Citizen-centered apps

The wave of making public data available continues as more countries adopt the model set by data.gov - latest is the UK's data.gov.uk. Expectedly, it did not take long before sectors like transportation and law identified areas to apply the data sources and build apps.

And now "data openness" has hit health care - see and here come the healthcare apps. With infrastructures like Healthvault and Google Health in place like the uptake should be faster and deeper. The question of privacy still remains, but I think once utility increases, so will security and privacy. This is the ultimate bottom-up consumer-centric apps design I had hoped for.

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Social media and healthcare

This weekend Aftenposten carried different stories around the cost of healthcare (for eg here and here - Norwegian texts). The technocrats and the bureaucrats will haggle about numbers and details while politicians extol the virtues of their party programs -- or more likely downplay the programs of rivals.

This dance is pretty obvious for most citizens, however, the voice of the citizen is absent in this discussion on the cost of healthcare and what we should be doing about it. I hope this is not for long and that the debate on cost of healthcare can be channelled inclusively and constructively to produce some creative solutions.

Last autumn in an article in a Norwegian trade journal, I talked about patient-driven self-service site Patientslikeme.com. Yesterday, the Aftenposten carried an article on a patient with ALS (or Lou Gehrig's disease) around the rising cost of healthcare. The individual interviewed described how ALS had almost destroyed his life but that state-financed healthcare made it possible for him to lead a meaningful life. The story behind Patientslikeme.com also has a link to ALS. Same conditions but different solutions.

I was struck by how in Norway, the state takes care of ALS-patients -- at a pretty high cost. In the US, beyond health insurance, there are mechanisms that catalyze innovation. It is useless pitching one system against the other since I'm concerned about finding how state-financed healthcare (in Norway) can drive innovation. I think a first step is in sensitizing people to the notion that resources (healthcare included) are limited and we all need to be active in finding solutions. Something like where the state can serve as a platform and that cultivates creative services.

I believe social media solutions have an important role to play - not as a technology in itself, but as a catalyst to socialize the ideas and complexities of healthcare for ordinary citizens. To raise awareness and then to get them to take a more participative, co-production role in health care services and to be part of the solutions. Utlimately helping drive inefficiencies out of the system and lowering the cost of healthcare.

In that respect it is good to see that the magazine of the Norwegian Medical Association carried an article on the role of social media in healthcare Tidskrift. I consider it a simple but significant start.

User-centric healthcare is taking shape

I recently came across the Health 2.0 conferences and just last week, the 3rd Health 2.0 conference concluded in San Francisco with some very interesting topics being discussed. The user-centricity approach is refreshing and only reinforces my thinking around the citizen-centered society in general. I have only read the agenda and some blog entries for the San Francisco conference and I am fascinated by the increased focus on the patient -- and not only on the doctor or insurer (employer). In particular, the collaborative patient-to-patient approach was very encouraging, as also the notion of leveraging user-generated health care data.

I toured the site of PatientsLikeMe.com, to understand just how these ideas are put together in an operating model. Taking the role of a mediator, they facilitate the sharing of information between patient, health care provider, insurer and pharmaceutical or life science vendors. Using collaborative technologies and information management concepts they are creating horizontal networks i.e. between patients which have all the potential to reduce bureaucracy and increase the "time to solution" for all parties involved.

In an earlier post I toyed with the notion of crowdsourcing of diagnoses based on my health care data. This conference has triggered many thoughts on solutions in this space and I even more convinced that Norway can turn these notions into practical ideas since they already have the institutions in place to make this a reality. See this post.

Crowdsourcing my medical data

Consider this. What if I did all the tasks for capturing my medical data? i.e. tasks that an amateur can do using consumer-affordable technology. I am thinking of the consumer profile of an owner of a mobile phone, digital camera or even a flat screen TV.

Then, could I post this medical data to a site and invite doctors or clinical technicians (or whatever they are called) -- who could mine this data to propose healthcare advice. Preventive care as well and diagnoses. The power of the network of doctors, who may have treated these illnesses in other parts of the globe, could be very valuable to me (persons posting this data). I could compensate the doctor providing this service in much the same way I would compensate my regular doctor.

It should make sense if we can solve the privacy and commercial challenges associated with this service. Useful, yes! But it shakes the foundations of the societal and commercial models we are used to. Will it work?