Dr. Phil’s “Blogajawea”

We had a great camp this weekend, learning up to probably 1/3 of the opener.  Everyone worked so hard, and we also had our first leadership session, doing an overview of this year’s (all new) curriculum, and getting to know each other just a bit more.  Thanks so much to the many volunteers (the Bess clan, Michelle Mohr and others), as well as to our staff for helping to make it a great success.  The level of maturity of our program, our training, and of our members is showing, and we’re all very excited about the up-coming year.  Have a great holiday season, and check back soon for pictures from camp.

Believe it or not, this blog will cover many topics, not just drum corps.  I’m a physician trained in surgery and public health and preventive medicine, and I head up strategy for a leading health care information and technology company.  I’ve been working hard over the past 10 years to develop technologies that bring “the right information to the right person at the right time.”  From a technical perspective, matching things to people who wouldn’t otherwise see them is a fun and worthy endeavor.  But as I’ve explored the needs of health care further, as I’ve interacted with those from Medicare and government, leading innovators from around the country, and leading corporations and health plans, I am evolving my perspective.  I have come to believe that enabling the matching of people to people could be the most important match of all in health care.  I’d like to talk about “People helping People”, and how this social model of people interacting, enabled through technology, is going to be just as important as any economic model in our evolution toward a more efficient and effective health care system.
I’d like to talk about this social model through three examples: Social networking, patient-physician communication, and patient-industry collaboration. 
Social networking over the web is personified by Facebook and MySpace, and is inevitably going to transform health care as consumers interact with each other to become healthier, compete with others over health improvement, and even decide what treatments are most likely to work based on how they worked for “patients like me”. (See patientslikeme.com for a great example for how this works).
More efficient and effective patient-physician and physician-physician connectivity will also become a cornerstone of our emerging health care system.  To be clear, calling what we have today a “system” is a stretch.  What we have today is individuals who do their best to guide people into the technologies or treatments that are most likely to have an impact, but there is no “system” which facilitates shared decision-making or information sharing.  If you’ve ever tried asking one doctor to share your health records with another, you know what I mean.  But we already have a platform in place that can provide the backbone to more efficient communication: the Internet.  Internet-based communications between patients and doctors can ensure that both have the information they need to make more informed decisions, and online messaging between patients and their doctors brings an efficiency and convenience to health care that benefits everyone.  And doctor-to-doctor communication using the Internet helps make a collaborative care environment possible, improving quality and lowering the risk of error.

But perhaps what excites me the most is patient-industry collaboration.  It may sound a little academic, but it’s a new idea that the Internet, and robust tools delivered through it, can help transform the way researchers and others in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries can collaborate with consumers directly to identify new therapies, and identify ways of targeting the therapies that are most likely to work for individuals.  By enabling researchers at institutions and industry to ask questions of large numbers of consumers, and by enabling consumers to utilize their own anonymous or private data to answer those questions without having to divulge their identity, we allow those answers to contribute to our knowledge and the development of new and exciting tests and therapies that can transform how we live.  You can see an idea for how this might work by going to www.genacy.com.
People helping People.  It draws upon our basic humanity.  It’s a social model that’s as important to the evolution of our health care system as any economic model.   As part of our national health care discussion I believe it can transform how we live.