week Use RSS and follow hundreds of journals
I want to work on a manuscript with my team We gather around the table Use Google Docs without geographical limits

My take is that most physicians are concerned about doing this but early adopters can share their successes and issues for the others.

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Health App Development and Innovation

July 13, 2011

Two quick notes:

HHS kicks off $5M ‘i2′ Health IT app development program – contracts awarded for this, more innovation opportunities looking to:

  • Allow an individual to securely and effectively share health information with members of his or her social network.
  • Provide patients, caregivers and/or clinicians access to rigorous and relevant information that can support real needs and immediate decisions.
  • Allow individuals to connect during natural disasters and other periods of emergency.
  • Facilitate exchange of health information while allowing individuals to customize the privacy allowances for their personal health records.

Also announced, the Cleveland Clinic Medical Pavilion on Innocentive and the first challenge posted.

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Google Health Ending – Not Having Broad Impact Expected

June 24, 2011

Google HealthGoogle announced today on its official blog that it is retiring or phasing out Google Health. Stating that it’s original goal was to “our goal was to create a service that would give people access to their personal health and wellness information” using their focus on the consumer, they found a lack of the broad adoption they expected. I was there at HIMSS in 2008 when Google Health was announced by Eric Schmit and Roni Zeiger doing a demo.

They admit that “There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts.” But not enough adoption to make it worthwhile to keep the shop open. They are provide means for users to export their data by January 1, 2012.

Already bloggers are busy speculating on why Google Health failed to gain traction.

  • Not understanding the healthcare market, especially the challenges of working with payers
  • Lack of partnerships with physicians
  • Not partnering with device companies as early as Microsoft did
  • Lack of incentives to use it
  • Lack of a means to securely communicate with providers
  • Not being tethered to EMRs with a few exceptions like Cleveland Clinic.

The reasons can go on and on. But overall, how widely have PHRs been adopted. Seen initially as a disruptive technology, but lack of trust and understand of its value by consumers has led to sluggish adoption overall. How successful is Microsoft HealthVault, Dossia and others? How about PHRs sponsored by payers? It appears that healthcare consumers are stronger adopters of social media and wellness tools and not PHRs.

So where do we go from here? Even the ePatient movement and Quantified Self are not generally strong adopters. If Google Health is worth saving, how about asking Google to hand it over to an open source community to maintain and enhance. In some cases, open source projects can gain more traction that productions by large Silicon Valley companies.

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The Healthcare Social Media Landscape

June 2, 2011

Here is a slide show I created reflecting on the different communities developing in this space. Although each emerged on its own, there is certainly collaborative projects and people across these communities and a sense of mutual support. I myself attended the first Health 2.0 conference, then Medicine 2.0 and also part of the e-Patient community. More conferences occur each year both in the US and Europe; two recent examples are TEDx Maastricht which had a health focus and Doctors 2.0 taking place later this month in Paris. Also, the Quantified Self movement is coming to health care as well.

I’d be interested in other’s opinions on this.

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Promoting Healthcare Innovation through Challenges

May 18, 2011

Challenge.gov

Innovation in healthcare is now pervasive.  To continue the wave of innovation, hospitals can now earn new incentives based on competitions. These are government-sponsored, industry-sponsored challenges, and even have the potential for becoming business ventures. Here are some competitions hospitals can enter to help expand industry innovation:

  • Health Challenges at Challenge.gov – These include video challenges, National Library of Medicine apps, Flu apps and more. Many offer monetary rewards.
  • Health 2.0 Developer Challenge – Developed by the Health 2.0 Conference folks, this includes online challenges and live competitions including a Code-a-Thon which most recently occurred in February A Code-a-Thon is a day long competition to build an application. Winners included a meta-analysis engine, Healthy people 2020 tracker, and an epidemic finder.
  • Veterans Affairs Innovation Initiative (VAi2) – This includes everything from equipment sterilization, blue button technology, prosthetics and rehabilitation. It encourages submissions from its own employees, as well as healthcare industry leaders.

A new player in this arena is Innocentive, an online business built around challenge-driven innovation. While not specifically focused on healthcare, it does have a Global Health Pavilion, featuring challenges from cell biology to caregiver communities. These challegnes promote the idea of an Open Innovation Marketplace, which is the topic of its new book.

For each of these healthcare challenge websites, the basic concept is open innovation. By utilizing competition for a financial reward, the government, an NGO, a private sector company and healthcare providers can generate low cost solutions. But the inventor/innovator needs to keep in mind their intellectual property rights if these are not spelled out clearly up front.

Nonetheless , the potential for healthcare innovation and problem solving are yet to be measured. Perhaps someone will some develop a site or app which aggregates these challenges and their successful solutions. Aggregation of healthcare innovation challenges would help inventors find opportunities which are sprouting up from government, conferences and corporations.

This post was originally published on Hospital Impact on  May 18, 2011.

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Social Media Moving into Healthcare’s Mainstream

May 2, 2011

TuDiabetes Study

Two articles today demonstrate the growth of influence in social media in the healthcare arena.

The first is a research article about TuDiabetes.org 15,000 members on PLosONE permitting data donation to measure H1c in diabetics to demonstrate a model for cohort and translational science and for use as a complementary surveillance  approach.  This research combined with a recent study of PatientsLikeMe demonstrate the potential power of utilizing patient reported results and outcomes as a research tool.

The second article appears in the Archives of Internal Medicine, “Professionalism in the Digital Age.” Get a copy of the full version if you can. It represents a positive approach to social media for physicians and other healthcare providers while noting some cautions, such as, the difficulty of separating personal from professional in social media. The article does not recommend social media as a means of communicating with patients but unlike some recent articles, does not discourage its use.

“The development of a “dual-citizenship” approach to online social media that separates public and private personae would allow physicians to both leverage networks for professional connections and maintain privacy in other aspects. Although social media posts by physicians enable direct communication with readers, all posts should be considered public and special consideration for patient privacy is necessary.”

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The Rise of Social Media & Participatory Medicine

April 28, 2011

Read my latest iHealthbeat Perspective on this topic. The rise of the ePatient feeds off of social media tools.

Two points I would like to reinforce:

  • every patient with a chronic or life-threatening condition is a member of an online community – they just need to join
  • social media sites are become a routine source of information on managing one’s disease and engaging one’s physician.

The members of the Society for Participatory Medicine are taking the lead in this area. To read a more extensive treatment, read the e-Patient Whitepaper and the works of Susanna Fox, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn and others. This movement is very dynamic and making strides into the practice of medicine.

This opinion piece was inspired by attending TEDxMaastricht – the videos tell the story of how social media technology is enabling participatory medicine.

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Appropriate Use of Social Media in Healthcare Organizations

April 14, 2011

A question during a presentation on social media in healthcare about the appropriate use of social media in patient care areas. Social media can be an effective tool for engaging patients online. But what about the use of social media in patient care areas. Should nurses, physicians and other healthcare providers be online interacting with colleagues or family during active patient care? With busy clinics and busier hospital units and greater concern about patient safety, is there time for what administrators might view as a distraction? Would you want your nurse to be updating Facebook while you are waiting for post-op pain medication? Yet there may be some advantages to direct caregivers utilizing social media. How about the oncology nurse interacting with the cancer patient discharged last week? Or nurses within a hospital exchanging ideas about improving patient safety? Yet stories of abusive use of social media in health care persist.

Clear answers are  hard to come by. Each hospital will need to develop its own policy and implementation of that policy in the use of social media in patient care environments. But when face time with the patient is the highest priority, social media may need to take a back seat.

Slides are here:

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TEDxMaastricht – Hope in technology and participatory medicine

April 7, 2011

MaastrichtApril 4 in Maastricht, Netherlands, was an event full of optimism but not simply about how technology can transform healthcare.  Lucien Engelen envisioned this conference as about health, not healthcare and full participation by the patient as an equal partner. To what extent was this accomplished?
The answer is in much of what was said:
- health as homeostasis rather than disease and cure
- you can’t outsource your health
- inforgs -by Luciano Floridi
- society has seen the separation passion and profitability
- in education ere are too many questions for faculty to answer, students must be full participants
- use of a flight simulator as a safety team building tool
- add travel history to your personal health record
- singularity – artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, implantables, genomics, robotics, regenerative medicine
- the shock of the possible – unexpected connections
- doing the impossible – climbing a mountain six times, curing cancer in 10 years
- everyone with a chronic disease is part of a community, they just need to be invited and join
- integrate Google Body with personal health records
- Recognizing healthcare failures and learning from them
- reducing fear of disease, hospital, blindness, etc. As a major goal of a medical practice
Although these quotes may not be exact or make up a coherent whole, the point is that creative optimism gouged by new, openly available technology like social media, can be transformational now.
This was no less true than the patient stories heard throughout the day of facing disease but triumphing over it through community (often online) and hope.
As I process this event, watch for more posts on these themes.

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Year in Review – Books of 2010

December 31, 2010

Following Kent Bottle’s lead in influential books in 2010, I decided to compose my own list:

  1. Chasing Medical Miracles The Promise and Perils of Clinical Trials. Tells it like it is – to be a participant in a clinical trial.
  2. Googled-The End of the World as We Know It – somewhat disappointing in that it discussed the advertising side of the business and less about the history of its technical evolution.
  3. DIYU: Epunks, Edupeneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. This book was recommended by a speaker at the J. Boye conference in Philadelphia. Questions the future viability of universities as they are undermined by Web 2.0 technology.
  4. Leading Geeks – Required reading for anyone who manages geeks, especially programmers. Helpful for anyone to understand the culture of geekdom, understanding the mindset of managing ambiguity and tearing down some stereotypes.
  5. The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil – mind blowing futurism and undying optimism in technology even though this is from 2005 and 650 pages. The law of accelerating returns puts us on a fast track to the future. I am now following Kurweil’s Accelerating Intelligence blog.
  6. A Little Booklet About Health 2.0 – by Lucien Engelen. Brief but advancing health 2.0 concepts with a peak to the future from a European perspective.
  7. Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More – this lead to my blog post on Partnerships with Online Communities – The Long Tail, discussing some of the implications of the long tail in healthcare.
  8. The Collapse of Complex Societies – a venture into history and anthropology which I enjoy and blogged about: Declining Marginal Returns of Complexity
  9. Laugh, Sing and Eat Like a Pig by e-Patient Dave – a personal, signed gift from Dave himself when he visited Cleveland and had dinner with us.
  10. Connected for Health: The KP HealthConnect Story – Probably the best story of successful implementation of an EMR on a large scale basis with honest, realistic discussion of struggles and successes.
  11. Program or Be Programmed – Ten Commandments of the Digital Age – read appropriately as an ebook, makes some good points without being paranoid about technology’s growing role in our lives.
  12. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can be Done About It. Recommended by @Ciscoiii when visiting the World Bank in Washington, DC. Excellent analysis of failed states with recommendations at the UN level for solutions.
  13. Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom – found this in Philadelphia at the Liberty Bell bookstore.

One on my shelf is Reading in the Brain: the New Science of How We Read.

More book reviews to come next year and many more will be on my Sony Reader.

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