The Big Idea : Personalized Health Information

We've all seen the searches in television commercials : 'hypertension', 'diabetes', 'ankle sprain'. But if professional health information is a Ferrari, the typical search results from a simple keyword query is more like a shiny tricycle. The novelty quickly wears off; we know there's a bigger world of information out there, but how to access it?

Being a patient is a journey. There's a period of initial diagnosis, learning basic disease information, then achieving a deeper understanding, gaining experience with the personal aspects of the condition, sharing information and gaining support from peers, and eventually giving back to the community through mentoring or active involvement in patient support and disease advocacy. The journey is complex and personal; health information resources on the web should understand this and support it.

Personalization is the key. In order to go beyond the introductory 'What is Hypertension', a health site needs to learn about your personal health history, family health history, medical conditions, and treatments. From this basic, anonymous, health profile, you can realize immediate benefits

• Personalized health news, selected from the best sources to match your profile
• Personalized search results, highlighting important factors such as connections between symptoms and conditions, side effects, drug interactions, and factors in your family history that may influence diagnosis, risk factors, and treatment.
• Personal connections to other patients that share a similar profile.

You are now 'plugged in' to your condition, continuously updated with relevant information, able to delve deeper into background material and research, and connected to peers.

Next, you'll begin to communicate with your health provider. Personal health records are coming into being in many forms, and there are great benefits to integrating the physician's view of the patient with the patient's own health profile. Using the health profile, the patient is seeing information written for patients, with the ability to venture into more advanced material if they desire. From the physician's point of view, the patient health profile becomes more than a bookkeeping system; it's a window into the best, most relevant, most applicable guidelines and research that they can use to make real-time decisions.

Realizing this vision, a personalized health information system that bridges new patients, mentors, and health care providers, is not a simple task. It is not all about technology, although innovative technology is required. It is not all about discussions and social networking, although effective communication is required. The system we describe can only be built by connecting patients, providers, content developers, industry, and medical information systems, using new technology that truly understands the language and structure of medicine.

This complete solution, this 'Big Idea', is what we're working towards.

Comments

[Rakesh Biswas]

Very well written Kevin.

What do you feel is the role of personal experiential information in this whole schema? For example if we had the personal experiential information of not only the patient in the clinical encounter but also that of other stake holders related to the clinical encounter beginning with health professional, relatives, hospital administrators, etc, humans may be able to derive more meaning from the dialogue between them than getting fragmented information.

The key to understanding the language and structure of medicine may lie in delineating these bottom up dialogues which are lost between the lines of our text books of medicine. The key to personalized health care may lie in an asynchronous interaction with the case/person at hand and the other actors in the care giving collaborative network.

rakesh