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 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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March 29, 2012 by Greg Moriarty
When you think about all the websites that vie for our attention in the course of a typical day (email, news, banking, etc.), a site dedicated to health benefits usually does not rank at the top of the list. While we at Healthx pride ourselves on creating a functional and visually appealing website, often the struggle for us and our clients is getting the end users to use it. This causes the word “engagement” to be passed around a lot at our offices. A lot of our time and energy is spent on asking ourselves how we can effectively maximize the use of our platform, thereby encouraging self-service and reducing calls to our clients’ customer service centers.
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