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Health Highlights From The New Media Academic Summit

July 1st, 2010 by Nicholas Genes, M.D., Ph.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
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I recently spoke at the panel on transparency at Edelman’s New Media Academic Summit. Ben Boyd was the moderator and Ellen Miller from the Sunlight Foundation was my fellow panelist.

Reviewing some of the #nmas10 tweets from the audience, I figured I should provide some links for the anecdotes I mentioned:

• Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CEO Paul Levy’s blog is still the starting point when talking about transparency in medicine today. I had the chance to speak with him a few years ago.
• Ed Bennett has done an extraordinary job following hospital social media adoption and highlights effective new media policies as well.
• Hospitals are using twitter and billboards to broadcast emergency department waiting room times. This is not without risk, as billboards may not clarify the triage process, where seriously-ill patients will be seen right away. 
• ACEP president Angela Gardner’s Twitter feed and ACEP’s blog. 
• A recap of Better Health bloggers’ meeting with Rep. Jack Ryan last summer during the healthcare reform debate. 
• Recent articles from NEJM and JAMA articles on medical students and social media.   
• A lot of the developments in openness in peer review and the world of grant funding are chronicled at Nature’s Peer-to-Peer blog. Bora Zivkovic has been and active an articulate defender of open publications as well.

Special thanks to Dr. Val Jones of Better Health for getting me involved with this group.

*This blog post was originally published at Blogborygmi*

Healthcare Engagement: Most Companies Are Not Meeting Employee Expectations

January 8th, 2010 by Dr. Val Jones in Audio, Expert Interviews
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Edelman has been a leader in surveying and analyzing consumer health opinion on a global scale. In 2008 they released the results of a Health Engagement Barometer, confirming the public’s strong desire for personal engagement with health experts and peers online and beyond. I clearly remember Edelman’s revelation that medical bloggers (particularly healthcare professional bloggers) are one of the most trusted sources of health information online. That made me feel good.

This time around, Edelman created a new survey (The Health Engagement Pulse) focused on consumer expectations of their employers. The results reflect a further shift away from traditional siloed roles and relationships (where employers have nothing directly to do with healthcare) and a new era of blended responsibility. To understand this shift, I interviewed Nancy Turett, Edelman’s Global President of Health. Please listen to the audio interview or enjoy the synopsis below.

[Audio:https://getbetterhealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/nancytourettjan.mp3]

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New Media Summit: Matthew Holt, Dr. Roy Poses, And Me

November 17th, 2008 by Dr. Val Jones in Announcements
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I was a panelist at Edelman’s CHPA New Media Summit today in New Brunswick, NJ. Matthew Holt (of the Healthcare Blog and Health 2.0) was the keynote speaker, and I participated on a panel discussion with Dr. Roy Poses. It was exciting to meet Roy in person for the first time, as I’ve been following his policy blog for some time.

Matthew presented a very rosy picture of Health 2.0 (consumer-driven healthcare), more or less suggesting that it could provide a large part of the solution to our current healthcare crisis. I countered with a more cautious view, explaining that expert engagement would be critical to Health 2.0’s success.

Matthew argued that sites like Patients Like Me were enabling patients “to do their own clinical trials online,” and that this was opening a whole new avenue for research. Dr. Poses and I were fairly concerned about this suggestion, primarily because we understand how easy it is to draw false conclusions from data, especially when the data are not collected in a systematic fashion.

I explained to the audience that association does not prove causation (E.g. Do matches cause lung cancer? No, though it’s true that people who smoke are more likely to carry matches). I also described a case in which a Health 2.0 principle went terribly awry: a group of consumers were asked to rate their medications for efficacy by disease/condition. This was supposed to leverage the “wisdom of the crowds” to determine which medicines worked best (by popular vote). Of course, the result was that every pain syndrome (low back pain, headaches, fibromyalgia, etc.) resulted in a narcotic pain medicine as the highest ranked treatment option. Do you really need Oxycontin for that tension headache of yours? Obviously, narcotics are popular among users – but are a last resort for pain management in the real world. The “wisdom of crowds” rarely works in healthcare.

Matthew agreed to disagree with me on a number of issues – but we certainly found common ground on the primary care crisis. He and I both believe that a shortage of primary care physicians is going to result in a catastrophic shortage of care for Baby Boomers in the next decade. Dr. Poses added that primary care physicians make the same salary as school teachers in his home state of Rhode Island.

I think we have to agree with KevinMD – the way forward is not going to be pretty.