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You Are “The Biggest Wasted Resource In Health Care”

ABCNews.com has posted a great new piece by Dr. Roni Zeiger entitled, “The Biggest Wasted Resource in Health Care? You.” Subtitle: “How Your Internet Research Can Help Your Relationship With Your Doctor.” It’s well reasoned and clearly written, and continues the trend we cited a month ago, when Time posted Dr. Zack Meisel’s article saying that patients who Google can help doctors.

Related notes:

— Dr. Zeiger’s article title parallels what Dr. Charles Safran told the House Ways & Means Subcommittee on Health in 2004: Patients are “the most under-utilitized resource.” He was talking about health IT, quoting his colleague Dr. Warner Slack, who had said it many years earlier. I often quote it in my speeches for the Society for Participatory Medicine, asserting that it applies not just to IT but to all of healthcare.

— Dr. Zeiger is on the editorial board of our Journal of Participatory Medicine and is Chief Health Strategist at Google. He gets the power of patient engagement deeply and clearly. Last fall he posted a prediction that in the future it might be malpractice for doctors not to prescribe a patient community to help you help yourself with your conditions.

Prediction: Googling and patient networks will become essential as we move toward the practice of shared medical decision making (SMDM). I know firsthand that the information my kidney cancer community gave me about coping with treatments went well beyond what my excellent clinicians could offer. (We’re starting a series on SMDM. The first entry was in December.)

*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*

Survey: How Would You Define “Health 2.0?”

My friend and fellow blogger Lucien Engelen asked the health community to help define what Health 2.0 exactly means through an online survey:

After our systematic review about the definition of Health 2.0, one of our next steps will be sorting out what “the crowd” thinks that has to be part of a definition of Health 2.0. For this purpose we’ve set up a little questionnaire that you could fill in below.

To make the crowd as big as possible, we have also made it available to put on your own blog or website. We would encourage you to do this and inspire others to do the same.

You may remember that Lucien and his collegues published a review about the definitions of Health 2.0 and Medicine 2.0 currently available.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

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