• Patient
• Care
• Accessible
• Accountable
• Awareness
• Connected
• Contextual
• Collaborative
• Consumer
• Community
• Choice
• Digital
• Electronic
• Experience
• Interactive
• Intuitive
• Mobile
• Networked
• Ownership
• Personal
• Participatory
• Preventive
• Private
• Relevant
• Real Time / Timely
• Secure
• Simple
• Shared
• Social
• Transparent
• Trusted
• Valuable

Of course each one of these has to be placed in context and I am sure that a lot is missing and some don’t fit here.  What do you think?  Please add your comments and relevant links below.

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Updates from the comment section:

• Empowerment
• Segmented
• Differentiation
• Responsive

I notice a need for my own sake and sanity to try and understand the different terms and what they mean to me as a consumer of health services (i.e. patient).

Starting my research by reading this paper – “Medicine 2.0: Social Networking, Collaboration, Participation, Apomediation, and Openness” by Gunther Eysenbach.  Here is the abstract to start you out:

In a very significant development for eHealth, a broad adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and approaches coincides with the more recent emergence of Personal Health Application Platforms and Personally Controlled Health Records such as Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault, and Dossia. “Medicine 2.0” applications, services, and tools are defined as Web-based services for health care consumers, caregivers, patients, health professionals, and biomedical researchers, that use Web 2.0 technologies and/or semantic web and virtual reality approaches to enable and facilitate specifically 1) social networking, 2) participation, 3) apomediation, 4) openness, and 5) collaboration, within and between these user groups. The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) publishes a Medicine 2.0 theme issue and sponsors a conference on “How Social Networking and Web 2.0 changes Health, Health Care, Medicine, and Biomedical Research”, to stimulate and encourage research in these five areas.

We’ll touch base later.

Physicians increasingly are discovering smartphones serve a purpose beyond being a convenient communication gadget.

It is good to hear.  As you know we are big proponents of the use of mobile technology for everything  … so it is always good to read research that supports our crazy ideas.   Some of the highlights:

Physicians are adopting mobile technology at a faster rate than the general public (54% of U.S. physicians now and by 2011 70%).

Drug references are the top function accessed by physicians… Other applications are also available (i.e. medical calculators, decision-support tools and electronic health records).

Use of mobile technology among physicians will increase EHR adoption.

Palm started the trend a while back (no idea of dates) when they offered their devices to medical students with select drug reference guides already loaded.  Initially and for quite some time, physicians in general, and for no better reason than pure familiarity were heavy Palm users.  At first, BlackBerry had a tough time breaking in with this group but began to trickle into their ranks after having won the hearts and minds of hospital management and administration.  The main reason for this can be summarized into two words: enterprise grade! Administrators, security folks and management all recognized the BlackBerry platform as being more secure, stable, easy to manage and reliable.

Unfortunately I don’t have access to the reports referenced in the above article by Manhattan Research or the Diffusion Group to see if adoption is broken down by device, however if the data is there I would assume a continuing decline on the Palm side and an upwards trend for BlackBerry usage.  If we look at physicians specifically I would have to say that this group would lean more towards the iPhone.  But again this is pure speculation from my view (from the ground up).

My conclusion: mobile devices are still being used by physicians as a personal productivity tool and are not  integrated into care giving processes to the extent that real and transformational value have been achieved.  There are pockets of success around but it is definitely not widespread.

Read the rest of the post at the American Medical News.

How will the shrinking labour force pay for the pensions and healthcare of the growing elderly? This column argues that linking retirement ages to longevity would alleviate a significant part of the deterioration in public finances and ensure that the burden of adjustment is carried by those gaining from increases in longevity.

In summary:

… there has been and will continue to be a widening gap between the number of years people spend inside and outside the labour market.  When longevity increases and retirement ages stay constant or even fall, it is implied that each generation tries to benefit from existing schemes by taking all of the longevity gain as an increase in retirement (leisure).  Obviously this is not possible, and this is the main reason for the projected trend decreases in the budget balance.  A much more straightforward reform agenda would thus be to ensure that retirement increases alongside longevity.  Linking retirement ages to longevity will remove a significant part of the trend deterioration in public finances, and it will ensure that the burden of adjustment is carried by those gaining from increases in longevity.

Read the entire piece here.