Innovation
New “body browser” tool
Got a sneak preview of a Google tool called “Body Browser” thanks to Desiree Miloshevic from #webGLCamp2 .
Watch the video.
Now how do you think this might fit into the Lifetime Health Diary App?
Suggestions Please
How much is too much medical information on the internet?
- Image via Wikipedia
Are there times when internet tools for mass communication are inappropriate for medical communications?
Take a look at this range of medical informational videos that I was sent by fellow #hpm group members.
- Talking about Death will not hurt you A presentation by Dr Gina Mohr education and training doctors.
- a video discussion about ‘partner in care’ for terminal patients in hospices and palliative care.
- the Fit for 50 program to promote fitness for over-50s.
- the right-to-die decisions video of Montana residents.
A wide range of subjects, levels of intensity and length of video communication. Some inform and educate, others lobby and others seek to create community involvement.
Howard Luks talks about ‘millennial patients’ the generation who is growing up with the internet and how they are using the internet as part of their crowdsourcing their physician, getting medical 2nd opinions online. He describes the millennial patient as
“They cannot understand, and they will (soon) not tolerate, this disparity in their ability to manage healthcare transactions as easily as they manage their financial transactions.”
He is challenging traditional norms of doctor:patient communication. And to to this he uses a private “portal” for email correspondence and promotes “Shared Decision Making“.
Lifetime Health Diary is closely following these discussions because we are keen to remain at the forefront of new paradigms in medical collaboration between patients, doctors and carers.
What do you think?
Should video be encouraged or discouraged?
What are its limitations?
And where should use be encouraged and where proscribed?
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!
A Little Background About Me
My name is Aga and together with 6 outstanding individuals I run Ignite Consultants, an organization which aims to channel resources, train leaders and build partnerships between businesses, the not-for-profit sector and academia for the growth of a sustainable society.
I am from a very entrepreneurial background, interested in how to make a sustainable difference in communities. I grew up in Poland, studied and worked in Glasgow, and have been continuing my life adventure here in Dunedin, New Zealand for the past year and a half.
While running a Social Entrepreneurship Project here in Dunedin, New Zealand, I came across Hamish MacDonald and Lifetime Health Diary Ltd. But it wasn’t until 2 months ago when he actually showed me his innovative software that with my experience of working with different disability groups and not-for-profit organisations, I saw it as a tool which could make a huge difference by enabling people to better communicate with doctors and caregivers as well as putting control back into their own hands.
The last couple of months has been an exciting journey; a huge learning curve, meetings with more than 20 organizations, discovering problems, thinking, rethinking, matching pieces of the puzzle and creating a strong vision of Healthy Community Enabled by Information
Encouraged by support from Otago University, local bodies and politicians we have decided to kick off a collaborative project which we strongly believe will create a huge impact in Dunedin’s communities and hopefully later, other communities in New Zealand and around the world.
This series of blogs will document our work, results, learnings, progress and everything else involved in bringing better health to communities! If this is a topic of interest for you, I would love to hear from you, wherever you are!
How a true passion can bring a sustainable difference
Hi Everyone,
I am thrilled to introduce you our guest blogger, a very inspiring social entrepreneur Aga Nazaruk, a director at Ignite Consultants based in Dunedin, New Zealand. Over the next few days and weeks as it progresses she will be covering a new Project: A Healthy Community Enabled by Information -a partnership between Ignite Consultants and Lifetime Health Diary Ltd and a number of community groups. You’ll be truly amazed (because I am!) what a real change a few people can make by embarking on a collaborative project and working towards a mutual goal!
I met Aga back in Spring of 2010 and was literally stunned to see how much power, energy and passion for driving social innovation into communities, training and inspiring leaders and building partnerships between businesses, the not-for-profit sector and academia for the growth of a sustainable society this petite girl possesses. She reminds me of this powerful storm coming onto the shore, sweeping off the dust and old litter, and bringing a fresh air, fresh prospective and a real change onto the ground.
Aga, welcome aboard! Looking forward to your great posts.
Tools to help pharmacies manage medications
It seems obvious doesn’t it? Pharmacists are the acknowledged experts at handling medicines. They spend years training for it, and all day long mixing medications and checking for contraindications, mistakes, oversights, etc.. So it is often with shock that a newbie to the medical industry reacts when finding out that because pharmacies have traditionally only been reimbursed for dispensing medicine, they have taken a backseat to your GP or specialist in terms of managing patient medications.
However, things are beginning to change. There are some really interesting things afoot with pharmacies…
Some pharmacies in New Zealand are now managing Warfarin. “15 pharmacies nationwide now carry out “standing orders” to decide what doses of the blood thinning drug warfarin patients should receive.”
And in the United States, pharmacists are partnering with health groups to assist in patient outcomes “Some health plans are even paying pharmacists to monitor patients taking regular medications for chronic illnesses like diabetes or heart disease”. “We are not just going to dispense your drugs,” said David Pope, a pharmacist at Barney’s. “We are going to partner with you to improve your health as well.”
In both New Zealand and the United States, Adherence rates stand at only 50% (the number of people who take their medications as prescribed), which the NY Times article above says costs nearly $300 billion a year in emergency room visits, hospital stays, and medical expenditures.
But as the pharmacists take on the increased role of managing medicines, they are going to face a challenge: accessing a complete and continuous drug record for the individuals in their care. This is due not just to incomplete and disparate data silos, but in a country such as New Zealand it is common for people to fulfill their prescription at any pharmacy, which means that pharmacies cannot know what other prescriptions a patient may have received from another GP (or more).
In fact, as pharmacists move into the front line in helping people manage their medicines better, they are going to need more than just better tools for access, they are going to need better tools for capturing and displaying that data in a comprehensive and easily understandable manner. This has been an overlooked area of need, but one that we think will move increasingly into the limelight as health groups, insurers, employers, and indeed pharma themselves demand a more intuitive at-a-glance understanding of a person’s medication regime than the hodge-podge of data sets that are currently used.
In fact, I would wager that a few years from now, intuitive data displays will seem obvious, and we will all wonder how we managed to cope in the old days when data looked like….just data!
Yours in Health,
Hamish
Whose rules for accessing personal health data?
Last week a couple of us attended a workshop in Dunedin put on by the National Health IT Board (New Zealand).
Graeme Osborne, who led the workshop as the Board Representative, correctly observed that “Health IT is hard because it is a reflection of a culture and its beliefs.” Correct, and in a multi-cultural society, you have multiple sets of social norms and individual expectations.
Everyone wants a break-glass policy whereby all their personal data can be accessed in an emergency situation, but no-one wants any random clinician or health worker to be able to see certain things about their health (mainly related to mental, sexual and genetic health details). This makes it really difficult to create national standards with a single privacy/access rule. Different people and different cultures hold different viewpoints as to what should be easily accessible.
New Zealand national health IT policy has 3 objectives, but like most of the rest of the world only 2 of these objectives are really being concentrated on at a national level. They are both to do with linking Primary, Secondary and Tertiary care by data standards.
1) That every health organisation collects patient healthcare information.
2) That health results are made available to clinicians.
3) A personal health record for all New Zealanders by 2014.
The third point seems to be so contentious that it is essentially being left to marketplace innovation to see if anything practical may result.
While there may be some default settings in terms of clinical data made available to other clinicians involved, I believe that transferrable and accessible health data can only work if individuals are empowered to control their settings. But there is a lot of patient education that has to happen before most people in society are even aware of all the pertinent issues so they are able to make the right choices.
Which is why at Lifetime Health Diary™ we are working with communities. Not only does this allow people to discuss with peers and people they respect to guide them through the minefield of information rights inherent within Health IT, but as the CIO of a large hospital here in New Zealand recently told me “No matter how good the data within my hospital is, 90% of healthcare takes place out in the community, and I see 0% of that”. Well said. National data standards cannot collect data that is not part of the system to begin with!
So whose rules for accessing health data? The individual, informed by communication with their community, which in turn need representatives who understand the issues and communicate with the national health bodies responsible for data standards. A little bit of effort expended in this area may return a lot more back to the health system in term of engagement from people than yet another clinical data sharing standards project.
Yours in health,
Hamish
“Smart pill”? “Smart Contact Lenses”? Age of Sci-Fi…
This week I stumble upon two new developments. Both impressed me so much that I could not help myself but to share it with you: contact lenses that monitor your health and “smart pill” that is once in your stomach reports to the computer/cell phone it was taken.
Both developments involve nanotechnology and are in an experimental mode yet, and it may be a long way before you actually start wearing those contact lenses that monitor health and display information on the body temperature, glucose level, inflammation, infection or fatigue, and swallowing your morning pill. However, the fact we have dedicated researchers working on these kind of projects who combine Health IT, science and nanotechnology, gives me a hope that we are still capable of coming up with a true innovation in that area besides just developing new software, “innovative” social networks, etc.
