The fall edition of the Health 2.0 Conference is behind us. And, as usual, I have not been there. You can find a summary of blogposts about the San Francisco edition on the ICMCC News Page.
Like with all previous editions, I stick to my opinion that it has become an industrial show. Revealing, probably without really intending to do so was a remark by J.D. Kleinke in The Health Care Blog:
So what exactly is health 2.0? Isn’t it really just a younger, hipper HIMSS?
Younger and hipper, maybe – because the entire point of labeling something “2.0″ is to stick out your tongue at 1.0, at your uncool parents in stretchy jeans and Velcro shoes who, after decades of earnest hard work, still couldn’t figure out how to computerize most of the US health care system. “2.0″ screams delineation, divergence, bye-bye. And there seem to be as many ways of delineating “then from now” as there are smart people, of all ages, putting serious work into solving health care’s plethora of problems with 2.0-associated information technologies, services and tools.
Health 2.0 a-Go-Go: A Revolution By Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet
and not a word about the comparison to HIMSS…..
And I once again checked the Twitter stream for the use of the word patient. Some interesting remarks I found (but only very few):
And Google’s Ron Zeigler tweeted:Gilles Frydman: the informed patient is the most underutilized tool in the health care system
which has been retweeted a couple of dozen times.
I have not been there, so I don’t know whether the quote is verbatim, but if so I am somewhat shocked. I never expected Frydman to call the patient a “tool“.
There was also this tweet: 62% conf participants think consumer PHR’s will stay separate. I sincerely hope this will be proven wrong.
2 interesting quotes by David Kibbe:
David Kibbe: it’s not “ehr’s for doctors”. It’s what do patients and hcp need 2 make better decisions. Web-based.
Kibbe: What doctors need is wrong question. What patient/consumers need is the better question.
The problem is, who is going to tell the patient? How are we going to educate patients about the fact that they will have to face a paradigm shift, that they will become an essential element in their own health path, that they will be part of the decision making, that they will have to assume their own responsibility? And therefore how to deal with the host of information that will become available to them, how to understand it, how to interpret it?
In 2008 I defined health 2.0 as:
“the combination of health data and health information with (patient) experience through the use of ICT, enabling the citizen to become an active and responsible partner in his/her own health and care pathway.”
Lodewijk Bos, Andy Marsh, Denis Carroll, Sanjeev Gupta, Mike Rees, Patient 2.0 Empowerment in: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Semantic Web & Web Services SWWS08, Hamid R. Arabnia, Andy Marsh (eds), pp.164-167, 2008
Due to the use of the word “enabling”, Health 2.0 is not only a goal but also a means.
Lodewijk Bos
I was teaching some second year students last week. They haven’t started communication skills teaching yet. One was remarking that his doctor asked him, “What do you think?” He didn’t know how to answer. Sometimes this question does work to reveal patients anxieties, or their ideas about the causes of their problems, or how these problems could be managed. Others are anxious because they don’t have any answers to those questions and they feel perplexed by their illness.
I will recommend Anne Marie Mol’s “The Logic of Care and the problem of Patient Choice” again. You may disagree with what she says but I think we do have to recognise that care can take many forms and not all patients want to be involved in making decisions on their care when they are unwell.
So how do we tell the patient?
Anne Marie
I do agree, not all patients want to be involved. But only when having the full choice you can choose not to. I am sure that many patients will tell their GP or another caregiver that they want them to “manage” their records and care and continue to work to some extend in the “old” way. But it is essential that the patient is entitled to have all the options open and available.
I think that the education should start early and has to be combined with other general educational efforts to make people more aware of their growing responsibility for their own life, even in parts of the world where certain social aspects of life are well organised. Thus we can hopefully find the balance that we will need between an “organised” social society (medicine, care, unemployment, etc.) and a market oriented one.
Lodewijk
@markhawker was asking if we could model which patients wanted to be involved, but I think it is much more complex than this. Depending on the type of decision, and the illness, and the intervention, and how well one is feeling, and many other things one may want to be involved or not. The health care professional therefore has to try and check every time.
Oh, and we need more time! 10 minute consultations are insufficient!
The research on all this in many ways still seems to be in its infancy.