I come across hundreds of news items a day when selecting the ones that should be posted on the ICMCC Newspage. And sometimes these articles raise questions.

Yesterday The Health Tweeder was announced. An exciting new application to analyze Twitter data. However, it raises some questions:

• How far back goes this surveillance?
• Are ReTweets also included?
• What is the number of tweets that has been used to come to these data. Only with that information we can decide whether Twitter is a really useful tool to measure the importance of certain issues. The way it is presented now is just a nice new gadget.

Another issue came up in the interview with Denise Silber on the upcoming Paris Health 2.0 conference on the eHealthnews.EU site, also yesterday.

It was my impression that Health 2.0 focused on patient involvement:

“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

But apparently I have been barking up the wrong tree. I already gave my reactions to the US Health 2.0 conferences (here, here and here), but this interview finally admits what I have feared for quite a while. It’s not about the patient, stupid:

“Our industry partners are really benefiting from all of the above [...] We will integrate the best of European health technologies, and compare and contrast them with leading examples of Health 2.0 from the US.”

And I don’t know what to make of Paul Roemer’s remark in his post “What exactly is healthcare 2.0?“:

“To get to Healthcare 2.0 using my definition, to redefine the business of healthcare, providers must move towards being effective, towards solving business problems, eliminating waste and duplication, retaining doctors and patients, and running it like a real business.”

And finally the latest US numbers on internet use: More than half of Americans use Internet for health (NCHS).

I wanted to compare this NCHS survey with the Pew survey from June 2009, as they took place close to each other (PEW: December 2008; NCHS: January-June 2009). I have a very important question about these surveys, who was asked? It took some searching, but the NCHS interviews are done in person in their own house (Who needs to participate in the interview?), whereas the PEW interviews are done by phone.

However, I’m not entirely sure what these remarks mean:

“Additional information, including information on the use of HIT, is self-reported by one randomly sampled adult (the “sample adult”) within a family, except in rare cases when the selected adult is physically or mentally incapable of responding.” (NCHS)
“For results based on the national sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling and other random effects is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points. For results based internet users (n=1,650), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.7 percentage points. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting telephone surveys may introduce some error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.” (PEW)

The number of interviewed people (7,192) by the NCHS was 3 times larger than the number in the PEW interview (2,253).
According to the NCHS 51% of US adults search for health information on the internet, PEW found 61%.
And in my view there are considerable differences in how participants were selected (PEW, NCHS).
Another interesting aspect: “The annual response rate of NHIS is nearly 90% of the eligible households in the sample.” (NHIS), “The response rates for the land line sample were 21 percent. The response rates for the cellular sample were 25 percent.” (PEW).

Lodewijk Bos

3 February 2010 | Categories: Blog.
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