Today's Post on Health Train Express

I was up very early this AM and set off on my daily surfing of health blogs.  There seems to be a division of those who focus on patient encounters and clincal care isssue, both humorous, commonplace and very sad stories.  The other end of the axis are those blogs focusing on health IT, health policy and reform.

Matthew Hold on the Health Care Blog always seems to have a reservoir of important health policy wonks emoting good stuff.

I envy the guy for creating Health 2.0  meetings all over the world. What a gig!!

Anyway today he has

 

  David Kibbe,

ePatent Dave, and

Vince Kuraitis

all well known writers on a number of health blogs, discussing disruptive changes in health care.

ePatient Dave  brings this approach to our challenge:

"It’s possible to look at the patients issue from a moral or ethical perspective, or from a business planner’s ecosystem perspective. In this post we’ll simply look at it pragmatically: is our approach going to work? It’s our thesis that although you won’t see it written anywhere, the stage is being set for a kind of disruption that’s in no healthcare book: patient-driven disruptive innovation."

ePatient Dave's comments at the Meaningful Use Workgroup of the HIT Policy Committee revolve about the potential for Consumer and Patient Involvement

We assert that to disrupt within a non-working system is to bark up a pointless tree: even if you win, you haven’t altered what matters. Business planners and policy people who do this will miss the mark. Here’s what we see when we step back and look anew from the consumer’s view:

1. We’ve been disrupting on the wrong channel.
2. It’s about the consumer’s appetite.
3. Patient as platform:
   • Doc Searls was right
   • Lean says data should travel with the “job.”
   • “Nothing about me without me.”
4. Raw Data Now: Give us the information and the game changes.
5. HITECH begins to enable patient-driven disruptive innovation.
6. Let’s see patient-driven disruption. Our data will be the fuel.
We don’t hear it often in healthcare, but disruption Is driven by shifts in buyers’ appetites over time. As products improve, some buyers reach a point where “more” is no longer attractive.

If you view your health data as a modular component in the “health web of the future,” you see that today it’s tightly integrated – with your provider. That prevents you from seeking care elsewhere, and it prevents you from adding value to your own data by applying innovative tools. To us that’s harm. It’s not just restraint of trade, it’s restraint of health.

At one time in the not so distant past it was posssible for the patient and the provider to get the consultation from whomever the consumer and provider wanted.

 

Raw Data Now: Give us the information and the game changes.

People often ask, “If we give you your data, what are you going to do with it?” We don’t know – that’s the point: innovators haven’t gotten their hands on it yet!

Twenty years ago Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web. In his TED talk a year ago he told why: he worked in a fascinating lab, and people would bring fascinating and useful information on all sorts of computers. “I would find the information I wanted in some new data format. And these were all incompatible. The frustration was all this unlocked potential.” He proposed the Web: linked data.

It can be hard to see huge potential in a simple change. After Tim’s boss died, the original proposal was found in his papers. In the corner he’d written, “Vague, but exciting.”

Tim’s next big vision says today’s internet stops short: it lets us see other people’s interpretations of datasets, not the data itself. So his 2009 TED talk agitates for change. By the end of the talk he had people chanting,

“Raw Data Now.”