The Internet Empowers Patients, Healthcare Providers Should Welcome That

August 14th, 2009

by Caitlin

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.

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