Here are some things that struck me about the first half-day of the first-ever “Health 2.0 Meets Ix” Conference in Boston today.

• I agree w/ Don Kemper that there are huge problems with the model of the “role of the patient is to be patient.” See “Ix Word Play: The Im-Patient Consumer” for more detail.
• This dichotomy of Health 2.0 for the rare/complex conditions (the “long tail”) and Ix for reducing known gaps in care (managing common chronic conditions) is interesting, but I think it’s a vast oversimplification. The reality is that you still need both — the strategy behind the blending is critically important.
• Matthew Holt notes that search doesn’t mean you get the right answer…just gets you in the right neighborhood. Sometimes that’s good, but often consumers want some more targeted leads.
• Interesting to see the PSA (prostate cancer screening) example used as demonstration of Health 2.0 value. Not that it isn’t, but PSA testing is often also cited as a great Ix opportunity, because prescribing evidence-based decision aids on PSA has significantly reduced unnecessary PSA testing.
• Both Amy Tenderich & Rushika Fernandopulle emphasized a point discussed here that we need to focus on how we help consumers manage the 525,500 minutes of the year they live outside the clinical delivery setting, not the 100 minutes they spend in it.
• James Hereford made 7 fabulous points in 7 minutes about building Ix into the delivery system:
  • You have to deliver what patients want (doesn’t matter how cool the technology is).
  • It has to make sense for clinicians from a clinical perspective.
  • It has to make sense for from a clinical workflow perspective.
  • Focus processes on the value proposition for the patient (I may have mangled this one a bit).
  • Information needs to be common, ubiquitous, and well-designed.
  • Health care is all about trust; whatever we do needs to enhance trust in the patient-provider relationship.
  • Incentives are critical.
• Don Caruso (a family physician in a small community) talked about how one key for him to practicing better is “figuring out how I can use patient information.”
• Caruso also talks about the extension of the patient-centered medical home model to more of a “medical village” by applying the PCMH concept to preventive care as well as chronic care.
• Rushika Fernandopulle points out that we need to go well beyond patient as partner; it’s that “patients need to control their own health care.”
• To do this, Rushika says, we have to engage the purchasers (employers, unions, etc.) because they’re the ones footing the bill.
• Finally, Rushika suggests that “the power of Health 2.0 is empowering patients to vote with their feet.”

Lots of great stuff to chew on, but so much more coming tomorrow @ 8:00am. Right off the bat, we’ll jump into the policy issues that a number of questioners in the audience couldn’t wait to talk about today.

We’ll also in the first session get into issues of safety-net populations vis-a-vis Ix & Health 2.0, something notably absent from today’s discussion.

Will sum up again tomorrow, but the live tweeting has been crazy…and also jamming up the lav mikes, producing some sound system challenges. I think we’ll be in better shape on that front tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 11:16 pm and is filed under Health 2.0 Space, Participatory Medicine, Patient-Centered Medical Home, Patient-Clinician Relationship. 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.