A colleague of mine recently slipped me a copy of “A Web 2.0 Model for Patient-Centered Health Informatics Applications” by Mark Weitzel, Andy Smith, Scott de Deugd, and Robert Yates of IBM. I learned two things as a result of this gesture: 1) my colleagues know me very well and 2) web and social technologies have the potential to enhance medical protocols for patients both on and offline.
Physicians use medical protocol as a plan for evaluating, diagnosing, and treating a condition. There are protocols for everything from cancer, diabetes, and the common cold. These protocols are used as guidelines that provide a scaffolding that physicians can use to avoid ineffective treatment while allowing them to tailor treatment using their own experience and the individual needs of a patient. These protocols are strengthened through information sharing. This information sharing typically takes place in physician communities, both formal and informal. However, with advances in healthcare technology, now is the time to invite patients into this data sharing in order to enhance these medical protocols.
As has been highlighted in blog posts on this site and sites across the web, web technologies, fueled by social and online communities, have drawn patients together into communities. Whether it be public sites like “Patients Like Me” or independant efforts of healthcare organizations to bring their patients together in a collaborative environment, these communities have proven to be a great way to keep patients healthy and engaged in their care. However, they are also becoming a platform for data sharing. This data sharing is largely informal, but it has the potential to enhance and improve protocols if patients and their providers are given the tools necessary to analyze the data that is collected.
As highlighted in the articled mentioned above, using open, standards-based Web 2.0 technologies to enhance data exchange and analysis gives us the following benefits:
- Provides data capture that can be applied to protocol closer to point of care
- Improves the effectiveness of protocol by increasing the volume and accuracy of data to be applied to medical protocols
- Can link the protocol used to a specific patient response to that procotol, which can provide “mass customization” of treatment
- Provides deep analytics and a vast community of physicians that can collaborate and provide feedback on the effectiveness of certain protocols; physicians can annotate decisions and deviations to protocol
- Provides patients access to specific results and their personal health record
- Physicians can provide updates, warnings, and advice directly to patients in a social setting
- The medical community can compare the results of different protocols in different facilities depending on patient situation providing immediate peer feedback.
In a previous blog, The Movement of Patients and Physicians into Social Media, we discussed how patients and physicians are both gathering in social media spaces. However, due to privacy concerns and lack of guidance, rarely are the two groups collaborating together. However, through the use of HIPAA compliant social portal technology and enhanced analytics, social physicians and patients have the ability to work together in a collaborative space to enhance their own care and medical protocol for the entire patient community.
