Personally Controlled Health Records: Tectonic Shifts in the Health Information Economy
Kenneth D. Mandl, MD, MPH, Associate Professor, Children's Hospital Boston|Harvard Medical School, Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology, kenneth.mandl@childrens.
Personally controlled health record platforms have been adopted by major technology companies, including Google and Microsoft, and by a large employer consortium (Dossia). Mandl will discuss the opportunities created as well as challenges faced in these real-world deployments.
Persuasive Interfaces for Medicine: Enabling Patients to Change Health-related
Behaviors
John Moore, MD, Research Assistant, New Media Medicine
Group, MIT Media Lab, jom@mit.edu
We know, in medicine, that patients are complex individuals with
the need for understanding and social support. We need to make decisions
with them rather than for them. Unfortunately, health information technology
today fails to adhere to these principles. It focuses on giving doctors
tools to enter, manage, explore, and reason with data, but it does not
include the most important person, the patient. We spend tremendous
time and effort on problems in data integration, but we fail to ask
the courageous question: Is this data going to make patients healthier?
The answer is, no, not on its own. It is not going to improve the fact
that only 50% of chronic disease patients take their medications correctly.
It is not going to slow or reverse our obesity epidemic. And it is not
going to stop deaths from preventable and treatable diseases such as
breast cancer and colon cancer. Patient trust in providers is fading,
and technology that alienates the patient is only going to cause a wider
rift. We need technology that works for patients by giving them new
abilities and new power. It needs to help patients understand their
diseases, track and reflect on their performance, and continually collaborate
and receive support from their providers and caregivers. This patient-centric
approach to technology, which leverages its persuasive powers and coaching
from physicians, is what is going to help patients take an active role
in their care, change their behaviors, and lead healthier lives.
HelloHealth: A Social Network for Clinicians to Communicate
with Patients and Clinicians
Jay Parkinson, MD, MPH, Myca, jayparkinsonmd@gmail.com
Facebook has given us a look at how the social Web can keep you
up to date on all your friends. What if an equivalent was used to keep
you up to date on all your patients? We'll explore what this means to
physicians and patients and to our society as a whole. Because when
we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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