A recent article in the Boston Globe – Think Before you Click –  suggests that the Internet is creating new ethical considerations for clinicians.  Should clinicians Google their patients? And if they do, should they tell them before or after they searched for them online?   Questions also abound about social networking and whether clinicians should “friend” their patients, and vice versa.  The short answer is no, but read on for a safe way for patients and clinicians to interact online by following these 5 quick social networking tips for providers.

As analysts here at IDC Health Insights, each year we have the task of looking at the big picture and examining the technologies, trends and drivers that we believe will most heavily impact healthcare organizations in the coming year.  We present these to our clients and friends in the predictions reports and webcasts each January, with separate editions for the U.S. and EMEA regions.  While I focus on the U.S. market, as I was reading through the 2010 EMEA predictions I was struck by both the similarities and the differences between the predictions as identified by our analyst teams in both regions.  I wanted to discuss some of the differences between the two sets of predictions as they are informative and provide an interesting insight into the different healthcare delivery environments across the U.S. and EMEA.  The main difference between the two environments is the existence of major national healthcare systems in EMEA, while the U.S. remains a largely private payer and fee-for-service system. 

Last month marked the 10^th anniversary of the publication of the November 1999 publication of the Institute of Medicine's report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System.  This landmark report highlighted the critical situation and the contributing factors in what it called the "nation's epidemic of medical errors."  Two oft-quoted statistics from the 1999 report were the estimated annual cost of these medical errors, between $17B and $29B annually, and the number who die in hospitals as a result of them, "at least 44,000 people, and perhaps as many as 98,000," each year.  In the intervening ten years since the IOM report we have clearly seen some improvements to patient safety, but there is still much need for improvement.

Google recently launched a new toolbar feature, Sidewiki, that enables Web site visitors to add comments regardless of whether the site allows visitors to comment  As one might imagine this new Google feature has created quite a controversy and has serious implications for healthcare and life science organizations, especially pharmaceutical companies.

Health 2.0 technology is all about patient empowerment and giving patients the information they need to make an impact on their own healthcare.  While my colleagues and I have been writing about Health 2.0 tech for some time, it was with great interest that we held a recent conversation with Dr. Jeff Livingston, who is leveraging it to educate and empower the patients he serves in his busy Irving, Texas, MacArthur obstetrics and gynecology practice.  As Dr. Livingston points out, he and his partners frequently have only eight minutes to spend with their patients, important decisions need to be made, and this short time can have a life-changing effect on outcomes.   Using technology has helped him to maximize the impact and role he plays in this short time with his patients.

A recent Boston Globe article described the real life experience of a person downloading his "medical information" into Google Health.  But it wasn't about any healthcare organization or any patient.  The story involves the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Dave deBronkart, also known as e-patient Dave, a tech savvy cancer survivor who credits participatory medicine as saving his life.  He blogged about his  experience with Google Health on his own blog, which was also posted to the e-patients.net  site.  This scenario highlights the challenges of using administrative data to populate consumer-facing PHRs.  What the various blogs discussing this topic have not yet touch upon is that it won't be any easier when it's all clinical data.

Provider ranking sites are in the news again (click here, here and here) with the usual debate about whether physicians can be rated like restaurants by Zagat or handymen on Angie's List.  Both sites now rate health professionals.  On the pro side of the debate is that the ranking of products and services is a fundamental concept of consumerism.  Consumers are being asked to be more financially accountable in their healthcare decision making and are thus seeking more online decision support tools to make more informed decisions, such as physician rankings.  The discerning consumer will be able to distinguish between crackpot and legitimate reviews.  On the con side of the debate is that one such crackpot review can irreparably damage a physician's reputation.  Medical services are not like restaurants or books and lay consumers are not equipped to evaluate physicians medical expertise.