Gov Gab on Organic Food
USA.gov just launched a blog and one of the first posts explains the 4 categories of “organic” food, a good basic tool for people trying to avoid hormones, pesticides, etc.
The Business of Survival
The Boston Globe today has a great article that, to me anyway, really illustrates the amazing resiliency and imagination of the human spirit when faced with the unthinkable. It describes Avi Kremer’s story, a man diagnosed with ALS who decided to fight back, literally, for his life with something different — money. Prize money, that is, for helping along the cure to ALS. His project, called Prize4Life, turns the tables on the traditional funding method for researchers:
Usually, researchers get grants as seed money on the front end of their scientific pursuits. Prize4Life takes that dogma and turns it inside out. Scientists get the prize money only after solving crucial questions about ALS — solutions that could hasten discovery of drugs to slow the disease.
Avi’s story is something that, although possible a decade ago, would’ve been so much harder to publicize and organize without the Internet. It is stories like this that, to me, suggest possibilities for the future (and capture the real spirit of “Health 2.0″ or e-patients).
This just in from Health 2.0
Yesterday was the landmark Health 2.0 conference (user-generated Healthcare) held in San Francisco. The event was hosted by Matthew Holt and Indu Subalya, MD. Originally envisioned as about a hundred folks getting together for a day to push the movement forward, this event turned into the “must attend” event for about 500 high energy thinkers and doers.
A few observations – the event felt like déjà vu with a twist. The room was packed. There were a few speakers from the “big guys” (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and WebMD) and a lot of entrepreneurs strutting their stuff.
One big difference was that in almost every case the panelists showing off their cool new user-interactive tools were not using ppt as in the past, but showing demos of real live products. Granted it was clear the presenters had pre-loaded pages and knew what results they would get (who wouldn’t?), they were none-the-less showing us what was actually available, not just a dream in process.
One exception to that was one of my favorites and the most e-Patient presentation of the day was – Sophia’s Garden. Founded by Karen Herzog and her husband (who’s name isn’t in the program, but it was clear that this is a joint effort), Sophia’s Garden uses a Second Life-like environment for parents and other patients to interact with everything from care providers to test results to expert health information. It’s very cool and VERY e-Patient. Sophia’s Garden is still in development so I won’t put a URL here.
BTW – Matthew Holt confessed that the secret to his Blog success was that he Blogged in his pajamas. I’m hoping that strategy will work for me. Note, no photo included with this post.
More info on Health 2.0 Conference.
Google Health’s Adam Bosworth Leaves
In a surprising move that caught many in the industry off-guard, titan Google announced that the leader of its stagnant online health initiative has left the company. You can read the full story over at Reuters
Bosworth, better known for his software engineering accomplishments, probably was not the best choice for this leadership role to begin with. A guy with a sharp mind and wit to follow, his expertise was more technical in nature than necessarily having the wheeling and dealing skills to bring together all of the players in U.S. healthcare. Which is a much larger challenge than I think even Google realizes.
Bosworth may have been stymied, too, by Google itself. With such a huge corporate play into this area, it’s hard to do something different enough to establish it as “Google-centric” and valuable to the average Internet user. While Google values how quickly it can develop and nurture Internet technologies for tools, it hasn’t been able to bring any Google magic to this area whatsoever.
Google’s only current health offering, via Co-op, is a simple tagging application that is very people-work intensive. Is this really the best technology can offer us, having thousands of random people going around “tagging” content? Might as well have monks transcribing health pages in their monastery.
The previews of Google’s online personal health record didn’t light any fires under anyone in the PHR world. The only reason people get scared when Google enters a market is because of the vast people it brings with it. But only If it implements well. (You only need to look at the vast network of orphan Google products to see that everything it touches does automatically take off.)
Hopefully, Google will take Bosworth’s leaving as a sign. Get someone in there with deep and extensive healthcare knowledge and background to lead this effort. And do something a little more interesting than tagging health content or an online health record.
The Democratization of Academic Medicine
A post many weeks ago by Andrew Leonard in his blog “How the World Works” mused about the significance of the declining number of publications from “top” academic economists. It was July 26, so the original post is in the archives here. (a day pass to Salon is free after viewing an ad.. ) The paper he cites by Ellison and colleagues here is interesting reading, as is one from last year by Kim and colleagues here on a similar topic. There are many interesting parallels to changes we’ve seen in health care.
Health 2.0 in The Economist
Health 2.0. It’s all that people can talk about some days in the online health world. It has no definition, though, it’s not much more than the nebulous “Web 2.0,” except topic-specific.
The September 6, 2007 edition of The Economist takes a stab at its take on Health 2.0:
Millions are now logging on to contribute information about topics stretching from avian-flu pandemics to the extraction of wisdom teeth or the use of acupuncture to overcome infertility. You could call it user-generated health care, or Health 2.0.
In some ways this is nothing new. The BrainTalk Communities, an online support group for neurology patients, began in 1993. But content now comes in different forms, such as blogs and videos, and there are many more contributors. More than 20% of American internet users have created some sort of health-related content, according to Jupiter, a market-research firm.
It’s a good read (and not just because I was quoted for the article!) because it puts some much-needed perspective into the hype machine that so many generate around the “2.0″ bubble. Little of this is new. Yes, some of the technology for sharing is new(er), but people have been “sharing” everything online (and I do mean everything) long before Facebook, Myspace, or some health-oriented take on all of this.
Some of the concerns I often hear from reporters is, “Is this stuff any good? Is it accurate? Isn’t putting a whole bunch of people together and getting them talking about healthcare dangerous?”
A lot of user-generated health information is accurate. A panel of neurology specialists judged that only 6% of information posted in the epilepsy-support group of BrainTalk was factually wrong, according to a study published in 2004 in the British Medical Journal. And with enough people online, misinformation is often quickly corrected. Inaccurate posts on the website of the Association of Cancer Online Resources (ACOR), for example, will be pointed out within two hours, says Gilles Frydman, the founder of the association, based in New York.
So, in a nutshell, no, it’s not.
It helps people understand their options better, get emotional support for some very trying times, and feel better about the healthcare choices they make.
white paper
e-Patients:
How They Can Help Us Heal Healthcare
