I attended a presentation last week put on by Paul Artiuch and Tim Warner of Don Tapscott's group New Paradigm,
talking about the most important trends in Web 2.0, and in eHealth in
particular. Some of the content is proprietary to members, but most of
it was reasoned opinion, pointers to interesting websites, and
intriguing trends and observations from their research that I thought
might be worth sharing with readers. If your organization is one of the
collaborators in the New Paradigm IT & Competitive Advantage
program, you might want to contact your organization's representatives
in the consortium, and get involved.
What I like about them is
their pragmatism – for example, they explain the value of social
networking tools in a way that is accessible to senior executives and
anticipates and addresses most executives' lack of knowledge, common
misconceptions and security/control fears about them. And they
encourage multiple parallel small-scale experiments using these tools,
in the context of addressing specific organizational problems, so that
participating organizations can actually become leaders in the use of
new technologies and ideas, instead of just abstractly understanding
their potential.
Here were, for me, the shareable highlights of the presentation:
- Focuses
for New Paradigm's current research include producer/customer/consumer
co-development and peer production, the self-managed organization,
implementing social networking applications in organizations, and
understanding the buying and working behaviours of Generation Millennium.
- Sermo.com
– This is a free website used by US doctors (you have to be an AMA
member to get in) where they share clinical information, ideas and
problems. Sermo was credited with the first detection of a recent e coli outbreak
in the US. It is primarily used as a self-help, peer-to-peer
information-sharing and second-opinion forum among small town and rural
MDs in the US (urban doctors presumably have stronger physical networks
they can call on to do this). It's now monitored by the CDC and the FDA.
- theStatus.com
– This is a free, global public website which allows family members to
post the status of convalescents (in hospitals, long-term care
facilities, or even at home), and receive condolences, messages etc. It
includes a blog-like interface for the patient or their rep to send
messages once, that everyone can read (so the patients can save their
energy to get well, and their families can save their energy to be
caregivers, instead of having to tell 100 callers the same news). Very
simple, very innovative.
- Organized Wisdom – This site enables peer-to-peer matching of health care information against stories
of healthcare problems. Very imaginative use of stories (as
context-rich problem definitions) and natural language algorithms to do
the 'matching' to possible health solutions.
- New Paradigm sees further evolution of the Web towards a self-managed, collaborative space. Sites that merely offer content without conversation (collaboration tools embedded), mobility (access anytime from anywhere), broadband (full multimedia capability) and pervasiveness (ability to interact with sensors and other machines in real time and space) will not survive.
- Revolution Health Group
– Steve Case (ex AOL-Time Warner) plans to make his site(s)/tools/media
the premiere destination for the entire US healthcare system, and is
investing millions to do so. It is free (ad-sponsored), but offers a
$129/year intermediary/concierge service that will do all your
searches, news synopsis and answer all questions for you, including
creating and maintaining a personal electronic health record for you
and interfacing it with other systems as required. Revolution Health
has just bought Wondir's Health categories and ported them to their
site (Wondir is a website that lets people ask and answer questions on any subject peer-to-peer on a caveat emptor
basis, and Health was its #1 category). Interestingly, Wondir Health
users seem unhappy with the new, less intuitive Revolution Health
interface – is there a lesson here? Meanwhile, the top 5 healthcare web destinations remain: WebMD, NIH, About.com Health, Yahoo Health/Yahoo Health Answers, and (sigh) the South Beach Diet site.
- Nike+
– Nike plans to put its Nike+ RFID sensors in all their shoes
'standard' by next year (over three million sold already). These
sensors send wireless GPS and other information to your iPod and other
equipped devices, which info can then be relayed anywhere else over the
Internet (and as the link above shows, can also be used to keep tabs on
you). This could be the fore-runner of environmental/health/security
sensors everywhere, that can be monitored by automated environmental,
health and security information systems 24/7 (and by Big Brother).
Note: The US apparently has more Nike shoes than cellphones.
- Some of the big healthcare e-challenges and e-opportunities:
- auto-detecting
medical errors at point-of-care ("beep – you have just attached the
patient's anesthesia tube to a non-anesthetic tank")
- reducing unnecessary visits/treatments (teleheath and other technology-enabled ways of pre-screening)
- comparative public 'ratings' of doctors and hospitals
- enabling
more home-based end-of-life care ('cause folks, we'll soon be running
out of room in nursing homes and hospices, big time)
- auto-alerting of flare-ups of chronic diseases (carrying the drug monitors in Japanese toilets to the next level)
- enabling
health self-management to reduce walk-in visit costs (monitoring,
measuring, diagnostic and even therapeutic devices you can hook up to
your laptop and the Internet)
- accelerating the development of generic drugs
- collection and publication of more accurate waiting-queue numbers and average wait times (since what gets measured gets action)
- better,
automated coordination of medical activities involving multiple
specialties/institutions (synchronizing schedules automatically)
- Research to date has found no evidence that introducing electronic personal health records (where a ton
of money is being spent these days) have any impact on ultimate health
outcomes, except for the detection of adverse drug reactions.
- It
would appear that healthcare quality and cost are adversely affected by
what New Paradigm calls 'demand distortions' (the expectation and
insistence on unnecessary interventions) driven largely by (a) drug and
healthcare device supplier advertising hype ("ask your doctor if
zybloxithon is right for you"), (b) some medical laziness
(over-prescription), and (c) our 'learned helplessness' culture ("I’m sick, give me a drug").
New
Paradigm is quite positive on social networking applications in
organizations, especially internal applications within healthcare
organizations (rather than aimed at the general public), and especially
blogs, wikis, IM and social networking apps similar in approach and
structure to Sermo, theStatus, and OrganizedWisdom.
As mentioned
in a previous post, if you're interested in a summary of Tapscott's
book Wikinomics, it's available free online as a 2-hour video
presentation here.
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