Social health, Social help

Social Media and Healthcare – Empowering patients around the world. Are you next?

Social media has the potential to revolutionize how patients interact with the health care system.  From providers, to pharmaceutical manufacturers and device makers.  Patients are engaged in online discussion pertaining to their diseases… they are learning and they are sharing their experiences.  Will this change how medicine is “practiced” in the US?  Perhaps…

Twitter for Health

People worth following in the Health Care space

• Top Ten Medical Professionals on Twitter : And I am honored and humbled to be one of them :-)
• My Twitter Follow List Folks who are making a difference!
• e-patient Dave The consumate social media e-patient
• Gilles Frydman Participatory Medicine advocate, Founder of ACOR
• Greg Masters Health 2.0 “guru”
• FasterCures A new slant on medical research using social media
• Trisha Torrey Trish is an accomplished patient advocate
• @AndrewSpong UK, Health conveyancer. #hcsmeu co-founder. Patients, providers, pharma
• @KentBottles : Physician, reader of books, airplane traveler, speaker/writer/learner
• @amcunningham GP, Clinical Lecturer and EdD student… interested in everything
• @DrVes Assistant Professor at University of Chicago, Allergist/Immunologist, Internist. Former Cleveland Clinic Assistant Professor and NEJM Advisory Panel Member.
• American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeon
• @healthiscocial : Interesting and deeply thoughtful commentary by @philbaumann on health care, social media, pharma and more.
• @SeattleMamaDoc :  Great blog by pediatrician and early social media adopter, Wendy Sue Swanson
• @Doctor-V : Great blog by Dr. V, a pediatric GI doc from TX. www.33charts.com

 

The *Engaged* Patient

These are sites administered by engaged e-patients, patient advocates, participatory medicine proponents and people interested in good solid medical advice.

• The Voice of Patient Engagement
• Treato “We enable people to understand the real life experiences of other patients, letting them make better informed healthcare decisions for themselves and their loved ones”
• Medify “help you and your family more easily navigate, stay current, and manage the often complex process of finding answers, while empowering you to get help from those you trust most”.
• Personalized Medicine The simplest, free, customizable, multi-lingual aggregator of quality medical resources in social media.
• “Patient Handout Search” : A health care google search tool helpful for providers and patients.
• Participatory Medicine
• Association of Cancer Online Resources Online patient communities to share timely advice for those suffering from cancer.
• Patient Empowerment Administered by Trish Torrey… a tireless patient advocate
• Finding Credible Reliable Objective Information about your Health on the Internet A good resource by Trisha Torrey
• The Trip Database : The TRIP Database is a clinical search tool designed to allow health professionals to rapidly identify the highest quality clinical evidence for clinical practice. Patients may find this database useful as well.  Thanks to Anne Marie Cunningham for pointing this out to me.
• Patient Power : Run by Andrew Schorr, author of The Web Savvy Patient
• Shared Decision Making : concept
• Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making
• Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare : Understanding of the Efficiency and Effectiveness of the Health Care System

Patient-Centric Health Care:

The patient is stationary and the healthcare system revolves around them

• BoneSmart.org : Global Consumer Awareness of Joint Replacement Options: A Q&A group administered by an Orthopedic Nurse.
• Project VRM : Patient driven health care, modeled around untethered, non – *siloed* data.
• The Patient as the Platform : What if the *vendors* (docs, MRI centers, hospitals, etc) had to navigate around the stationary patient (and their data)? Now all the data is in one place… available to those who are granted permission to help improve the health of those in need!
• A PCAST Patient Portal

We are all patients!

Social Media is beginning to impact upon the health care landscape.  Patients are online and they are beginning to engage with one another, as well as with various organizations to learn more about the diseases they suffer from.

No one knows for sure where our social media activities will take us.  Social media has the potential to improve the delivery, content and quality of the care we administer… but there is also a downside.  There is a lot of mis-information out there and many people trying to prey on desperate people simply looking for meaningful advice on their conditions.  Don’t believe everything you read online… vet your information sources carefully.

Those of us in healthcare are trying to encourage others to engage.   Both the AMA and the Australian AMA have put forth guidelines to encourage *proper* online behavior.   This is new for all of us, but stands to benefit all of us, the experiment is well worth it.  WE ARE ALL PATIENTS !!