At the age of 16 I was told by my gastroenterologist that the only way he would treat me is if we did this together as a team. I learnt very early on that I needed to take responsibility for my health. That led me to understand more about my blood levels, the important markers and what I needed to do next to assist my recovery. In the last 5 years, post my intestinal transplant, I really decided that I have a responsibility to give back to the surgeons who saved my life. The best way I could do that was to live my life. I started mentoring patients with IBD and intestinal failure and then started talking to the new transplant patients. From there I understood more the power of the patient and the role we can play in healthcare in the future. At Stanford Medicine X we have a philosophy of everyone included which is around the fact that everyone, including the patient, has a role to play and each role has to be based on mutual respect and empathy.
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Solutions That Will Be Essential for the Future of Healthcare
We are living in an age where thousands upon thousands of individuals and companies are trying to find faster, better and cheaper ways to get things done leveraging the latest digital technologies. We are so completely surrounded by efforts to innovate, disrupt and accelerate, that it may come as a surprise to find out that “innovation” has been around ever since our earliest ancestors shed their body hair and started walking upright.
Since those early days, our ancestors have sought solutions to their everyday problems and the “technology” they leveraged was whatever the environment around them gave them to use. These early humans started to make tools and weapons out of stone and thus came up with a clever solution to help them hunt, grind grains, start fires and build shelters. It may however come as a surprise to find out that, even in the stone age, our earliest ancestors applied their latest innovation to also find solutions to their health problems!
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Bayer’s Head of Innovation and Tim Kelsey of the NHS to Keynote Health 2.0 Europe
By HEALTH 2.0
The Middle East Marketplace, Medical R&D, Investments, and Consumer: Kemal Malik, Head of Innovation at Bayer, and Tim Kelsey, National Director for Patient and Information for NHS England are slated to keynote the upcoming 5th Annual Health 2.0 Europe conference on November 10-12 in London, UK. The international digital health conference will feature a wide variety of sessions on some of the most important topics in digital health including:
Medical R&D: How medicine continues to grow with Health 2.0 tools which supports medical research and collaboration via open data reporting and collection through clinical trials. Featured demos include F1000, Lumos!, PxHealthCare, and TrialReach.
Big Data: A session that frames national, entrepreneurial, and patient-based efforts to create Open Data portals and access across the spectrum. See how HealthUnlocked, Healthbank, and Marand are turning big data into actionable change.
Wearable Technology: As the marketplace for consumer tech and wearables become more prevalent within digital health, Health 2.0 Europe features devices from Biovotion, Qardio, Empatica, and Sensoria which are taking new approaches to tracking, capturing, and analyzing personal health data.
Health 2.0 Europe: Creation Healthcare’s Daniel Ghinn
Harriet Messenger – How has social media transformed our lives? And how do you see it transforming health care?
Daniel Ghinn – Social media is transforming our lives in so many ways. I think all the benefits we’re getting through social media are now happening in health care. For example, social media is great for connecting people who share experiences, this is greatly beneficial in health care – whether it’s bringing patients together or building strong communications between health care providers.
It enables us to learn from one another, to get support and to share ideas in ways that would never have been possible in the non-digital communities that we lived in before the explosion of digital.
HM – Who is using social media? Is it patients, health professionals, pharmaceutical companies?
DG – To some extent it is probably a reasonable generalisation to say everybody, but in so many different ways. Patients, I believe, led the digital health revolution. Patients coming together, collaborating, sharing experiences and learning from each other on how to connect with other diverse areas.
Health 2.0 Europe: Med Digital’s Felix Jackson
Harriet Messenger – New technologies are allowing pharmaceutical companies to be in direct contact with patients. How is this transforming the industry and what are the opportunities and the pitfalls?
Felix Jackson – Nothing has really changed with regards to how pharmaceutical companies can interact with their patients. We’ve always been able to provide information for patients. In fact it’s a regulatory requirement that pharmaceutical companies provide patient information. What’s changed is that the digital framework enables them to do this much more conveniently online and much more powerfully. The places that I’m seeing theses changes are places like disease awareness, where pharmaceutical companies are using digital awareness to raise education and information about a certain disease and when to go and seek treatment from a doctor. Also in their support of patients post prescription. So when a patient is prescribed a drug and needs detailed information on that drug, pharmaceutical companies are doing quite a lot of work to provide that information digitally.
HM – And are there pitfalls to this at all?
FJ – Yes, one of the problems with digital, is that it is very global and so traditionally the pharmaceutical companies are regulated on a geographical basis, by country, and traditionally that has been quite easy to control, handing out leaflets in a specific geography. Now with the Internet, if you put something online it can be accessed from all sorts of different parts of the world and that can cause issues. However, I don’t think those problems are that major. If you think it through, it’s about how you are aiming and targeting that activity and if you’re aiming at UK patients and filter websites in the UK then it’s very easy to control, or at least easier than some companies worry about.
The Enormous Potential for Digital Health Care Services in Germany
Throughout Europe, digital innovations with substantial benefits for the patients are spreading quickly. However, stakeholders in Germany are still reserved about these new technologies. Alexander Schachinger, founder and CEO of healthcare42.com and speaker at Health 2.0 Europe, talks about the chances of digital healthcare services in Germany.
Mr. Schachinger, healthcare42 and Publicis Healthware/ razorfish are currently preparing a survey about the utilization of health information by chronic patients in the Internet. What exactly is the objective of your investigations?
Alexander Schachinger: Up to now, there haven‘t been any representative scientific studies about the usage of health information by chronic patients. We still don‘t know how this influences their knowledge, their attitudes or their behavior in regard to the healthcare market, in particular towards doctors and pharmacists. We are attempting to close a gap here since research on e-patients has been unfortunately neglected in Germany. In a survey in cooperation with KWHC and others, we interviewed 3,500 e-patients online. We were able to show that the Internet, exchange in forums and suchlike do have an effect on the patients, especially in regard to medical consultations and the decision for or against a certain therapy.
How do you define “e-patients?”
With this term we refer to people suffering from chronic diseases, but also to acutely ill patients, who use the Internet to find out and share information about health issues. This term also comprises all sorts of caregivers, including parents, children or spouses who inform themselves about the medical conditions of their loved ones via the Internet.
A song for (Health 2.0) Europe
On Tuesday and Wednesday this week we completed a remarkable first—Health 2.0 Europe brought the spirit, technology and passion we’ve hosted at Health 2.0 conferences in the US,and married it to all those qualities and many more from all over Europe. I’ll be writing much more about it soon, but all the simultaneous translation reminded me about this multi-lingual classic from Roxy Music (one of the few great songs in many languages)
Health 2.0 Europe Opening Video
Health 2.0 Europe Intro from Health 2.0 on Vimeo.
Health 2.0 Europe, a fabulous end to Day 1
(posted early Weds 7th April, Paris time!)
We had quite the fabulous time at Health 2.0 Europe Day 1. Other than my personal fouling up of the final presentation about Health 2.0 in Haiti, things went very smoothly. (We will record and repeat that segment for a wider audience, as it’s a remarkable story and Roni Zeiger told it very well despite the technical difficulties).
I think that the panel on patient communities was the best ever at any Health 2.0 Conference, and Susannah Fox told me it was the best she’s ever been on—and she’s been on a lot!
Then we had a fabulous night out at a fabulous location, Les Invalides. And there’s much much more to come today! Follow #health2eu on Twitter.
(Photo from supergelule.fr)
Health 2.0 Europe today; take a deep breath
By
I’ve been careening around the Paris metro getting the flavor of this amazing city, and tomorrow the preparation stops and Health 2.0 Europe finally happens. (Just to be clear this blog publishes on California time where it’s still the 5th but the conference starts Tuesday April 6 Paris time!!)
More than 500 people will gather to hear about search and content, online communities, patients & consumers using tools with & without connecting to doctors and hospitals, and much more. We’ll hear from leaders in online health in the Netherlands, Denmark, Hungary, the US, the UK, Germany and more. We’ll find out the reaction of the health care system, including hospitals, payers, physicians and pharma, to these new technology advances. We’ll try to see if we can figure out if there is a distinctly European version of Health 2.0–-at least we’ll be arguing about that (and Indu, I and Denise Silber have been doing lots of arguing about that!).
The conference is officially sold out, but our stellar registration meisters (Hillary McCowen & Miles Denison) tell us that they’ve found a space or two (hanging from the rafters?) and that a very limited number of tickets will be sold on site. Best to get there before 11.30 tomorrow if you still want one.
So see you at Cite Universitaire tomorrow (Tuesday). Officially it starts at 1pm, but please get there early to pick up badges and get yourself a seat!
If you can’t be there follow the tweets at #health2eu and wait for the videos that will be coming out in the weeks after the conference…..
