After I blogged last week about the Ix role in Health 2.0, it was cross-posted on The Health Care Blog. The post there generated a number of comments representing multiple perspectives.

As is perhaps too common in blogging, I may have gone too quickly and not been clear enough about some of the premises of Ix, particularly with respect to the great importance I place on consumer empowerment and engagement. I also did not provide examples to give a better perspective on what I was describing.

Here’s some additional effort to clarify, and I’ll come back to this more soon.

First, information therapy (Ix) does not at all mean that information should be available “by prescription only.” When we talk about Ix, we have always discussed three “prescribers” of information:

1. Clinician-prescribed.
2. System-triggered (based on data sources that serve as “information triggers” like a new lab value, medication, diagnosis, etc. that suggests a new need for a particular piece of information).
3. Consumer-prescribed. Even within that last category, there are multiple possibilities: Self-prescribed; prescribing to a friend/family member; and prescribed by someone in a peer group (this could be from an online social network, from fellow “patients” in a group visit, or from many other sources).

Second, there are many ways for people to find and ingest health information. But it also depends a lot on the individual. Susannah Fox from the Pew Internet Project has told me that health care is much different from other industries Pew has studied in that consumers are much more likely to seek out a professional in a time of crisis. In fact, according to Pew data, 80% of Internet health information seekers (and I presume a greater percentage of the general public) seek guidance from a clinician. Several other consumer surveys have reported similar findings.

I’m not at all saying that most consumers will stop there. My own e-patient experience last week with my 4-year-old’s new diagnosis of asthma is a good example. I wanted the pediatric allergist to answer a slew of questions. As I recounted the two-hour appointment to my wife, I remembered some of his answers with more fuzziness than others (much to my wife’s chagrin). Some tailored Ix (including an after-visit summary to detail next steps) could go a long way toward helping me and my family on the right path.

No doubt with our information-seeking tendencies, we would supplement that with many other health information searches. But my efforts thus far with both searches and posts to pediatric social networking sites have not yielded information specific enough to answer my particular questions.

The reason why I want the “information prescription” (in this case from my doctor, though as I said before, it could come from other trusted sources as well) is that I want my doctor to treat his dissemination of information to me as carefully as his selection of medication prescriptions for my son.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Engaging Consumers, Health 2.0 Space, The New Health Care Consumer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.