The perfect storm of technology, consumer-directed healthcare, and comparative effectiveness measures is here. It’s time to capitalize on this convergence by leveraging social networking and patient health records (PHRs) to harness the wisdom of crowds and create effective patient management strategies.
Healthcare reform is forcing patients to grow up quickly in terms of their healthcare literacy. This includes understanding how reform impacts them and having to make more self-rationing decisions about their own care. Meanwhile, technology is providing patients with unparalleled access to information to help them understand their own health challenges and the changing healthcare landscape, as well as the ability maintain their own health data electronically through services such as Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault.
Patients and healthcare professionals alike are using sites like PatientsLikeMe.com, Juvenation.org, Sermo.com, and Medscape’sPhysician Connect, to learn from the collective wisdom of their peers to better manage their conditions, practice medicine, and spur advancements in medicine and research. What is lacking, however, is a concerted effort to un-silo these communities, bringing these patient and physician communities together to harness the aggregated learnings from the indispensable patient-physician dynamic.
Yes, there have been message boards since the dawn of the Internet that enable patients to ask physicians questions about their health and their treatments. However, what the emergence of social media provides us is the opportunity to allow physicians and patients, and even government health agencies, pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers, and potentially payers to collaborate toward improved patient outcomes. In this model, each party would bring their own expertise and knowledge to the conversation as part of a closed-community around a patient or a group of patients with similar health challenges. Social media essentially takes “registries” to another level, becoming a channel for mobilizing and documenting the proactive engagement and collaboration of all of these parties to optimize patient outcomes.
The documentation enables physicians, patients/patient advocacy groups, payers, manufacturers, and government agencies to all glean meaningful insights from these aggregated patient-centric interactions. Moving forward, these multi-disciplinary cases replete with both qualitative and quantitative information can help inform treatment guidelines, HEDIS measures and payer coverage, health economic models, and advancements in ongoing patient care and research.
For example, an oncologist, even at the point of care (thanks to mobile!) can look across aggregated patient-physician interactions, EHR/PHR data, patient outcomes and management strategies for treating a patient with advanced renal cell carcinoma. The larger the volume of aggregated cases and data, the more actionable the patterns that emerge. These may include how to motivate greater adherence, managing side effects of a treatment, and predicting the most successful 1st-line therapy based on patient factors.
Social media’s greatest value, arguably, is not what achievements and knowledge can be gained within distinct peer communities, but the challenges that can be addressed through cross-community collaboration.
