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Pregnant with Plausible Promise -Web 2.0 and Participatory Medicine…

The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently released a report on the impact of web 2.0 on what they describe as ‘participatory medicine’. According to the authors of the report, Susannah Fox and Mary Madden, the inroad web 2.0 technologies have made in the health arena as well as their transformative potential will result in a completely different form of healthcare than we experience currently.

With 75% of adults and 93% of teens in the US online, the authors claim that “‘people-powered’ technology ….represents such a big sea change in the way we think about the internet …that users come to expect a certain level of interactivity in their online pursuits. They expect to be asked for feedback, to participate in shaping the communities and tools they use online.” Moreover, with 64% of teens creating content online already, we can expect to see even more radical content generation and participation as they move into college and into the workplace. So where does this leave health and its providers?

According to Fox and Madden, it now exists in the hands of participatory medicine or the space in between the sole authority of the physician and the fully web empowered and informed e-patient. In this space, or grey area, lies a ‘plausible promise’ as Eric Raymond suggests, of a different vision of healthcare far away from the overwhelming task of reforming the healthcare system but within reach of the web savvy patient.

Medicine 2.0, or participatory medicine, stands for a new, better health system, which emphasizes collaboration, participation, apomediation, and openness according to Gunther Eysenbach, MD, MPH of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, in the current issue of JMIR. As Berci Mesko on DiagnosisPR discusses, medicine will change not necessarily as a direct result of these technologies but more so because of the changes in expectations they will bring to the patient-provider relationship. With the emerging e-patient on one side comfortable with searching for medical information, researching potential providers and their conditions as well as communicating with their physicians, and emerging clinical practices such as Hellohealth on the other, medicine will be radically different.

However, beyond the clinical relationship, web 2.0 technologies and their engagement is coming to mean being more up to date than colleagues on innovative technologies and clinical practices, expanding your network of potential research collaborators and funders, Mesko claims. They are becoming critical to clinical career trajectories.

Thus, as Fox and Madden conclude, drawing on Diana Forsythe, a medical anthropologist, all those involved with health care need to design their work and clinical practice for “what could be” in terms of facilitating openness, choice, conversation, participation and collaboration.

Good things happen when we connect!

With many thanks to the creative talent of DJ Bass and Junkgirl for their images!

Kirsten Broadfoot