Over a year ago now e-patient Dave finished reading a white paper about the nature and status of the e-patient and its connection to participatory medicine. The white paper offered up several main conclusions — that patients are valuable contributors and providers should recognize them as such; that the art of empowering patients is trickier than we thought; that we have underestimated patients’ ability to provide useful online resources; that we have overestimated the hazards of imperfect online health information; that clinicians can no longer go it alone and that the most effective way to improve healthcare is to make it more collaborative. I bet you’re thinking ” no surprises there!”. But actually, there may well be as a more recent blog discusses…..

Recently in the blogosphere there has been much hubbub around ‘clinical groupware’ and its potential for reforming healthcare practice as well as the industry at large. Clinical Groupware is beyond electronic health records and as David Kibbe at The Healthcare Blog describes, is web-based and networkable, designed to be used interactively to coordinate care and create continuity through a ‘unified view’ of a patient from multiple sources of data and information. It offers dynamic evidence based guidance and coaching, collecting quality and performance measures daily to provide everyone involved with the patient’s care with a collaborative platform for decision support and care planning. People are divided however about just how far physicians and patients as well as all others involved in care can be connected, can share and can collaborate. All this debate makes me wonder, what is so threatening about opening up such a conversation of care between patients and physicians so that they can collaborate, mutually engage in decision making and care planning?

Somehow I don’t think is the main issue. You will notice that in the description of clinical groupware there is discussion of collecting quality and performance measures, evidence based guidance and coaching and multiple sources of data and information. I am sure this challenges our traditional notions of medical expertise. But it also challenges some of the current practices around the design of pharmaceuticals and medical devices which have been well targetted as costly endeavors driving up the cost of healthcare. As the stimulus bill comes into effect, it brings along with it, a very distinct desire to engage in “comparative effectiveness research” which aims to measure the effectiveness of different treatments for the same illness. Critics suggest that this places the government right smack in the middle of the doctor-patient relationship. Others mentioned that some drugs are not effective in particular populations because those same populations were never involved in the initial research behind the drugs. This is a design issue now, folks!

It is also where Syndicom enters the discussion with its release of DesignEdge, a new way to dynamically connect R&D teams in the evolving process of device design and development so that mistakes are caught early on as the feasibility of the product or procedure undergoes constant evaluation and assessment. Driven by the mantra of ‘fail fast, fail cheap’ , the idea here is to design treatments which will make their way through such comparative effectiveness research because they will have been thoroughly discussed, trialed, evaluated and improved. Because it is online, DesignEdge also allows teams to work remotely as well as ‘follow the sun’. Research and decision making processes in DesignEdge are accelerated and streamlined, as they are imagined within clinical groupware discussed above.  Feedback on group challenges is sent via email and web notifications and team leaders can easily manage reports and track group activity. DesignEdge also tracks collaborative contributions and compiles an instantaneous report automatically whenever it is needed. That’s a lot of good work and coordination managed for you!

If you would like to learn more about DesignEdge™, please visit http://syndicom.com/designedge/.  In the meantime, consider the comparative and perhaps competitive advantage you have over many of your colleagues by already embracing patient care based in collaboration!

With thanks to deSKOLtrolado,  and lumaxartfor their excellent images!

Here’s to being at least one step ahead of the rest!

Kirsten Broadfoot

Tags: case planning, case study planning, clinical groupware, collaboration, comparative effectiveness research, decision support, decision support system, DesignEdge, e-patient, fail cheap, fail fast, follow the day, follow the sun, health 2.0, health web 2.0, medical device development, medical devices, medical devices companies, new product development, online health information, participatory medicine, patient care, product development, surgeon communities, syndicom, the collaboration

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Blog.