Dr. Phil’s “Blogajawea”

Well, it’s time for another blog entry.  The Oregon Crusaders continue to make great progress (although sometimes housing is a stress… luckily I’ve got Ron Barnett helping me to manage that).  And our DCI directors meeting went well over the weekend - it was so good to hang out with friends like the Northwest directors, Rob Lowery, Rob Ripley, Jeff Pearson, Marc and Stefanie Hebert and so many others so committed to drum corps.  But instead of talking about drum corps I wanted to spend a little bit of time expanding on an issue that I brought up in my last health care blog.  (OK, so if you were looking for a drum corps post, like electronic guitars and how they aren’t approved for use in DCI shows, then I’m sorry to disappoint).  (Oh, second parenthetical point, if you’re looking for a blog every few days, you’ve got the wrong guy!). 

Now for the blog.  I had the great pleasure today of leading a discussion of health care connectivity in Washington DC at the World Health Care Congress with former US Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders and Dr. Paul Grundy of IBM.   Dr. Elders is as sweet at she could be, and still as eloquent as ever advocating for greater health care literacy among consumers.  Dr. Grundy has been on the “front lines” of providing personal health records to employees and advocating for a stronger relationship between patient and primary care provider.  Connectivity of all types is something that is getting a lot of play in health care.  Friends and colleagues Jamie and Ben Heywood at Patients Like Me, Adam Bosworth of Keas, WebMD with their drug insights and message boards and so many others are tapping into the power of technology to enable people to help other people to make better decisions and improve their care.  I hold to the belief that patients connected to each other, to physicians, and to the research community are what have the chance to transform our disconnected (and yet somehow overly techno-centric) health care system.  When it comes to patient-physician connectivity, we touched on something today that I believe is critically important.  We talked about the importance of the connection between patients and their doctors, but as part of a growing and meaningful relationship.  Not as part of the transient or distant relationship that most patients now have with their doctors.  It’s one of convenience, efficiency and significance.  It’s one that supports a continuity of care, a familiarity, between a doctor and his patients.  But it is one that meets the needs of doctors and patients.  Doctors choosing the health record and workflow systems that meet their needs, while patients choose the system that best meets their needs.  Connected, not tethered, but connected with all the doctors that provide him care.  We have held out hope that regional health information organizations and a national health information network might provide the connectivity we seek.  But two things have threatened these efforts: 1) There is no clear business model, and 2) The consumer is oftentimes nowhere to be found in these efforts. 
Why is it that the consumer cannot be the bridge across our health care system?  I believe, as we are beginning to show through WebMD, that patients can help to bridge our fragmented system.  They can use technology to support the doctor-patient relationship, supportive of their need for privacy and control, and supportive of the consumer-centric health care system for which we have all worked.  Imagine: A patient walks into their doctor’s office.  They provide unique information that is input into the doctor’s office system that automatically links the doctor’s system to the patient’s portal.  Secure messages, lab results, a full health history, monitoring and tracking, health improvement, clouds parting, angels singing.  You get the picture.  And doctors able to have a good quality of life managing urgent issues in-person while managing non-urgent issues more efficiently.  It’s not a future that has to be that far away.  In the words of one of the meeting’s attendees today: 2008 is the year.

Enjoy the pictures of me with the WebMD team and with Dr. Elders and Dr. Grundy.    

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.