Even if you don’t work in healthcare, there’s a good chance you’ll be following recent health Web 2.0 developments with interest. The Medpedia Project, for example, will bring a wikipedia approach to health information, and Google Health, the personal health record service available in the
You’ll be interested because if you’re a consumer of health services—a reasonably high likelihood—you’re looking online before you visit a doctor. A Harris survey reported that 58 percent of people who look online for health information discussed what they found with their doctors.
This trend toward self-educated health consumers is causing the doctor to become a knowledge navigator. Experts predict that patients will ultimately be the stewards of their own information, and health care will be a much more collaborative process between patients and doctors.
And if you’re a student of social media, you’ll be especially interested because the way in which Web 2.0 technology is embraced by healthcare professionals will provide an informative case study on how this new technology challenges established management models and assumptions about who can create content.
In many ways, Social media fits healthcare as awkwardly as a backless hospital gown. For good reasons, healthcare institutions are inherently risk adverse, highly value information from authoritative sources and closely guard intellectual property. These values, however, create conflicts with Web 2.0, which is built on a premise of an open flow of information with few controls on the source or intellectual property.
The approach taken by Medpedia is to collaborate with the healthcare industry, with 110 organizations contributing or pledging over 7,000 pages of content to the knowledge base, and 25 health organizations have announced their plans to use the Medpedia Network and Directory to connect with their memberships.
In doing so, Medpedia strikes a balance between the authoritative requirements of healthcare professionals and the open information flow of healthcare consumers by including three interrelated services: a collaborative knowledge base, a Professional Network and Directory for health professionals and organizations, and Communities of Interest, in which medical professionals and non-professionals can share information about conditions, treatments, lifestyle choices, etc.
According to an article in Canadian Healthcare Technology:
While only physicians and Ph.D.s in a biomedical/health field can edit the Medpedia knowledge base directly, and only health and medical professionals are to use the professional network, consumers have an important role to play in the evolving model of Medpedia.
They can suggest changes to the Article pages, and they can participate in “Communities of Interest.” “Communities of Interest” is the part of the Medpedia Platform that brings consumers and medical professionals together to share knowledge around conditions, treatments, and lifestyle choices.
Google, on the other hand, is pursuing a classic Web 2.0 strategy, one that has proven to be very effective for them: relentlessly enhance data, let the community decide what they want to do with it, and don’t over-finesse the launch.
It will be interesting, indeed, to observe the impact these initiatives—and their different strategic approaches—have in an industry that has proven resistant to the viral spread of social media.
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