Audience votes for Living Profiles at Health 2.0 conference

Posted April 24, 2009 by the Living Profiles team (Project HeathDesign grantee) 

At the Health 2.0 - Information Therapy conference in Boston yesterday, the Living Profiles team did a demo of our prototype in the "LAUNCH!" session that premiered the most innovative products in development in health care right now. 

Nine participants were asked to give a five minute demo of their technologies, and at the conclusion, Living Profiles was voted by the audience as the most exciting and forward-thinking project in the group! 

The prize was a main stage speaking engagement at the Health 2.0 conference next fall in San Francisco. We believe that this type of recognition only further illustrates the probability that this type of interface will be widely used and accepted by a variety of audiences. Thanks to Project HealthDesign for being so supportive of our unique project, and hope to see everyone in San Francisco!

The Doctor’s Role in a Health 2.0 World

Posted April 23, 2009 by Lygeia Ricciardi

One of the recurring themes at the Health 2.0 - Information Therapy Conference is the challenge of merging the new world of Health 2.0 – in which many patients create, share, record, aggregate, and manage their own data -- and the traditional health system. The theme is also closely linked to Project HealthDesign’s emphasis in its upcoming round of grants.

How an existing health organization absorbs or adapts to Health 2.0 depends on its unique characteristics and character. Yesterday at the conference we heard from healthcare organizations ranging from large integrated systems to small, independent clinics. Some are trying to fit Health 2.0 into their existing paradigms, while others are completely overhauling the way they do business.

A number of observations about incorporating Health 2.0 emerged. For example, according to James Hereford (Group Health), you have to deliver to patients only information that is relevant to them, and do so in a way that also makes sense to doctors--both from a clinical and a workflow perspective. It’s also important to provide incentives to share and use information. Perhaps most of all, whatever you do must strengthen rather than undermine trust in the patient-doctor relationship.

How might Health 2.0 change that relationship? For one thing, in the past, doctors functioned as repositories of a significant proportion of health knowledge. But with the volume of new research generated today, it’s impossible for any individual to keep up. ePatient Dave (patient, blogger) relayed some testimony by Don Lindberg, Director of the National Library of Medicine, who said that even if he read two medical journal articles each day, at the end of one year he’d still be 648 years behind in the medical literature. 

So of course, combining that point with Health 2.0 resources, many patients have begun to know more about their particular health conditions than their doctors do. Which begins to shift the traditional patient-doctor relationship and power dynamic.

What should a doctor’s role be? Obviously a key part is providing clinical care or guidance, especially in response to particular health events or conditions. Another part may be leading or managing a team of other caregivers. With regard to health knowledge, Danny Sands (Cisco and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) says doctors should know how and where to find information, and must freely admit—whether to colleagues or patients—when they don’t know it. Doctors and patients can seek and interpret information together, and doctors can help patients understand how generic facts apply in an individual’s particular case. An important aspect of information gathering is, in fact, collecting and contextualizing information about the individual patient.

Along the same lines, Jamie Heywood (PatientsLikeMe) observed (quoting an unnamed source), that the patient is the CEO of his or her own body, and the doctor is the consultant. The doctor’s job is to  support patients in caring for themselves on an ongoing basis. Several other people emphasized the extent to which most things that impact patient health, such as behavior choices related to diet, exercise, compliance, smoking, etc—take place outside the formal health system and are under the control of patients themselves—so doctors need to help point people toward the tools that can let them succeed in maintaining their own health on an everyday basis. Another comment by Jamie was about the responsibility of doctors in balancing the demands of individual patients and population health.

Susan Edgman-Levitan (Mass General Stoecle Center) emphasized yet another aspect of the doctor role – doctor as healer: a person who cares deeply about the patient and contributes to health not merely through clinical knowledge, procedures and techniques, but with kindness and compassion.

While on the one hand there are elements of truth in all of the observations above, on the other, as Paul Wallace (Kaiser Permanente & Ix Center) pointed out, we have to keep in mind that no one doctor can be all things to all patients.

In my opinion, it’s important to consider the doctor’s role in the context of a much larger care team, which includes not only other clinical providers, but patients and the teams they assemble to support themselves, too – including families, friends, and, increasingly, members of virtual communities. How do you think the advent of Health 2.0 should impact the doctor’s role?

 

Accelerating consumer-focused health: the Health 2.0 - Info Therapy Conference

Posted April 22, 2009 by Lygeia Ricciardi 

I’m writing to you from the “Health 2.0 Meets Information Therapy” conference in Boston. The conference is very relevant to readers of this blog in its emphasis on health, information, user design, and user-generated content (and Project HealthDesign is, in fact, a conference sponsor). 

Last fall I attended the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. What I enjoyed most was the opportunity to learn about and meet people building and actually running a variety of creative Health 2.0 companies. (There several definitions of Health 2.0, but the basic concept has to do with collaborative, participatory healthcare that is generally consumer-oriented.)

This time, given the recent announcement of the 2^nd round of Project HealthDesign’s grants, I’m interested not only in seeing what’s out there, but also in spreading the word about and encouraging people to apply for grants.

As you can imagine, particularly in this economic climate, the word “grant” attracts a lot of interest: everyone is looking for funding, yet resources are scarce. And a wide variety of types of organizations, including for-profit companies—are eligible.

But I think it’s important to also emphasize the non-monetary benefits of being a Project HelathDesign grantee. For example, grantees are part of a community of peers and experts who help to hone and improve their ideas. They have numerous opportunities, through structured workshops and other activities, to learn from other teams of grantees and from experts in the field. (In the first round, the Project hired Sujansky and Associates to develop a set of platform components to meet the specific needs identified by grantees.) 

Another goal of Project HealthDesign is to help to shape the development of the consumer-health field, both by sharing its own findings (see for example the e-primers from Phase 1) and by educating policymakers about the changing health landscape and its many implications, including social and ethical ones. In the last round, grantees travelled to Washington DC to meet with members of Congress after a coaching session that helped them convey their ideas is Washington-speak. In the next round, the emphasis on helping to inform policy will continue, and we will also be encouraging grantees to use the vehicle of this blog more often to get their voices out to a broader public.

If you are on the fence about applying for a Project HealthDesign grant or need help forming partnerships with other organizations, we can help, as can our partners at the Health 2.0 Accelerator, a non-profit collaborative and match-maker associated with the Health 2.0 conference. I’d also encourage you to attend one of the webinars about the grants coming up in April and May.

 

Be a Part of Project HealthDesign

Posted April 16, 2009 by Patricia Brennan, RN, PhD, FAAN

This is a very exciting time for Project HealthDesign. 

If you are reading this, you probably know that we have just released a call for proposals for a second round of funding. 

One of the most helpful insights from our project to date is the importance patients place on collecting and sharing data that aren’t typically part of their medical record, but come from their everyday life – observations of daily living (ODLs).  In projects selected from among the applications that will be submitted to Project HealthDesign this June, grantees will test what and how ODLs can be used by patients and clinicians together.

Since we know patients are experts at their personal experience and clinicians are experts at clinical practice, to make health care more efficient and effective, we need to integrate their expertise so that providers can offer actionable advice when patients need it, resulting in better outcomes – possibly at lower cost. Teams selected for the new round of funding will use personal health record (PHR) technologies to conduct small trials with patients and clinicians in real care settings.

I would like to invite you to follow and help shape our work by applying to be a new grantee, being part of our dialogue and/or by passing along this information to your colleagues. Follow us on Twitter, subscribe to receive our messages and alerts, and subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed.

The Focus of Project HealthDesigns’ New Round of PHR Grants

Posted April 8, 2009 by Lygeia Ricciardi

As you may have seen, today Project HealthDesign announced a call for proposals for its second round of grants related to the development of personal health records (PHRs)—making $2.4 million available for several grants of up to $480,000 each.

What’s different about this round from the previous one? A key point is the explicit emphasis on capturing and integrating consumers’ (or patients') observations of daily living (ODLs) into a PHR and then—taking the idea a step further—directly into the workflow of their health care providers.

The ODLs focus is based on input from patients in the previous round of Project HealthDesign grants. Project leaders say one of the key learnings from the initial phase was the importance that patients placed on collecting and sharing data that are not typically part of the traditional medical record, but rather come from everyday life.

Steve Downs, who oversees the Project HealthDesign program on behalf of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, describes it this way: “We routinely saw people gather data on diet, exercise, sleep patterns, pain levels and many activities that give us a more accurate, meaningful picture of how people feel, day in, day out. This is powerful information that could help clinicians understand their patients better, understand how a treatment is working and adjust the treatment accordingly. We’re at a time when the technology has advanced enough that we can contemplate real breakthroughs in how to work with patients that suffer from chronic diseases.”

Project HealthDesign Director Patti Brennan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison further illuminates the ODLs focus: “The first round of Project HealthDesign taught us that the needs of patients must be the primary drivers of technological innovation. When it comes to patients being active managers of their own health and health care, we learned that it’s not just important to record observations from the clinical experience; personal observations of health as we go about our daily lives are equally critical. Information about how you feel and what you experience on an ongoing basis needs to be easily integrated into clinical processes because these observations reveal trends that enable care to be vastly improved and tailored to patients’ realities. By allowing this type of information to be shared easily between patients and providers, we believe people will experience a different level of engagement with their health and the health care system. The result might well be better patient-provider relationships and better clinical outcomes.”

If all goes well in the second round of funding, the project may see these kinds of outcomes and will no doubt learn other unexpected and valuable lessons from patients along the way. For-profit and non-profit entities may apply for grants. Initial (brief) proposals are due on June 3, 2009. For details and more information, see the full call for proposals. And feel free to submit any questions or observations you my have via this blog.  

PHR Related Events in April

Posted April 1, 2009 by Lygeia Ricciardi 

April 4-8, 2009 – Annual HIMSS Conference and Exhibition 

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is the healthcare industry's membership organization exclusively focused on providing global leadership for the optimal use of healthcare information technology (IT) and management systems for the betterment of healthcare. The HIMSS09 Annual Conference will provide you with usable knowledge on leading edge topics in healthcare IT and management systems through the over 300 education sessions available for you to attend. Session topic categories include Ambulatory Information Systems; Clinical Decision Support; Leadership and Strategic Planning; the Electronic Health Record (EHR), and several others. (Chicago, IL)

April 6, 2009 – CCHIT Presents: A Dialogue on Open Source EHRs

The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology is a private nonprofit organization with the sole public mission of accelerating the adoption of robust, interoperable health information technology by creating a credible, efficient certification process. During this webinar, individuals will be able to discuss the topic of open source electronic health records. (Online)

April 13-14, 2009 – 6th Annual World Health Care Congress

The 6th Annual World Health Care Congress is the most prestigious meeting of chief and senior executives from all sectors of health care. The 2009 conference will convene over 2,000 CEOs, senior executives and government officials from the nation's largest employers, hospitals, health systems, health plans, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and leading government agencies. With a variety of Summits and Emerging Trend Forums that highlight innovations in health IT and consumer engagement, the conference is sure to hold valuable insights and information. (Washington, DC)

April 13-14, 2009 – eHealth Risk Workshop

The Waterloo Institute for Health Informatics Research hosts a workshop to help individuals realize the benefits of eHealth while taking an integrated approach to privacy, security, safety, project and business risk management when implementing and managing eHealth systems. This intensive participatory workshop explores the competencies needed to develop and implement an innovative eHealth risk-benefits management program in your health organization. The eHealth Risk Workshop leverages best practices in risk management and benefits realization. (Ontario, Canada)

April 22-23, 2009 - Health 2.0/Ix Therapy Conference

Health 2.0 Conference and the Center for Information Therapy have teamed up for their first joint conference. The two organizations have come together to present a conference that aims to integrate all the ideas about the role of patients in the transformation of health care. The theme of this conference will be "The Great Debates on the Next Generation of U.S. Healthcare." Here are some of the key topics that will be discussed:

Health 2.0 & Ix: Tensions & Synergies

Knowledge creation: Experts vs User-Generated Care

Navigating the health care system: Human intermediaries vs. automation & algorithms

How do you build Health 2.0 into the delivery system?

What is the future role of the doctor?

What are the incentives for Health 2.0 and Ix?

(Boston, MA)

April 30 – May 2, 2009 - 23rd Annual Pharmacology & Clinical Update

This intensive three-day conference will identify new as well as review current pharmacological and clinical approaches to management of common conditions in primary and acute care. This conference has been designed for nurse practitioners, clinical nurse specialists, nurse midwives, physician assistants, advanced practice nurse students, and other health professionals in primary care. The distinguished Patti Brennan, Project HealthDesign Director, will be presenting on “Innovations for Advanced Practice”. (Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin)