A new report is shedding light on how social media can help healthcare payers and patients alike transform the industry into a better one.
The PwC study found that patients are increasingly relying on social media to find and share medical information. Almost half of the respondents said the information they found via social media could influence them to get a second opinion, and one-third reported using social networks to obtain medical information from other patients.
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April 26, 2012 by Jouhne Scott
The Quantified Self is one of the big trends of 2012. To put it simply, “quantified self” can be thought of as self-knowledge or self-tracking through numbers. These numbers measure things such as how long we sleep, how many miles we run, or how many calories we consume in a given day. It would be very tedious for an individual to sift through all that data by themselves; but devices and applications like FitBit, Nike+, and RunKeeper are making this incredibly easy to do. Collectively, this data provides a look into a patient’s daily activity using self-tracking and visualization.
For future healthcare in the United States, self-tracking can increase the effectiveness of physicians by painting a more accurate picture of a patient’s health and helping the doctor visualize that data to better absorb the data. This medical information draws a contextual picture about a patient’s overall health condition, complementing a doctor’s past experience, expertise, and test results. Most providers do not have access to this information unless the patient actively tracks it and brings it to their physician.
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April 19, 2012 by Debbie Brown
As healthcare in the United States evolves to cover more people and track more health issues, concerns over how to best process this growing body of data remain.
The mounting volume of health information is what those in the healthcare IT space call ‘big data’, which are data sets that grow so large that they become cumbersome to work with using on-hand database management tools.
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April 13, 2012 by Ani Young
Recently Dean Health System’s President and CEO, Craig Samitt, spoke out on the topical issue of Meaningful Use as it pertains to payers.
Samitt himself has helped implement an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system for his organization, but thinks the healthcare industry may be putting too much focus on making EHRs ‘meaningful’ and not enough on other relevant and equally significant technologies. Samitt says to truly make healthcare in the United States “accountable”, we need to expand our idea of what health IT is to include systems such as kiosks, online healthcare portals, computer-enabled triage systems, expansive online access to medical evidence, sophisticated data analytics, remote patient monitoring, and social media. Samitt says he is not alone in this thinking.
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April 5, 2012 by Ani Young
A survey completed last month by the National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC) found that a whopping 95% of healthcare stakeholders categorize patient engagement as either ‘important’ or ‘very important’.
Only 5% of the respondents answered ‘somewhat important’ and NONE said found engagement to be unimportant.
Overwhelming as those statistics are, they may not be surprising. Of course, most players in the healthcare IT industry hope to impact patient lives in positive ways.
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