Or at least Esther Dyson thinks so. In today’s Financial Times, Dyson discusses how consumers are using the Internet to take control of their personal health. And it’s true –every day, more health-devoted blogs, Twitter handles and patient community sites crop up attracting more and more visitors.
In a recent interview with DiagnosisPR, new media evangelist Ron Ploof discussed how healthcare communication has changed over the past few generations. Ron noted that doctors were once the be-all, end-all for health information. Whatever your doctor diagnosed you with, you had, and whatever the doctor prescribed, you took. This began to change sometime around when the baby boomers began aging. More questions were asked. More doctors were consulted. Then, the Internet emerged as a tour de force. Now, when we go to the doctor, we are armed with questions and printouts from WebMD or a list of symptoms from About.com or iVillage. And chances are, we’ve probably also already talked to our mom, our friend, the daycare provider and the dry cleaner for their opinions along the way.
Dyson is right – the way we receive health information has certainly changed, and the way we engage in our personal health has also changed. But Dyson also wonders how the medical system will adapt to this grassroots approach. As Ploof pointed out, the government and healthcare providers will soon be forced to choose how they lead and engage in healthcare communications, because if they don’t, patients will go on talking without them. Between physicians’ Twitter handles, live OR streams and President Obama’s HealthReform.gov Website, the industry is certainly experimenting, but no clear direction taken yet.
Dyson put it simply, “health begins at home,” and the healthcare choices we make are based on the information and resources we have available to us. Now that we have more information at our disposal, from many different resources, it will be interesting to see how healthcare providers and the government adapt to the new modes of communication and understanding.
The White House is taking a lesson from President Obama’s campaign and venturing online to debunk healthcare reform plan myths with a new website, according to the Associated Press.
The Website hosts consumer FAQs and YouTube-esque videos of White House staffers discussing healthcare reform issues. Although the site holds only basic information at the moment, it encourages readers to find and engage in new information in the manner they prefer. Readers looking for more in depth information on the plan are directed to the administration’s HealthReform.gov Website, while social media enthusiasts can connect with others on the issue by visiting the White House’s Twitter and Facebook pages.
Physicians and hospitals have recently been experimenting with delivering health news through new media channels, but President Obama’s adoption of new media for healthcare communications may point to a real change in how healthcare information will be disseminated and received by consumers moving forward. Although we can’t be surprised by this move from our Internet-savvy Commander in Chief, it will be interesting to see how the rest of Washington responds.
Silicon Alley Editor Nicholas Carlson thinks you should. Carlson wrote an interesting post this week about a recent hospital stay he had as a result of a broken foot. He shares his story of discomfort when he endured chills and tremors during a routine bandage change in the middle of night because the resident didn’t have the chart that would have forewarned her of the recurring chills.
Carlson wrote, “Here’s why this was all so frustrating: The resident should have known I’d get the tremors so bad, coming out of my sleep like that. It’d been happening for days.”
He points to the lack of easy information flow as the problem and points to a stat by Consumer Reports that shows less than 2 percent of hospitals in the U.S. have comprehensive electronic records systems that make patient information readily available anywhere in the hospital.
Carlson suggests that renting iPod Touches to patients including an app that allows them to keep notes and synch the medical information between the nurse and doctor, whom would also carry iPods, could be a practical solution.
He writes, “The notes could be video, text, audio, or photographic. I’ve had several nurses thank me for showing them a picture of the wound I keep on my iPhone before they re-do the bandages. It helps them proceed carefully and plan ahead.”
At Diagnosis PR, we’ve blogged about electronic patient records in the past, but Carlson may be onto something here as well, what do you think?
This morning, the WSJ reported on various Silicon Valley companies striving to reduce healthcare costs and inefficiencies using high-tech methods. Examples include:
• A miniature digestible chip that can be attached to conventional medication, sending a signal that confirms whether patients are taking their prescribed pills.
• A wearable device for wirelessly measuring vital signs in hospital rooms.
• A Band-Aid-like sensor that monitors patients on the move by measuring respiration, fluid status and physical movements.
Can these technologies help improve our ailing healthcare system?
Eric Topol, a cardiologist and genomics professor at Scripps Research Institute, believes they can. “Wireless applications have the potential to change every one of these areas,” he said at an industry event in San Diego last week.
I must say I’m surprised some of these ideas are only now being developed. Wirelessly measuring vital signs seems like a no-brainer, as it eliminates the need for “spot checks” and allows for continuous monitoring of various signs such as blood pressure.
The digestible chip, though intended for good use, seems a bit “Big Brother” to me. I take my prescribed pills in the proper dosage, so I don’t know that I will get behind this chip.
What do you think about Silicon Valley’s effort to improve healthcare?
As I’ve written about before on this blog, the web is starting to transform how we, as patients, obtain healthcare information. Recognizing this, healthcare companies have become much more aggressive in how they’re using the web, specifically social media, to disseminate information. Forbes recently reported on a creative way one organization chose to promote a pivotal study.
In the Forbes piece, reporter Rebecca Ruiz, explains how the Mayo Clinic out of Rochester, Minn used Twitter to tease an upcoming study on celiac disease. They followed the folks re-tweeting the news and chose a select few to share the findings with exclusively. What’s unique about this, is that Mayo didn’t give the results to traditional reporters. They gave them patients with celiac and offered them an embargo of the study, with free reign to blog about it. A privilege typically reserved for journalists.
The results were also distributed on Facebook and through this YouTube video.
This example from Mayo is likely to be the wave of the future. Undoubtedly, more and more healthcare organizations will begin using Facebook, Twitter and other emerging social media tools and communities to reach out directly to the people affected by the disease states and conditions for which they are providing education. It will be interesting to see how these interactions impact new and traditional media as well as the consumption of healthcare information.
The Forbes piece also includes a great slideshow that highlights the best resources on the web for obtaining healthcare info. Check it out here.
Nor surprisingly, news came out of a group of global researchers today in The Lancet reporting that tanning beds are as deadly as arsenic. The studies concluded that the risk of skin cancer jumped 75% for folks using tanning beds under the age of 30. According to WebMD,The International Agency for Research on Cancer (division of the WHO) announced today that “that it has moved UV tanning beds to its highest cancer risk category .”
I don’t know about you, but this news isn’t shocking to me. The days of bronzing up before a big event are over but what about the summer months? My follow-up question is, what does this mean for sun worshippers or people just enjoying the beach? Even though we know to use sunblock (everyday!) and self-tanners, does this news show that tanning beds are more dangerous than the sun? OR are they equally as dangerous…I’ll do some digging and report back on my findings.
Based on some additional research, as expected, it looks like the sun is almost as bad as these tanning booths. Time to reapply the sunscreen…check out this WebMD article that sites some recent studies to back up these claims.
Who could forget the April outbreak of the H1N1flu – more commonly known as “swine flu” – that swept the globe and left people around the world in a state of panic? First reported in Mexico, spring breaks and honeymoons to the sunny vacation destination were cancelled as people feared they could be susceptible to this scary and fatal disease while traveling. The virus continued to spread, and on June 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the swine flu a global pandemic.
It is now known that the virus is spread through human contact and by many of the same avenues as the traditional, seasonal flu: coughs, sneezes or by touching infected areas and then touching your nose or mouth. While many of the symptoms could be considered minor (fever, cough, headaches), those aged 65 years and older, kids under the age of five, pregnant women and those with underlying medical conditions such as asthma, diabetes or heart disease are at higher risk of more serious complications.
Not surprisingly, the New York Times reported that pharmaceutical companies are rushing to have a swine flu vaccine available for the fall flu season. About 2,400 healthy adult volunteers will be tested in the first clinical trials to evaluate the vaccine. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is overseeing the trials and is quoted as saying, “[The trials are being conducted] in a compressed time frame in a race against the possible autumn resurgence.” Is it just me, or does this seem a bit rushed?
Of course I appreciate the need for the vaccine and given the high incidence of the flu in the fall, I understand the reasoning behind the timeline. However, the fact that the physician overseeing the trial even says that this is a “compressed time frame” is a bit alarming to me. I know I’d be pretty nervous to volunteer myself for a quick clinical trial evaluating the efficacy of a vaccine for a virus that swept the nation, leaving many gravely ill and killing others. On the other hand, taking part in this trial, no matter the outcome, is a selfless act that could positively affects thousands of people. Do you think the schedule for this clinical trial is too accelerated or do you believe it’s necessary to be completed by the fall? Would you be willing to participate in a trial of this nature?
Often, it’s a celebrity’s misfortune that is the catalyst for us commoners to hear about, understand and get screened for some of the more rare disease states.
Actor John Ritter died of an aortic dissection caused by a previously undiagnosed congenital heart defect. Prior to his death, little was known about this deadly disease. After he passed away, screening for aortic dissection in men rose by 26 percent.
John Ritter
Today, news of Adam Yauch’s cancer diagnosis hit the web. Unfortunately the overarching story line was that the tumor in his salivary gland would keep The Beastie Boys off its tour schedule and delay the release of their next album Hot Sauce Committee Part 1.
Yauch describes when he first felt something was wrong.
“About two months ago, I started feeling this little lump in my throat, like you would feel if you have swollen glands or something like that, like you’d feel if you have a cold, so I didn’t really think it was anything,” he says.
His doctor sent him to a specialist who diagnosed the cancer.
Adam Yauch
The silver lining for Adam is that it sounds like the cancer had not yet spread, for others, this news should serve as a reminder to ask you doctor about screenings for various types of diseases.
The world around us is changing and the way people are talking about and communicating is evolving rapidly. Each day, new blogs, Twitter feeds, communities and forums are created. In light of this, Larry Weber put together Sticks & Stones: How Digital Business Reputations Are Created Over Time… And Lost in a Click to talk about the way reputation management is changing in the social web.
Health care organizations and providers have even more at stake in this new media landscape. From patients to doctors, people are passionate about the health care system and products and go to the web to vent, chat, discuss and engage.
Find out more at the Sticks & StonesWeb site and feel free to connect with Larry directly on Twitter: @TheLarryWeber. You can also view a video of Larry talking about the video on the site.
Last week,Obesitypublished a study finding that people classified as ‘overweight’ according to their Body Mass Index (BMI) (25-29.9) may live longer than people with a ‘normal’ reading (18.5-24.9). It is theorized that the extra weight actually protects the body during the stress of aging. At first I thought this was further proof that thin is not in, and that a healthy person should have a few extra pounds; however, perhaps the study is just another indication that the BMI calculation is misleading, and it is not the best way to measure one’s physical fitness.
I’ve been skeptical of the BMI since high school when during our annual Fitness Test the most athletic girl in the grade (made of sheer muscle yet standing only 5’1) was deemed ‘overweight’ due to the ratio of her weight to height. Since muscle weighs more than fat, serious athletes can have a higher BMI simply because they weigh more. Perhaps some of the ‘overweight’ participants in the Obesity study had a high BMI but longer lifespan because they had a high muscle content, not because they were overweight and out of shape. By the same token, it’s also possible that a participant with a ‘normal’ BMI was simply ‘thin’ but not physically fit.
Lenny Bernstein of the Washington Post, and a critic of the BMI, recently visited the University of Maryland’s Department of Kinesiology to try various fitness tests, including the VO2 max test, to see if they are better indicators of health and fitness than the dubious BMI. In the end, Mr. Bernstein argued that the VO2 max test and other simple tests that can be done in your doctor’s office, such as measuring pulse and blood pressure, are in fact effective ways to measure how in shape you are.
So perhaps Mr. Bernstein has it right in the end – while it’s clear that a one-size-fits-all test to measure health and fitness may not be accurate (otherwise my high school colleague would have been named the most physically fit student), it’s measuring fitness, not weight, that is the key. While the BMI may help people reach a healthy weight for their height, it’s your level of physical fitness that reigns supreme.
