Susan Smith's List: Web 2.0 in Health Information Administration

Health 2.0, web-based apps and services for the healthcare sector, is a nascent but potentially huge market for web 2.0. As of now, many of these apps have an emphasis on communication, information sharing and community. These are relatively easy things to address using Web tools. However we're starting to see health 2.0 apps try to tackle the enormous inefficiencies in the healthcare system - check out our description of Carol.com below. Also, in the longer term, we will see the Web being used in medical diagnosis and practice.

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.

Using examples, this report describes how the Web is becoming a platform for convening people with shared concerns and creating health information that is more relevant to consumers. Social networks, ranging from Facebook to specific disease-oriented sites, are proliferating so rapidly that new services are already under development to help health consumers navigate through the networks.

The report details how innovative collaborations online are changing the way patients, providers, and researchers learn about therapeutic regimens and disease management. It examines the benefits and concerns regarding Health 2.0 and includes an extensive listing of health media resources.

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.

leading health informatics and health services/health policy journal (ranked first by impact factor in these disciplines). JMIR was the first open access journal covering health informatics, and the first international scientific peer-reviewed journal on all aspects of research, information and communication in the healthcare field using Internet and Intranet-related technologies; a broad field, which is nowadays called "eHealth" [see also What is eHealth and What is eHealth (2)]. This field has also significant overlaps with what is called "consumer health informatics.", health 2.0/medicine 2.0, or participatory medicine. This focus makes JMIR unique among other medical or medical informatics journals, which tend to focus on clinical informatics or clinical applications. As eHealth is a highly interdisciplinary field we are not only inviting research papers from the medical sciences, but also from the computer, behavioral, social and communication sciences, psychology, library sciences, informatics, human-computer interaction studies, and related fields.

from JMIR website, pulls articles from various eHealth blogs

In a very significant development for eHealth, a broad adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and approaches coincides with the more recent emergence of Personal Health Application Platforms and Personally Controlled Health Records such as Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault, and Dossia. “Medicine 2.0” applications, services, and tools are defined as Web-based services for health care consumers, caregivers, patients, health professionals, and biomedical researchers, that use Web 2.0 technologies and/or semantic web and virtual reality approaches to enable and facilitate specifically 1) social networking, 2) participation, 3) apomediation, 4) openness, and 5) collaboration, within and between these user groups. The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) publishes a Medicine 2.0 theme issue and sponsors a conference on “How Social Networking and Web 2.0 changes Health, Health Care, Medicine, and Biomedical Research”, to stimulate and encourage research in these five areas.

PUTTING BREAKING MEDICAL NEWS INTO PRACTICE--MedPage Today is the only service for physicians that provides a clinical perspective on the breaking medical news that their patients are reading. Co-developed by MedPage Today and The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Office of Continuing Medical Education, each article alerts clinicians to breaking medical news, with summaries and actionable information enabling them to better understand the implications.

Health 2.0, cousin to Web 2.0, has become energized by Congress' $34 billion commitment to invest in Healthcare Information Technology (HIT). The celebratory mood of the Health 2.0 community is the same as we have witnessed in industries on the verge of rapid growth—and simultaneously very different. Advocates and entrepreneurs make up the community, the healthcare advocates charged up by the first healthcare reform rhetoric and government programs since the Carter administration and the entrepreneurs attracted by the large opportunity a nimble young company can exploit. Both groups are almost indistinguishable in the din of their enthusiasm.

“This past month marked an exciting development at Open Medicine: the launch of the Open Medicine wiki. The first publication to be housed on the wiki is a scoping review of studies examining the use of asynchronous telehealth1 by Deshpande and colleagues. The interactive article allows users to log in and edit, delete or add content to the review and to look at changes other users have made to the document.

Why are we using wiki technology as a publishing platform? Wikis enable a network of users to edit documents collaboratively and on an ongoing basis. This may be particularly relevant to scoping and systematic reviews, which, depending on their area of focus, can quickly become outdated as new studies are published.2 A wiki — a potentially revolutionary tool for knowledge transfer — makes it possible to keep reviews as current and relevant as possible.”

What is acetaminophen made from? Does heartburn lead to Barrett's esophagus? Will your 3-year-old outgrow her stutter?

When Americans have questions like those, one of the first places they go for answers is online. At some point, many end up at Wikipedia.

"More and more people are using the Web to get their health information to augment what they learn from their physicians," says John T. Burklow, the public liaison for the National Institutes of Health. A recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that researching health information is the third most popular online activity among adults, after e-mail and general searching.

Maine's statewide health information exchange has gone live with a one-year demonstration program that will involve 15 hospitals and more than 2,000 clinicians. That includes more than one-third of practicing physicians in the state.

The Health IT Standards Committee is charged with making recommendations to the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (HIT) on standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria for the electronic exchange and use of health information. Initially, the HIT Standards Committee will focus on the policies developed by the Health IT Policy Committee’s initial eight areas. Within 90 days of the signing of ARRA, the HIT Standards Committee must develop a schedule for the assessment of policy recommendations developed by the HIT Policy Committee, to be updated annually. In developing, harmonizing, or recognizing standards and implementation specifications, the HIT Standards Committee will also provide for the testing of same by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST).

The Health IT Policy Committee will make recommendations to the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (HIT) on a policy framework for the development and adoption of a nationwide health information infrastructure, including standards for the exchange of patient medical information. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) provides that the HIT Policy Committee shall at least make recommendations on standards, implementation specifications, and certifications criteria in eight specific areas.

Health information technology (HIT) allows comprehensive management of medical information and its secure exchange between health care consumers and providers. Broad use of HIT has the potential to improve health care quality, prevent medical errors, increase the efficiency of care provision and reduce unnecessary health care costs, increase administrative efficiencies, decrease paperwork, expand access to affordable care, and improve population health.

Overdrive Interactive’s 2009 Social Media Map is available for download now. This Social Media Marketing resource is free - just fill out the form to the right to receive a copy and please go ahead and send it out to people you know or post the image to your blog. All we ask is that you give us a link back to this page. Of course, if you feel we are missing something critical please let us know via the form below.

Take-Away Points
Patients with coronary artery disease can maintain their lipid levels after discharge from a
disease management program.
n Disease management programs for patients with heart disease improve processes of care
and risk factor profiles for the patients enrolled; however, they are resource intensive.
n Patients can maintain lipid levels after discharge from such programs through the use of
electronic laboratory reminder letters.
n Such a system of follow-up will allow disease management programs to provide care to
other high-risk populations without the need for additional resources.

Aug. 7, 2009 -- Electronic reminders can help heart patients stay healthy and on their medications even though they are no longer being closely monitored, new research shows.

The study is among the first in the U.S. to show that electronically maintained health records can improve outcomes among heart patients and possibly even lower health care costs.