Health Camp Dc 2009 Intro

This is the introduction to HealthCampDc 2009. The Hashtag for the event is #HCDC09.

Health Camp Dc 2009 Intro

View more presentations from Mark Scrimshire. (tags: healthcare washington)

HealthCampDc kicks off at CareFirst in Washington DC

The event is finally here. Over 40 people have signed up to attend HealthCampDc at the CareFirst offices in Washington DC near Union Station.

The event will be going out live over the Internet. I expect a number of participants to be actively blogging and tweeting. We may even get video streams running.

To monitor the live conversation check out the CoverItLive widget here in this blog.

I am excited to be welcoming people to this event. Just looking over the roster of attendees tells me that we should have a lively discussion with experts from the community and all areas of the Health Care industry.

The Stimulus Bill (aka the ARRA) turning Health Care on it's head?

I have just got back from the "World Health Care Congress Leadership Summit on Consumer Connectivity". It was a lively event as you can see from the event streams on Day 1 and Day 2.

I spent some time at LAX while waiting for the plane home talking with @bobcoffield. I believe there could be a lot of interest in running a workshop to dig deeper in to the health care privacy issues that are impacted by the American Recovery and Re-Investment Act (ARRA or aka: The Stimulus Bill).

Would you be interested in a workshop event?

I was thinking about setting up a special HealthCamp Privacy workshop that could be held in conjunction with the upcoming Health 2.0 Conference which is being held in Boston on April 22-23.

There would have to be a fee paid by participants to cover the cost of setting up this event. Leave a comment below, or send me twitter message to @ekivemark so we can gauge the interest, or even send me an email just convert the address to a legal syntax.

World Health Care Congress Summit Day Two

Yesterday was a busy day at the World Health Care Congress Leadership Summit on Consumer Connectivity. What was amazing was that during the opening session Marc Needham (@mneedham ) of Scripps Health asked how many people in the audience knew about Twitter. Amazingly about 90% of the audience raised their hand. In deed a number of members of the audience were live tweeting the event. You can see the tweet stream, using the #WHCC2 hash tag on yesterdays blog.

Thanks to my fellow tweeters who were contributing to yesterday/s event coverage. The Congress got an enormous amount of exposure as a result of your contributions. This is great news because the topics being discussed at this event are critical to the future evolution of technology in Health Care.

The Personal Health Record is becoming a critical connection point in the delivery of care.

I will be running CoverItLive again today, except when I am presenting later this morning.

Here is the LiveBlog feed for Day 2 of the Congress:

World Health Care Congress Summit on Consumer Connectivity

The World Health Care Congress Leadership Summit on Consumer Connectivity kicks off this morning with a pre-event workshop led by:

• David Ahern
• Michael C Gibbons, MD
• Michael D Parkinson, MD

The Workshop is on "Designing and developing a Product Framework for Consumer Participation"

Preparing for the World Health Care Congress Summit

The World Health Care Congress Summit kicks off this morning. I am going to try a new method of covering the event. I am using the CoverItLive service.

Posts from the event will appear in the Window below:

World Health Care Congress on Consumer Connectivity

An unexpected turn of events last week led to me being invited to participate in a session at the World Health Care Congress Leadership Summit on Consumer Connectivity. that is taking place in San Diego on February 23-24th. TriZetto is leading a session on "Powering Consumer Engagement through Integrated Health Care Management." This is going to be a crazy week because I am in the middle of preparing for HealthCampDc which is taking place in Washington DC on Friday February 27th.

The invitation to attend the Summit came about because CareFirst is a major customer of Trizetto. Their software powers enrollment and claims management for a significant portion of CareFirst's 3.3 million members. I was asked to represent CareFirst in their session.

The summit is going to be looking at social networks and other tools to fuel consumer engagement in the management of their health care. This has been a keen interest of mine and is behind the HealthCamp series of events I have been organizing.

Representing CareFirst at this event represents somewhat of a conundrum for me. My background in the evolution of Web 2.0 - what do we label the latest web technologies these days? has put me on the leading edge of web strategy at CareFirst. At this event I am representing CareFirst, but my views may not be those that are adopted across the company. However, they are at the core of my thinking when discussing and planning the evolution of the company's web strategy.

I think this leads me to presenting a talk, which I will post later on Slideshare, that outlines the high level CareFirst strategy but also blends in my personal views. My views on health care have evolved through discussions at various HealthCamp related events.

I feel it is more important to promote an approach to establishing participatory health care. After all that is the core idea behind HealthCamp - To promote the conversation around re-inventing Health Care using social networks, open standards and the latest Internet and Mobile technologies.

I hope I can encourage more people to establish HealthCamp events as a result of attending this event. A number of other Health 2.0 "Agitators" are going to be there. Scott Shreeve and Bob Cauffield are among some of the Twitter users that will be at the Summit. I am certain there will be plenty of others. Bob and I are aiming to discuss the planning of HealthCampWv. It looks like the hashtag for the event is emerging as #WHCC. so you can follow the event on search.twitter.com using that as a search term. If the tag changes I will put out a tweet that uses the old and the new hashtag.

If you are a fellow tweeter at the event then please come say hello or ping me @ekivemark. I will also be posting blogs from the event about interesting sessions.

Finally, if you are going to be in the Washington DC area on Friday February 27th sign up for HealthCampDc and join in this vitally important discussion on the re-invention of health care and the engagement of consumers and patients. Go to http://healthcampdc.eventbrite.com to sign up.

Medical Home or Medical Office?

In many corners of the Health Care industry experts are busy developing the concept of the Medical Home. This appears to be one of the industry responses to the rising cost of health care and the challenges in effectively managing the treatment of chronic ailments. The concept of the Medical Home has been with us for years, since the late 1960's.

Following on from my blog post yesterday, when I looked at our role as consumers in the future of health care, I think it is time to look at the concept of the Medical Home and the continuing paternalistic role of the Medical Community. Don't get me wrong, I am all in favor of Primary Care Physicians being compensated for managing the care of the chronically ill. The complexities of the modern health care system make navigating it a daunting prospect. Assigning someone to help get the right care at the right time is a positive step forward.

My concern is whether it will really be patient-centered. Will the Medical Home perpetuate the paternalistic relationship between the patient and the medical community.

Isn't the concept of the "Medical Home" a misnomer. Isn't what is being created a "Medical Office" or "Medical Concierge" service?

As I mentioned yesterday. We, as patients, are the people that are dealing with our medical condition on a 24x7 basis. Even with the very best care, unless we are admitted to a hospital or hospice, our relationship with physicians and other medical specialists, while having more continuity than the current episodic nature of care, is still intermittent at best.

If we are truly trying to create the Medical Home then we should be re-thinking care from the ground up. The cost of care delivery drops significantly as we move from in-patient, to out-patient, to practice-based care and then to home-based treatment.

If we truly want to create a system of health care that puts the patient at the center then we need to promote the adoption of the Personal Health Record as the central coordination point. A Personal Health Record that is managed by the patient. A record that the patient can authorize others to manage on their behalf.

With a Personal Health Record at our side we can then adopt Tele Health Monitoring devices to help us manage conditions on a more continual basis. We can leverage the power of the Internet to enable remote monitoring. It could be like having an security company for your body, just like many people have alarm systems continually monitoring their home.

Experts might argue that remote tele Health monitoring might not be as reliable or accurate as measurements taken by an experienced physician or nursing assistant. But surely the trending of readings that might be taken daily, or even multiple times per day, would ultimately be more valuable that a reading taken once per month, or less frequently, in the artificial conditions of a hospital or doctors office.

If we progress down this route then I believe it is essential that the data collected is available to the patient in their Personal Health Record. We will fail in our education of patients if we collect the information centrally and make it difficult for patients to review and analyze this information. Self awareness is critical to changing habits and promoting healthier lifestyles. Making monitoring information available to the individual so they can correlate it with their schedule and habits is an important step in changing for the better.

If we are going to construct the Medical Home, let's really do that and work out how we can enable better care - Where patients actually live.

Let's continue to evolve the Advanced Medical Home - but call it for what it is - The Advanced Medical Practice and work out how to integrate Primary Care with patients in their home through, online care services, remote tele health monitoring and other services that will enable patients to maintain their independence for as long as possible.

Our role as consumers in the future of healthcare

At the recent Social Media Club DC event I was one of the panel members talking about Health and Social Media. It was a lively event with a lot of discussion with and between the attendees.

A number of questions during the evening focused around the Personal Health Record. During the various interchanges I referenced the UK National Health Service and their deployment of Personal Health Records to UK citizens. This deployment is changing the relationship between Doctors and Patients. There is a transformation occurring. In the past the Doctor-Patient relationship has been paternalistic in nature. The UK's adoption of Personal Health Records is creating a more informed consumer and making the relationship more patient-centered through the empowerment that comes with increased knowledge.

Following the Social Media Club event a question came in to me on Twitter from @DeborahH.

@ekivemark "to involve consumer... be less paternalistic" A thought: what impact could this idea have, droppd into the mainstream conversation?

This question got me thinking:

• Why it is important to adopt Personal Health Records.
• Could the adoption of Personal Health Records change the relationship with Doctors, Payers, Pharmacists and others in the US Health Care industry?
  

Why we need to adopt Personal Health Records

Health Care is becoming more complex and capable. Continual advances in care and drug regimens are extending our life expectancy but can also increase the risk of dangerous interactions. The risk of adverse interactions will rise if everyone involved in a patient's treatment does not have full visibility in to the the medications and treatments being administered.

We should also realize that we, as patients, are the one common denominator in our treatments. Not only are we the one common denominator but we are also the person who lives with ailments 24x7. In comparison we may get to spend only a few minutes with our physician infrequently. When looked at in that light we should be empowering ourselves to manage our own health and wellness.

Changing the Patient Relationship

Enabling us, as patients, to be better informed changes the relationship for all of our interactions across the healthcare industry.

Through better information we can have more informed and focused discussions with our physicians.

I also wrote recently about the adoption of Personal Health Records being driven by the senior members of society. The desire to retain independence while containing medical costs will lead to an increased use of home-based medical monitoring equipment. The data from this equipment could end up being uploaded to a patient's Personal Health Record and from there shared with physicians and others involved in the patient's care.

This all leads us to have more visibility and understanding of our health conditions and to spend the scarce time we have with medical experts productively.

We will move from the paternalistic mode to more of a partnership of equals.

The Health Session at Social Media Club DC is a sell out

Tomorrow, Wednesday February 7th, IQ Solutions in Rockville is hosting a Social Media Club session. The topic is "Engaging the Health World Through Social Media." I have been asked to take part on the panel that is being moderated by Alexandra Rampy (@SocialButterfly). It is a real pleasure to be participating alongside Healthcare blogger, Dr. Val Jones (@DrVal), Christian Olsen and Joel Selzer of Ozmosis.

This should be a great panel, an interactive discussion, with not a PowerPoint in sight.

I have been invited because of my role as "chief troublemaker" and change agent in the HealthCamp movement. With HealthCampDc happening on Friday February 27th and HealthCampPhila taking place a month later on Saturday March 28th, this is a great opportunity to spread the word about these events.

I hope that anyone following the event is inspired to sign up for a HealthCamp event and join in the discussion about the future of Healthcare.

For those not familiar with HealthCamp, these are barcamp-style events focused around HealthCare. Healthcare is a complex industry with many different specialists engaged in the delivery of services.

Privacy issues create complexity and often stifles innovation and experimentation in the industry. Privacy is a double-edged sword. We have to trust that our privacy will be protected. At the same time, if we happen to be the victim of serious medical conditions that affect our quality of life then sites like PatientsLikeMe demonstrate that we are willing to sacrifice some of our privacy in order to improve our quality of life.

Privacy issues will come to the fore with Personal Health Records. Fears of our most personal information being accessible without our consent will have to be balanced against the risk of receiving incompatible treatments due to an ignorance of the full range of medications we are taking.

It always strikes me as ironic that when it comes to Health Records it is us, the health consumer, that are the only people in the health equation that typically does not have access to our records.

As I have discussed in an earlier post I believe Personal Health Records will be adopted by the senior members of the population. This will be driven by the quality of life issue. Our seniors will take advantage of Remote Tele Health monitoring equipment that will feed the Personal Health Record and allow vital signs to be remotely monitored.   

How does Social Media come in to play in the Health Arena?

I expect to see Social network tools being adopted amongst doctors and others with common interests. However, the real revolution has to come with the Personal Health Record.

We are the one common denominator in the health delivery equation. As such, we need to encourage systems to be developed that reflect this fact. If this is to happen then the Health Care industry needs to recognize and adopt some of the standards that are enabling information to be controlled by individuals. OpenID, OAuth and microformats are just three examples of standards that have much to offer in the Health Care arena.

I look forward to discussing these issues at the February Social Media Club DC meeting. If you come to the event please come and say hello!

Mac Mini should become the Apple TV Plus

An article on Apple Insider today has Analysts urging Apple to upgrade the AppleTV to add Cable TV support. I think Apple would be better off keeping the price of the AppleTV low and instead building in the Cable TV interface to the Mac Mini when they revamp it. The Mac Mini with a cable TV interface and a large hard drive, plus the ability to add extra storage would make the Mini a great home media hub. The AppleTV could then continue as the satellite device. With a great hub product a family could easily add an AppleTV to each TV set in the house.

A fully fledged Mac running as a compact media hub opens the opportunity to sell additional wireless keyboards and mice too. The platform has Front Row and Mac OS X offers the opportunity to extend functionality more easily than opening up the AppleTV. The Mac Mini can be the adaptable point of entry for digital media and Apple can keep the AppleTV relatively closed. It stays as basically an iPod with an external screen and remote.

A fully fledged Mac OS X machine running as a home media server with iLife and iWork included further extends the influence of the Mac. A media optimized interface (via Front Row) makes it easier to break down the PC barrier in the home but the ability to do double duty as a computer further extends the reach of the Mac and breaks down the PC monopoly, ultimately making it easier for families to make their follow on computer purchase a Mac that would be compatible with their media hub.

Apple don't mess with the AppleTV instead upgrade the Mac Mini to be the home media hub. I am sure Robert Scoble and Dave Winer would agree with that strategy. They have been in the leading wave of Mac Mini Media Hub users.