Healthcare 2.0
A recent Newsweek article explores the idea of making electronic health records freely available to family, friends and doctors, like apply Web 2.0 concepts of open-source transparency to healthcare. Although there are understandable risks in decentralizing this information, a growing number of practitioners are beginning to embrace this new value model.
The idea behind this thinking, according to author Barrett Sheridan, is that Web 2.0 concepts currently applied to a business context would provide similar benefits to the healthcare sector. There is some natural hesitancy of users to disclose of pre-existing conditions to insurance companies, as well as societal attitudes toward people with certain illnesses and disabilities. The opposing rationale is that such negative connotations are the result of a system that fails to adequately provide a sense of compassion or support mechanism for patients.
Web 2.0 technology has brought about a new form of identity, one that removes privacy from the equation. People see themselves as a personal brand with both positive and negative traits; everything about us is out in the open and available for review. Sheridan reports that this may be an opportunity for consumers to cultivate new ways of approaching their personal health, perhaps finding a community of supporters in the process:
Now that the health sector is slowly but surely beginning to embrace Web 2.0 tactics like social networking, sharing your health information with friends, family and even strangers may become an everyday occurrence. “On the one hand, you care a lot about the privacy of health information,” says Peter Neupert, a vice president at Microsoft in charge of the company’s health-related products. “But in order to make it valuable, you have to be able to share … The concept of health is a social concept.”
We have seen some evidence of this in the accessibility space. Many users have found that collective knowledge can be a very powerful enabling tool, which is why such organizations as Knowbility and Virtual Ability, Inc. are so valuable. Many users with disabilities whom I’ve interviewed in Second Life, for example, credit their community of supporters for helping them enrich and sustain their lives.
So it’s interesting, this idea of “health as a social concept.” Can we as a nation acclimate ourselves to the idea of freely distributed healthcare data, if we know that we’re taking part in a service that benefits the common good?
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