You're wondering about the picture. I can tell. We'll get to that in a moment.
I read in the California Health Care Foundation's newsletter that Jane Sarasohn-Kahn MHSA of THINK-Health has written a report called The Wisdom of Patients: Health Care Meets Online Social Media.
Social media on the Internet are empowering, engaging, and educating health care consumers and providers. While consumers use social media -- including social networks, personal blogging, wikis, video-sharing, and other formats -- for emotional support, they also heavily rely on them to manage health conditions.
The Internet has evolved from the information-retrieval of “Web 1.0” to “Web 2.0,” which allows people who are not necessarily technologically savvy to generate and share content. The collective wisdom harnessed by social media can yield insights well beyond the knowledge of any single patient or physician, writes report author Jane Sarasohn-Kahn. The outcome of this development is “Health 2.0” -- a new movement that challenges the notion that health care happens only between a single patient and doctor in an exam room.
This dovetails nicely with what I learned in my thesis research on online consumer health search. People are taking control over their own health care, and using the Internet as a tool in that empowerment. This is of course not new news; healthcare was a hot topic in forums on Compuserve and America Online before there was a World Wide Web. So what is new?
The difference between then and now is the plethora of tools that are becoming available to consumers:
According to the report, the growing demand for transparency will drive the evolution of social media in health. A growing array of tools will become available that are increasingly mobile, as well as personal health data storage in commercial products like Microsoft Health Vault, Google Health, and others. The author concludes that the ongoing demands of a consumer-driven health marketplace will inspire innovation in applications that integrate clinical, financial, and ratings information.
I remain skeptical about the near-term effects of technologies like Health Vault and Google Health. They seem like Band-Aids on the antiquated, fragmented, pathetically free-market US healthcare system, which is struggling to get primary- and secondary-care patient charts computerized.
When I see information flowing freely between the electronic health records in online health information repositories and the practice management system (PMS) of a family practice clinic in Baraga, Michigan, home of the famous Hilltop Restaurant sweet roll and little Jake (picture of both above), I'll be a lot less skeptical. For that to happen, the business model of most PMS will need to change, and they will need to develop the ability to exchange data interoperably in real-time. I'm not sure these obstacles are insurmountable, but they are formidable, and the incentives to stay with the silo-ized status quo are enormous. Time will tell.
There is a real opportunity in the midst of all this, though. I don't have time to expand on it now, but I will raise it as a question:
What if prompt-and-reminder systems were connected to your personal health record in Microsoft Health Vault or Google Health?
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