Social Health on line

Social media effect hospital choice of patients!

Although our attention may be distracted from time to time by a health-related smartphone or tablet app, a health tracking device, a quantified self peripheral, or some another piece of shiny, soon-to-be-outmoded future junk, I hope it is becoming obvious by now that the best digital health app currently available is conversation.

It is the health conversation on the social web that can best interpret, filter and respond to our need for high quality information regarding disease symptoms, diagnosis and treatment options.

It is conversation that conveys the insight of trusted voices to inform our shared healthcare decision-making.

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UK doctors have been given new guidance to help them provide patients with online access to services like booking GP appointments and ordering repeat prescriptions.

Patient Online: a Roadmap also covers such other 'transactional services' as secure online communication with the practice and access to online records.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said: “Appointments, prescriptions and test results can, and should be, only a click away. Records - which help patients work in partnership with their doctor to manage their care - also need to be easily accessible.”

Hunt has an ambitious plan for the NHS to go paperless by 2018 and as part of this the NHS Commissioning Board wants all GP practices in England to offer patients online access to their records and transactional services by 2015.

The Royal College of General Practitioners' (RCGP), which lead on the development of the new guidance, says giving patients access to their own records presents both “great opportunities and major challenges”.

Department of Health's whole systems demonstrator research calls into question degree of enthusiasm for the technology, says David Brindle

Expectations of the benefits of telehealth technology may be scaled back after a study found it was "not effective" in improving the quality of life of people with long-term conditions.

The research, the latest findings to emerge from the Department of Health's whole system demonstrator (WSD) evaluation of telehealth and telecare, the world's biggest trial of the technology, calls into question the degree of official enthusiasm for its adoption.

Telehealth has been seen as a potential breakthrough in the care and support of more than 15 million people living with long-term conditions, who account for half all GP appointments and three-quarters of hospital bed use. By helping them better manage their conditions at home, it is expected to reduce their demands on health services.

However, the research – conducted over 12 months among 1,500 patients with lung disease, diabetes or heart failure in Cornwall, Kent and London – found that telehealth use had no impact on generic quality of life anxiety or depressive symptoms.

Writing for the British Medical Journal on bmj.com, the study team concludes: "Our findings strongly suggest no net benefit from telehealth; therefore, it should not be used as a tool to improve health-related quality of life or psychological outcomes."...

In July of 2012, National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC) convened a meeting of the Consumer Consortium on eHealth. The Consortium was created in early 2011 and has since developed into a diverse group of over 300 individuals and organizations, united in the common goal to use health IT to engage patients in their care. During the 2012 Consumer Engagement Summit, it became clear that something had changed in the way people were talking about patient engagement. In 2011, there had been a persistent question: “Why patient engagement?” By this past summer, the questions were: “How do we do it?” and “Where do we start?”

It was with that zeal and enthusiasm that NeHC, led by Board member and Senior Vice President for Policy at Healthwise Leslie Kelly Hall, embarked on an effort to help organizations identify that starting point and give them a finish line to strive toward. This year NeHC, with the participation and contribution of over 150 collaborators, pointed out the path to the finish line with the Patient Engagement Framework.

The Framework provides a guide for healthcare organizations to think about patient engagement using eHealth tools and resources.  It encompasses five phases of development to strengthen organizations’ patient engagement strategies:   Inform Me, Engage Me, Empower Me, Partner With Me, and Support My e-Community.  The characteristics of some of these phases include information and way finding, e-tools, patient-specific education, and the build-up to patient access to records, patient generated data, interoperable records, collaborative care, and community support.

Watch our highlights video of Mobile World Congress 2013, an event that broke attendance records.

By Dan Bowman

NeHC framework aims to help providers improve patient access to electronic health records

The patient engagement requirement included in Stage 2 of the Meaningful Use incentive program has many providers worried about whether or not they'll be able to convince their patients to use interactive online tools to access their health data. The National eHealth Collaborative, a Washington, D.C.-based public-private partnership geared toward enabling nationwide health information exchange, thinks it might be able to help.

NeHC today released a model framework provider organizations can use to help spur patient engagement efforts. The model--dubbed the Patient Engagement Framework--is divided into five phases, each of which incorporates advice from organizations that have successfully launched and sustained patient engagement efforts. The five phases of the framework are:

Eighty-nine percent of doctors were likely to recommend a mobile health app to patients in a January 2013 surveyby ambulatory clinical solutions provider eClinicalWorks. The Westborough, Mass.-based company conducted the online survey of 2,291 healthcare professionals in the United States, 649 of whom were physicians. Ninety-three percent of doctors interviewed for the survey found value in connecting an mHealth app to electronic health records and 93 percent of physician respondents also saw mHealth apps improving a patient's health outcome. According to survey results, nearly six in 10 doctors (58 percent) said a top benefit for having an mHealth app feed data back into a patient's EHR was the ability to provide patients with automatic appointment alerts and reminders. In addition, six in 10 physicians also said that at least half of their patients would be interested in appointment reminders via a mobile app. Almost half of doctors in the survey cited a patient's access to medical records as a top benefit, as well as the ease of scheduling appointments. And, nearly two thirds of physician respondents said medication adherence is a top health issue in which an mHealth app linked to EHR could make an immediate impact, while more than half said diabetes (54 percent) and preventative care (52 percent) were other areas of potential benefit

Lucien engelen conducts this crowdsourcing experiment

We at Radboud University Medical Center are in the midst of change while running the quest of how to cope with the big challenges that we are facing in healthcare. Doubling demand, budget cuts shortage of skilled personnel combined with better-informed patients and exponential growing technology are rapidly entering this space.

Are we still delivering healthcare the same way in 2020 or will things change and even disappear ?..

I would like to do a little experiment to prove the power of social networks and social capital, by asking you to share your thoughts on the topics that should find their way into the newly REshaped curriculum for Medical Students.

Let’s assume we can come up with the same, better, unsighted, unexpected views topics in a little social media experiment; so we need YOU ;-)

So the BIG question is :

What do we need to incorporate in a REshaped curriculum for medical students to be sustainable for the upcoming changes in healthcare ?

As patients increasingly turn toward social media to access healthcare and self-diagnose, the patient-provider relationship is changing, the book argues. The first step in this change came when patients gained access to medical information online. Now they're adding the power of crowd sourcing, which means the healthcare industry isn't just seeing a more educated patient but also patients interpreting information and, essentially, becoming a member of their healthcare team.

"Patients are becoming our colleagues," said co-author of 'Social Media For Nurses' Ramona Nelson. "It's changing relationships and the kinds of questions and services a patient asks for."

With healthcare becoming increasingly virtual, said Wolf, it's becoming the provider's responsibility to direct patients to the best online resources.

Looking ahead, Wolf advises that nurses and practitioners need to incorporate social media into a strategic plan to determine how they're going to use different platforms and extend services through them. This plan, she said, should be created from a clinical perspective as well as an IT perspective, allowing for an interdisciplinary approach.

"Clinicians in services may not understand websites or synchronized information versus unsynchronized information," she said. "They need help to get them out there virtually."

This year looks set to be an interesting one for eHealth in Europe, as the European Commission tries to inject more pace into the area.

Although it has been actively promoting eHealth in the region for over a decade, initial progress has been slow, only really picking up after the launch of 2010’s Digital Agenda.

Health is a key component of that wide ranging, and ongoing, programme, but two eHealth initiatives that bookended 2012 could start accelerating progress.

The year started with the Commission’s decision to set up an eHealth Network of national authorities, one of whose tasks would be to drive uptake of technologies like tele-monitoring and e-prescriptions.

Then, as 2012 ended, came the Commission’s eHealth Action Plan, promising “smart and sustainable healthcare” and mapping out its targets until 2020 and assigning an integral role to the eHealth Network.

Its part in the plans will see it working towards eHealth ‘interoperability’, essentially ensuring different systems can work together, for EU Member States.