Healthy community
Awareness drives health improvements
As with so many other things in life, improved awareness can make a positive change to your health.
Here’s a nice study where US barber shops installed blood pressure check machines and it was found that for men with hypertension, their conditions improved if they chose to get checked after their haircut.
Sounds trivial – but there’s an expense in the machinery which is paid back in the health outcome.
LHD hopes to harness the same effect by encouraging tracking and management of personal lifestyle and health. We are working particularly on community care situations at present…. hopefully we can give you news of a trial using community nurses soon.
Government Priorities in New Zealand Healthcare for the Disabled and Disadvantaged
- Every health organisation collects patient healthcare information.
- Health results to be made available to clinicians.
- By 2014 an individually owned health record by all New Zealanders.
“Health IT is hard because it is a reflection of a culture and its beliefs”.
“Where do the 5%-10% of people with different disabilities and chronic illnesses, who actually really need improved health information management systems and who are obviously among the most costly to treat, fit in this system? Will we have to wait till 2014 or beyond until something will be available? Would it be an idea to put something out there, maybe not very pretty, but something simple, test it, get feedback from the users, improve, test again, get feedback, improve etc? We can quite quickly develop something which can change not only how the data is managed but actually positively impact the lives of many people and organisations who are supporting them, leading the way to transformation of medical industry.”
Our First Community Group Meeting! (Part 1: Introduction)
Yesterday, with help of Sue Russell from DCOSS, Ignite Consultants held a meeting under the theme: Healthy Community Enabled by Information: Social Innovation at Work. Representatives of nine different organisations attended. Despite very short notice they kindly came to share their ideas and feedback on what can be done to address some of the problems arising due to inefficient information management systems between patient, doctors, caregivers and other parties engaged in patient health management.
We started the meeting with everybody introducing themselves, I gave a short introduction followed by guest speaker Hamish MacDonald who presented his innovative technology, Lifetime Health Diary™
I met Hamish nearly one year ago, when running my Social Entrepreneurship Project. He approached me to tell me about the global mission of his company including the 5 billion plus of those who are the most health disadvantaged in the global community, including even in our communities such as the disabled, cultural minorities, people living with chronic conditions, the elderly, etc. who very often face significant challenges in obtaining adequate access and delivery of health services.
But it wasn’t till 2 months ago when he actually showed me what, together with his team, he managed to build and how the vision becomes reality. Intrigued, and seeing a huge potential in how this tool could help people with different disabilities, I took the idea to different organisations to see what they thought. The response was overwhelming.
Lifetime Health Diary™ is a secure, free, patient-owned, internet-based health diary for recording, monitoring and self-managing one’s health, as well practice health prevention. It captures and systemizes all data inputs into an easily understandable “Graphic Natural History” of your heath through lining up all your data by temporal correlation – which is a fancy way of saying your background lifestyle factors and life events are lined up by date alongside your clinical data. This allows your unique clinical story to be better understood by clinicians and caregivers that you personally invite by secure email link to view your health record.
During the meeting Hamish talked about his friend and business partner, Dr. Atsushi Matsunaga, the inventor of the software and a person very frustrated with the inability of the healthcare system to prevent illness in the first place. Hamish shared the history and idea behind the innovation outlining 7 Requirements for the system: i) Better health outcomes for you; ii) Quicker prognosis for your doctor; iii) Shared Patient Care among your Caregivers; iv) Interoperable amongst their different systems; v) All under your Control, vi) Transferable; Accessible, Portable & Private; vii) Free for both you and your doctor.
Hamish finished his short talk, and suddenly, “Access to information”, “Better health care delivery”, “Control and empowerment”, “Patient in the centre of the health system”…a lively discussion had suddenly started and Hamish was under a stream of questions. Details in the next blog post…!
The Project: A Healthy Community Enabled by Information
The project is a result of a partnership between Ignite Consultants and Lifetime Health Diary Ltd and a number of community groups. We all see a great need to address some of the pressure and problems resulting from the inefficiencies of the current health information management system. A significant slice of the population is not receiving the healthcare they should be, for a variety of reasons. This only makes all of society poorer, as their conditions and quality of life get worse and more expensive to treat than would otherwise be the case with timely interventions.
We believe in a bottom-up approach and harnessing the power of technological innovation, academic expertise matched with real needs of real people on the ground, powered by the spirit of young, talented students who want to make a difference.
We want to work together to, in a collaborative manner, enable cost-effective solutions and drive a movement of access, empowerment and knowledge in healthcare.
I am thrilled to be a part of it and I truly believe that this is the beginning of an exciting journey of collaborative effort to not only empower those the most disadvantaged to live better lives but transform the way we manage our health and interact to create a healthy community enabled by information.
We want this blog to be a communication platform for everybody who is involved and who is supporting this initiative, to share ideas and track our progress. Let`s get it started!
