Americans believe that scientific evidence is not always clear when differentiating between different treatment options for their health.Yesterday, as I moderated the the kick-off Great Debate session of the Health 2.0 Conference, co-hosted by the Center for Information Therapy in Boston, I felt this was a key tension between the fields of Health 2.0 — the use of web 2.0 tools in health, especially among health citizens — and Information Therapy, which aims to 'prescribe' the right information at the right time for the right patient in the process of care.The public belief in scientific uncertainty statistic comes from the latest NPR/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health poll, The Public and the Health Care Delivery System.Don Kemper of Healthwise, the guru and proponent of Information Therapy, discoursed with Matthew Holt on the differences and synergies between Ix therapy and Health 2.0. A panel of reactors listened and responded: they were Gilles Frydman of ACOR, Dr. Alan Greene of DrGreene.com, Amy Tenderich of DiabetesMine, and Dr. Ted Eytan of Permanente Foundation. All four of these panelists are on Twitter, all four are active and important voices in their respective websites and blogs, and all four hold deeply passionate visions for Health 2.0.
Commentology:
Deron liked Matthew's interview with athenahealth CEO Jon Bush.
He had this to say about Jon:
"He's an amazing guy with great vision and clarity. If I were starting a practice from scratch, using Athena's platform would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, we've already invested big $$ in one of those standalone systems."
RBaer weighed in on Matthew's morning post, "A Liberal is a Conservative Exposed to the NHS."
"I am actually a former German physician, (I am in the US because my wife is US American), and I can tell you that German physicians, especially hospitalists are underpaid (many physicians in private practice do reasonably well, though). I hear from friends and family that Germany is paying a price for that by seeing many physicians go abroad (England, Switzerland), being replaced by doctors from Eastern European countries who are often faced with language- and cultural barriers."
Interview with Mark Leavitt
Interview with Jon Bush
A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Continuity of Care Record Gains Ground As A Standard
We live in a time of such great progress in so many arenas that, too often and without a second thought, we take significant advances for granted. But, now and then, we should catalog the steps forward, and then look backward to appreciate how these steps were made possible. They sprung from grand conceptions of possibilities and, then, the persistent focused toil that is required to bring ideas to useful fruition.
We could see this in a relatively quiet announcement this week at HIMSS 09. Microsoft unveiled its “Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS) 2009, the next generation release of the enterprise data aggregation platform that enables hospitals to unlock patient data stored in a wide range of systems and make it easily accessible to every authorized member of the team inside and beyond the hospital – including the patient – to help them drive real-time improvements in the quality, safety and efficiency of care delivery.”
Around the Web in 60 seconds
Carl Hiaasen on efforts to block Florida's new cigarette tax:
"Ellyn Bogdanoff, the Fort Lauderdale Republican who chairs the
Finance and Tax Committee in the House … strongly opposes a
cigarette tax because fewer smokers would be bad for business. The woman is dead serious, folks. In
particular, Bogdanoff worries about the impact that a cigarette tax
would have on convenience stores — not exactly the bedrock of our
economy, but these are the establishments where most young smokers buy
their Marlboros and Camels.''Twenty-two percent of all sales in
convenience stores are cigarettes,'' Bogdanoff said. “We need to look
at everything. If they don't go in to buy cigarettes, they don't buy
the Coke. They don't buy the chips.''And if they don't buy the chips, then they don't buy the beef jerky! God help us!"
Op-Ed: Surgeon Shortage Worries Rural Doc
By
Now that I’ve reached my mid-50s, I sometimes think about retirement, and to be honest it worries me.
I’m not talking about the typical things you worry about pre-retirement, such as the loss of income or lifestyle changes. I worry about what will happen to my patients.
Why? For the simple reason that it will be hard to replace me. This isn’t my ego talking: there simply aren’t nearly enough new surgeons coming along to replace me – or my other contemporaries, for that matter.
I work in Glasgow, Montana, a town of 3,500 in northeastern Montana that is about as rural as it gets. I serve more than 20,000 patients in an area that runs 100 or more miles in every direction except north past the Canadian border. I’ve been on call essentially every hour of every day since I came to Montana over 20 years ago.
Health 2.0 NYC Chapter Meetup
Back in 1995-96, I ran a site out of
my dorm room called Mac-o-mania. It was a collection of interesting
products and tidbits for the Macintosh community. I initially gathered
content myself but as the site's popularity grew I became highly dependent
on people to send me comments, tips and links to keep the site going.
I am a huge believer in the unique ability
of people to take their experiences (failures as well as successes)
and place them, along with other content, onto shelves in their brain.
Innovation is the combination of all those pieces of content in a social
environment shared and combined with other like-minded individuals.
Last June I went to Scott Heiferman’s
Tech meetup and shortly thereafter created the New York Healthcare Technology
Organization using meetup.com platform (thanks Scott!!! – its worth
every penny).
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Building Health into the Delivery System, Take Two
The following is a guest post from Rushika Fernandopulle, MD, MPP,
Co-Founder of Renaissance Health. This is part of a continuing series of blog entries cross-posted here, on the Center for Information Therapy Blog, and the Health Affairs Blog, the conference’s Media Partner in advance of the first-ever “Health 2.0 Meets Information Therapy” Conference in Boston on April 22-23.
Rushika provides another physician perspective on the same question answered by John Halamka this week,
“How do we build Health 2.0 into the delivery system?” Both Rushika and
John will participate in a debate on this topic in Boston.
I am an internist who has been working for the last 5 years to
design, build, and test radically new models of delivering primary care
to improve experience, outcomes, and affordability of care. I currently
serve as Medical Director of one of our redesigned practices in
Atlantic City, NJ. Yesterday afternoon, Mr. Santos, a 53 year old
Hispanic doorman at a local hotel, came in to see me quite visibly
distraught. His prior primary care doctor had without asking him or
discussing the issue checked a PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) as part
of his “routine” blood tests and the results were mildly positive
(6.5). He was told, “Your screen for Prostate cancer was positive, you
need to see a urologist right away to have it taken care of.” All he
heard, of course, was “cancer” and “positive” in the same sentence.
Before Mr. Santos had time to even form the first of the dozens of
questions he had, the doctor had already strode out the door. Over the
next few weeks, Mr. Santos went online to read about PSA and prostate
cancer (which yielded over 6 million pages on Google), and started
talking to his friends at work about the issue. What he surmised, quite
correctly, is that the way forward for him was not at all clear, and
that instead of finding answers he only had more (but better)
questions. What really was his chance of having Prostate Cancer? If he
did what really were the benefits of catching it so early? Were the
risks of the biopsies worth this benefit? What were his other choices?
