Health 2.0

mHealth Summit - Coming in Dec. in DC

2011-10-26T15:29:00.000-07:00

Is the healthcare world waking up to the power of mobile? Social has largely passed them by but mobile looks to be a lot less threatening - simply because the ROI/health impacts are easier to document and the platform so much more ubiquitous.

Check out who's coming and what will be discussed at the mHealth Summit here.

The Very Best Session at Health 2.0: Data Driven Healthcare

2011-10-20T11:12:00.000-07:00

The Very Best Session that I attended at Health 2.0 was this session on Data-Driven Decisions. It featured a panel of three top experts followed by demos of a number of vendors who have created products in this space.

BEST BITS

While the whole video is worthy of your attention, If your time is limited, focus on these best bits.

6:00 In: DR. PAUL WALLACE

Of the three panelists, Dr. Paul Wallace, Senior Vice President and Director of the Lewin Group Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research, was the most interesting.

Formerly at Kaiser Permanente, he was part of the team that used Archimedes to make spectacular increases in reducing heart attacks 24% and even more for the more dangerous type of attacks.His brief remarks as a panelist come at 6:00 into the video.

BEST BITS, CONTINUED

43:40 In: JEFF ADLER OF ARCHIMEDES

The vendor whose software and modeling approach unlay the Kaiser Permanente study is Archimedes' Indigo product which was presented by Josh Adler of Archimedes.

His demo comes at 42:40 into the video.

Health Data Everywhere: Not A Drop to Link

2011-10-19T11:23:00.000-07:00

The artfully named Health Data Everywhere: Not A Drop to Link from SXSW is essential listening for those of us interested in what might make healthcare work well - data-driven analytics, applied to medicine, which is a field in its relative infancy.If you'd like to give it a listen, click here.

(The screen below is just for looks).

Health 2.0 - A Traipse Around the Conference Floor

2011-10-03T17:31:00.001-07:00

Mobile Apps for Patients and Doctors Alike

2011-09-23T11:56:00.000-07:00

Finally the health care industry is waking up to using cell phones more effectively in getting patients connected to doctors, medical records/charts, and prevention programs.

While there isn't yet a corresponding movement toward patient-to-patient mobile apps, I would imagine this would be coming down the pike in the near future, too, as everything migrates to mobile devices.

Here is a roundup of three cutting edge apps that are getting some traction.

FINDING A DOCTOR

ZocDoc.com - the "Open Table" of doctor sites - is making news with both investors and patients. It offers both a web site AND a mobile phone app to let people find a doctor.

It's signing up doctors from all the health plans and helps doctors, who pay a monthly fee for the service, fill empty spots in their calendars.

It helps patients find medical care when and where they need it.

Yesterday Goldman Sachs announced its investing $25 million in Zocdocs, which made news. Here is the NYTimes coverage.

One wonders whether or not it will include Yelp-style doctor ratings to its app as well or if the more mainstream Yelp will continue to be the leading inadvertent source of information for most patients seeking doctor reviews.

Zocdoc is great for finding a dentist or doctor when you are traveling, for instance, and need help. It is easier than calling your physician for a referral in a different city. The app shows which doctors are covered by which health plans, which is a huge source of confusion - that functionality alone would be enough to support a web site company.

MEDICAL RECORDS ON YOUR PHONE

Longitme healthcare IT company Epic offers its doctors and patients a way to communicate using My Chart.

Here is the iTunes page with app info customized for one of the many health plans it serves.

Here's a video from one of the first providers to roll the app out:

PREVENTION ON THE PHONE

Perhaps my favorite mobile example comes from former colleague Kevin Patrick, a leading m-health researcher who has made the Santech company products based on his research in the PACE Project.

The initial research focused on obesity prevention in teens and has now expanded to many other prevention topics. You can learn more about the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and led by Dr. Kevin Patrick, a professor of Family and Preventive
Medicine at UC San Diego by clicking here.

Here are screenshots from the kids and obesity app:

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There also a number of videos from television news coverage here. I love the Fox news story about the teenager who lost 30 lbs.

When will it be available for the rest of us???

Health 2.0 Conference Next Week

2011-09-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

The Health 2.0 conference starts Sunday and continues through Tuesday in downtown SF. Find out more here.

How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer

2010-05-06T23:32:00.001-07:00

A BBC documentary about networks and getting smarter...
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/documentaries/interactive/futuremakers/ep4/

Collaboration in Healthcare - Great Talk from TedMed

2010-05-06T23:17:00.000-07:00

Hear John Abele's TEDMED presentation on health and collective intelligence:

DOP Central: A Place for Directors of Pharmacy

2010-03-01T12:46:00.000-08:00

I spent some time this fall consulting to an interesting new startup called Pipeline Healthcare. Its main mission is bringing telepharmacy services to hospitals and retail pharmacies. Many rural hospitals are not able to support night time pharmacy shifts since pharmacists are hard to attract to rural areas.

Just ask North Dakota (where they've done the most research on this).

In addition, many retail pharmacies find the same issue - pharmacists are in demand and the night shift is not the best assignment one can get today.

Enter telepharmacy, which solves this issue with pharmacists in a central call center in Chicago, or wherever.

The piece of this that I was working on was putting together a site for directors of pharmacy. You can read more about it on the Pipeline Healthcare site here.

There are 5,000 directors of pharmacy nationwide. It will be interesting to see what happens when they have an online watercooler where they can connect and communicate with one another.

Open Medical Records: The New Frontier?

2009-09-21T09:27:00.001-07:00

Today's story on NPR about the experiment with open medical records - a good one, give it a read through and a listen here - made me think back to the work we did in the mid 1990s on the personal health record as well as the push for consumer medical libraries that Planetree originally led.

Back in the 1980s doctors considered it taboo for patients to have access to medical literature. Today medical literature oozes from every other node on the Internet.

In the 90s, I worked with Mike McDonald, an epidemiologist from Berkeley, to help Gore and Koop on health information infrastructure. One of our central tenets was that patients ought to own and control their medical records in cahoots with their doctor. How can a doctor treat you when s/he doesn't know if you are exercising, what you are eating and other lifestyle factors - which are of course the main determinants of your health.

Today there's a small movement to see if open medical records can fly. There's concern from doctors about changing the way they do business - more of the secret society's walls coming down.

Since 1996, patients have had the right to see their medical records although, as the NPR story states, some places make it difficult by charging you a lot of money for a copy.

I was interested to see mine, I have to admit, when my doctor suddenly left his practice after a medical event for instant retirement. All patients were instructed to come down and get their records. His wife handed them out through the window we usually checked in at. It was a semi-surreal experience.

I read through my record hoping to find something of interest, but it was in fact quite boring. He was of the old school, protecting patients against health insurers, and wrote very little in the official record. Of course, I didn't have major medical problems or it might have been different.

All the same, I hope in our lifetime we will see open medical records - and ones that are jointly created.

After all, most of us don't have the same doctor for life and we need to become active participants in our health and in healing ourselves with professional partners when we are sick.

Health Insurance Reform: Why Do We Want It?

2009-09-16T20:29:00.000-07:00

In case some people have forgotten, here's why we need health insurance reform - because we can't afford the current system. Business can't afford it, ordinary people can't afford it, and it's the most senseless health care "system" on earth.

Today's Chronicle story "Premiums rise 5% for year; increase is 131% for decade" based on the latest Kaiser Foundation report lays it all out quite neatly.

Health IS Social

2009-09-13T22:41:00.000-07:00

Researchers studying the social networks of the Framingham study data have come to startling new conclusions about health: it's social. From stopping smoking to gaining weight, hear how researchers are now piecing together the data in new ways, focusing on behavior and social networks.

Story is here.

Jill's Stroke of Insight Talk from TED

2009-09-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

Watching this video makes me realize a lot about why and how health 2.0 can work - and why we needed 2.0 (is it our right brain) to follow the 1.0 era. Tell me what you think....

Joe Flower's Video: Health Care Strangled In Its Bed

2009-09-09T10:39:00.000-07:00

See the video here...an excellent and scarey overview of where we are now.

http://www.imaginewhatif.com/

Doctors 2.0: Looks Like Pre-Internet

2009-06-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

Doctors are investing in technology that lets them spend more time with patients - Hallelujah. Read the article in today's NYTimes.

I also recommend Paul Krugman's recent columns on health care reform:

Don't trust the insurance industry
and
Blue Double Cross

Mobile Giving Foundation: Imagine 15% of That Concert Audience Donating to Your Health Cause

2009-06-03T10:19:00.001-07:00

One of the most interesting sessions for me at the recent NetSquared mobile activism conference was a presentation by the Mobile Giving Foundation. Mobile giving is a new trend that helps causes get that "impulse buy" contribution, typically from a younger donor than their usual donor base.

I'll dig more into my notes from this session to add more details here, but the most salient takeaway example comes from Alicia Keyes whose one-time mention of the number to text for her children's AIDS foundation (KeepAChildAlive.org) on American Idol yielded $500,000.

At her concerts, she is seeing 15% of her audience donate $5 via their cell phones, using the Mobil Giving Foundation system (which is a 100% passthrough on the full donation amount, thanks to cooperation from all the carriers).

For more information, check out the speaker Christian Zimmern's slides which he graciously shared.

mHealth Keynote from Brooke Partridge from NetSquared Conference

2009-06-03T10:05:00.000-07:00

Brooke Partridge presented her overview of mHealth initiatives in developing countries worldwide.

You can learn more or download the full report here. There's also audio to go along with the full presentation on her Vital Wave consulting site.

Her previous mHealth reports are also available on her site.

One interesting point that stuck with me (and it's a week later) is the potential for bundling a suite of services in small countries, which can include some health services. Health as a stand along service may not be an attractive offer to a small provider, but a bundle of services can.

I've been working with my long time friend Janine Firpo at Sevak Solutions on her Africa-wide mbanking initiatives. You can find more about this work at the Sevak Solutions web site.

New Stars in the Health 2.0 Firmament: SMS

2009-06-03T09:42:00.000-07:00

Is mobile 2.0? Or beyond? It seems to me a lot of the most cutting edge work is taking place on the cell phone and that front was definitely "up" at the NetSquared conference last week on digital activism.

NetSquared is the social media arm of the nonprofit TechSoup, which helps nonprofits use technology effectively.

The biggest rising star at the conference, a group that took home no less than 3 separate awards, was Frontline SMS Medic, a group of hotshots who are working hard to bring some efficiencies to healthcare in remote African villages. They won three small prizes that come with cash - which seemed only fair since their organization had previously received zero in funding.

Frontline SMS Medic helps community workers use services more efficiently, including ambulance trips, and is setting up a patient medical record as well.

Its pilot in Malawi, working with community health workers there, is described in more detail on their web site or in the NetSquared project description.

Here are some of the photos from the conference of the Frontline SMS Medic booth:

How the Mayo Clinic Uses Social Media

2009-06-03T09:07:00.000-07:00

I first encountered the Mayo Clinic when I went there in the early 80s to meet and interview Joe Mayo for a Turner Broadcasting System show on Minnesota in Hal Holbrook's Portrait of America series.

In the mid 90s, they competed against a small band of epidemiologists from UC Berkeley (that took me into their fold as their media producer) who had mounted a serious and lively (and ultimatedly winning) effort to create a state of the art interactive television channel for Time Warner in their ITV trials (the Full Service Network). Ultimately we prevailed.

It comes as a great pleasure to hear that Mayo is in the game with social media - probably the best use of their health knowledge that could possibly happen. Perhaps next they will be sharing equally with PatientsLikeMe and other truly social sites.

Enjoy the presentation. (And remember I have been talking about the Flip since 2005! It's even in my 2005 book Create Your Own Digital Movies.)

Energizing Word of Mouth through Social Media

View more Microsoft Word documents from Lee Aase.

Kaiser: Email Reminders Work!

2009-05-19T11:28:00.000-07:00

See the story in today's Chronicle.

Radiologist Adds Personal Photos...and Gets Different Results

2009-04-07T11:56:00.000-07:00

If you've ever seen someone's emails that have their photos in them, you may have felt more connected to them.

A radiologist tried this approach with patients - and treatment changed.

See the story of his fascinating research in today's New York Times.

Nothing traditional 2.0 about it in terms of technology - but everything 2.0 in terms of connecting social media (in this case a personal photo) to social behavior.

2.0 Breathing New Life into Health Startups

2009-02-09T18:18:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been meeting with and learning about new Health 2.0 startups that are not on the featured panels at Health 2.0 - which is a good thing, because Health 2.0 the conference is starting to repeat itself and is a bit sponsor-heavy up there on the speakers sofas.

It's exciting to me to see the impact 2.0 is having on the world in health and how much more refined and community-centric it can be 10 years out of the gate.

Newco #1 Graftfinder.com is an interesting site - it searches multiple partner sites to search for grafts (by medical professional), saving time for clients and money as well. It also offers a community hosted on Ning.

Newco #2 is WeAre.Us, a new health communities site that Techcrunch calls "Ning with heart." While communities have been with us in the health space for quite some time, this looks like an interesting one, because it's devoted purely to chronic diseases like Crohn's and Huntington's. These are the sorts of groups that have traditionally on listserves, Yahoo or Google Groups, or scattered in public forums like Facebook. However, the times they are a changing - and the latest social software can bring more to life in these communities and meet a younger generation's higher level of expectations about what an online community should offer.

At the same time, does no one look to the research from the past on health communities? The work David Gustafson and his colleagues at University of Wisconsin at Madison bears rereading. The more things change...

The REAL 2.0

2008-10-24T23:25:00.000-07:00

Health 2.0 was a disappointment this week, but getting back on track with the online Connectivism class is a joy.

If you want to learn more, systematically, about this whole 2.0 thing, this free class offers a very savvy intro and deep dive.

Emerging Markets and Cell Phones

2008-10-24T22:56:00.000-07:00

The Next Billion Customers, Brooke Partridge: Interplay08

A fascinating talk about both the emerging markets country breakouts (did you know that FIVE families control Mexico? It wasn't on the National Geographic special, was it) and cell phone use (most people don't use it for voice but for text). I read Brooke's report on mHealth, after seeing her on the global health panel at Health 2.0, but enjoyed this video more.

Of course, we will all now be wondering if any markets still emerge, from the rubble heap of Dark Days.

Texting 4 Health

2008-10-24T17:46:00.000-07:00

One of the best mHealth conferences, Texting4Health.org, took place in the spring at Stanford and has also shared all the presenters slideshows here.

Rockefeller eHealth Conference Videos

2008-10-24T17:45:00.001-07:00

Find them online, here. There's a lot of interest in mobile health in this group.

Global Health = mHealth

2008-10-24T17:26:00.000-07:00

One of the better presentations at the recent Health 2.0 conference was the panel on Global Health moderated by James Mathews of Sage Software.

A great summary of it is available at ReadWrite Web here.

For more great conference coverage, see all of Lidija's blog posts on the conference here.

Health 2.0: Eating Your Own Dogfood

2008-10-24T17:17:00.001-07:00

One topic I had wanted to raise at the Health 2.0 conference was to encourage health companies and providers to start using Enterprise 2.0 tools internally. Once you have worked with these tools and understand their usefulness, it's a much easier step to use them in clinical settings with consumers and patients.

Often an easy place to begin is with an internal blog.

Health Video Campaigns: One of the Best

2008-10-24T16:34:00.000-07:00

I am such a fan of the Brower Youth Awards program, honoring young environmentalists, and especially the way the campaign uses web video profiles about the program itself (What Would Dave Do?), the opening animations, and the videos themselves.

Here's Marisol Becerra's profile, focused on toxics in her Latino neighborhood in Chicago.

There is unfortunately something wrong with the embed code at the moment so I can't insert it here, but you can view the video online here. Check out all the videos in this series!

Come to My Talk on Web Video Saturday

2008-10-24T07:33:00.000-07:00

I will be giving a talk tomorrow Saturday called YouTube101 at BizTechDay. It's for startups and small businesses, but would help anyone in health as well, about why and how to use video externally and internally. The emphasis will be on marketing but it's applicable to many health media needs as well.

I will also be posting the slides on slideshare and and on my YouTube101.tv blog.

2.0, Health, and KM: Will It Blend?

2008-10-24T07:29:00.000-07:00

After spending the last four years hard at work on various Knowledge Management projects, and 2.0, I've come back full circle the last two days to the health informatics and health information startup crowd I used to know and love. But I've got to say, it's looking a bit thin, compared to the fields of KM and 2.0.

KM in particular brings so much more to the table in terms of understanding the way people really do learn and absorb knowledge, not just information. Let's call it applied knowledge, too, because it really does need to be integrated into thinking and life.

I sense there may need to be a whole new way of teaching health informatics and health IT and health technology that simply hasn't been there before.

Health 2.0 Conference, SF

2008-10-23T22:00:00.000-07:00

The latest two-day Health 2.0 conference seems to be rapidly morphing into a cross between a mini TechCrunch wannabe in the health vertical and a commercial expo of predominantly young companies that may be interesting but are not 2.0.

After suffering through a remarkably blatant display of conference sponsor companies on Day 1, and resetting my sights to account for the cognitive dissonance of finding very little of actual 2.0 at the conference, I did learn something.
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1. American Well again announced it's launching in Hawaii with HMSA. This is the most promising telemedicine venture to date, which appears to neatly solve many of the business/provider/payment issues.

2. Hello Health has progressed, and is cool but limited in its rollout schedule. Despite interest from hundreds of doctors who would like to roll it out in other cities, the group is slowly expanding only in NYC at present.

3. mHealth (mobile health) is an exciting, emerging platform in the U.S. and exploding in the international context. However, mobile health is not really yet part of the Health 2 conference and has its own conferences. VitalWave announced its study for the UN mHealth initiative with Vodafone is available online. Get a copy here (mHealth in the Global South). Learn more about the Rockefeller sponsored Bellagio conference on mHealth here.

4. Edelman released a downloadable report on 1,000 users in each of 5 different countries to report on their health interests. Download it here. (Hint: skip ahead to slides 42-3 if you want to see the report's key findings.)

5. Clay Shirky's opening talk was helpful, and the best content of the whole conference, but too short and not followed up on in the conference presentations. Since he's worked in health, it was especially unfortunate not to learn more from him. However there is a very nice summary of his talk at ReadWriteWeb here.

Is there an argument to be made that Health 2.0 isn't really a large enough niche to warrant its own branded conference? There may in fact be a great Health 2 0 conference to be created, but not one that is focused on sponsorships from existing health companies.

User generated healthcare may in fact be taking place much more in regular, non-health-nichified 2.0 platforms - like facebook, blogs, wikis, Yahoo groups, Google groups, Ning and other free online platforms.

New to Health 2.0? On Ramp Here...

2008-10-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

Want to know more about Health 2.0 but don't know where to start? Download these reports to get started:

iCrossing's How America Searches: Health & Wellness
The Wisdom of Patients: Health Care Meets Online Social Media

Want more, you say? How about a dive into Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody, which, although it's not health specific, is a great introduction to the field.