Why Your Doctor Should Have a Wiki.

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn at the Health Populi blog recently published a report entitled “The Wisdom of Patients: Health Care Meets Online Social Media.”The report addresses issues around the new social networking sites that focus on health issues, but also begins to take a look at “what’s next for social networks and health?

Think about the wealth of information being generated nowadays and how much emphasis the Web 2.0 model has placed on user input. Look at what Wikipedia has done for information or what Amazon has done for product reviews. The study states that nearly 59% of patients look on the internet first for health-related information before they see a doctor.

This isn’t surprising seeing that the internet is relatively anonymous in the sense of getting information on very personal issues. Think about how many HIV or STD patients don’t go see a doctor just out of sheer emberassment. I mean there are social taboos.

I like to think of my friend who has Crohns Disease and the number of doctors he has seen, many of them specialists but living in different parts of the U.S., if not the world – some as far away as Turkey.

How beneficial would it be to have a support group wiki specifically created for Crohn’s with all of the top doctors in the world contributing updated information, maintaining open dialog with patients across the world?

I think that open dialog between patients and doctors online in a research manner could be very beneficial. Patients could end up looking at articles posted by a doctor on the wiki and may end up proposing their own solutions. At least that is what my friend with Crohn’s hopes for. In some respects, he knows the symptoms of Crohn’s better than his doctors.

My friend spends hours a day looking for published articles on Google Scholar, only to find that most of the research is closed off to subscribers. Why?

I think about how much information a doctor can possibly give a patient if the average patient time in clinics nowadays is just under six minutes? Is that really enough time to discuss the intricacies of the patients dilemma?

I don’t think so. I do think that there is hope though. I’m just waiting for that Crohn’s specialist to put up a damn social network so they could actually communicate with their patients for more than six minutes.

—————

Side Link: Larry Page talks on advancing science through having scientists place an emphasis on marketing themselves.