Tag Archives: HealthCamp

This Twitter Thing

Posted on by

Last Tuesday I attended HealthCamp Boston, a really excellent 1-day “unconference” organized by the extremely energetic Mark Scrimshire.  The unconference format is really fantastic, provided that you get the right people in the room at the right time. In this case, we did, and the user-generated agenda included an excellent discussion on the new HHS rules for PHRs lead by David Harlow of HealthBlawg, a deep dive into design by Claudio Luis Vera, a session on consumer and clinician PHR engagement that John Moore and I put together (with John providing most of the good bits) and a discussion of Twitter’s role in social healthcare media led by Jen McCabe Gorman. It was great to finally meet some people I only knew from online, and I definitely made some new friends (including beers and a fascinating discussion after the meeting with Vivek Garg of TrialX). I definitely recommend these events, and at $25 a person it’s a lot cheaper than normal conference. We’ll be organizing one on software design in healthcare at HMS in the very near future.

I didn’t actually make it to Jen’s presentation on Twitter – I was over with the pharma crowd. But last Tuesday was the day I figured out what Twitter was good for. It’s not that I was a Twitterphobe, but I’d signed up because all the cool kids seemed to be doing it. I followed a bunch of people, and set up this blog to advertise posts as tweets, and that was about it.

The eureka moment came during the first session of the day.  Since attendees were encouraged to tweet about the event, I brought up Twitter on my laptop and started writing tweets that summarized the interesting points of the discussion, using the #hcbos hash tag to identify them to the other conference-goers and interested outsiders.  Then I started following the hash tag in another window, and saw a few other people in the room were also tweeting. And here’s the cool bit – we were generally picking up on the same stuff. Not completely, but with at least 80% overlap. And just like that, Twitter was validated as an information source. I just had to see it in action.

For the rest of the conference I watched the hash tag and picked up some of the key sentiments from the sessions I missed. The next two days I followed the tags for the Health 2.0 conference, which I hadn’t attended. While I certainly missed the details, I definitely picked up the flavor of the event.  And in the week since, it’s been a great way to maintain contact with all the new people I met at #hcbos.

So that’s that – I’m not yet a complete Twitter addict, but I think I get it. Of course, now that I’m here, I’m seeing the dark side as well, as it becomes another vector for spreading swine-flu hysteria. As is often the case , xkcd gets to the heart of it.

The Patient is the Platform

Posted on by

Doc Searls invented the Internet. Ok, not really – but he was one of the co-authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, which did as good a job as anybody, and better than most, at predicting the degree to which the Internet would facilitate conversations, rather than just transactions, companies and their customers.

Anyway, Doc is now a fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law, and for the last year or so has been thinking about healthcare:

Doc Searls Weblog · Getting real about fixing health care.

What he’s done here is coined a really nice, pithy term: “the patient is the platform.” I’ve been trying to say the same thing for a couple of years, usually with a variation on the phrase “the only person who knows where all my healthcare data is hidden is me”. We even ran an entire conference on the PHR as a platform in 2007 (and there’s some great video on the web site). I like Doc’s version better, and I’m going to steal it.

On the subject of pithy one liners, at HealthCamp Boston yesterday, John Moore and I ran a session on Consumer and Clinician engagement in healthcare IT. John did a nice job of keeping the discussion focused on human factors (I only dragged it down one rabbit hole when I decided we really needed to talk about microformats), and in the follow-up conversation we came up with another Internet analogy:

The PHR is a patch.

In other words – the health system is broken. Lack of coordination and information sharing is one part of the system failure. Personally Controlled Health Records promise (they have yet to really deliver) to bring disparate parts of the healthcare system together, via the agency of the one actor who actually touches most of them: the patient. But PHRs, and even EHRs, are not healthcare reform. They’re a bridging measure.