A new trend is bubbling up on the internet. More and more individuals are returning home from their doctor appointments, and turning to the web for a second opinion. Fortunately, there exist countless Web sites devoted to providing health information for these individuals... unfortunately, the information is vast, general, and terribly non-person specific.
This growing group of "e-patients" are individuals "who are equipped, enabled, empowered and engaged in their health and health care decisions," according to e-patients.net. They pour over the Google search results page in hopes of finding tailored, data-driven health information in real-time.
Spectrum's VP of Digital Strategy, Kevin Walsh, attended the Health 2.0 conference held last week in San Francisco where user-generated health care was one of the main topics of discussion. Many of the products and services introduced at the conference had a lot to do with this new group of e-patients using the internet to find data to aid in managing personal health decisions.
Steve Lohr, of The New York Times, recently wrote about a new start-up company introduced at Health 2.0 that sets out to aid e-patients in wading through the "vast trove of generalized health information" found online. Lohr explains:
"The ideal, health experts say, would be to combine personal data with health information to deliver tailored health plans for individuals. That is what Mr. Bosworth and his San Francisco- based company, Keas (pronounced KEE-ahs) Inc., mean to do."
The Keas system is still in beta, and not an end-all-be-all of online health consumerism, it is, however, an initiative to supplement the lull in person-specific health information found on the Web. The system's goal is to help e-patients take control of their health, to "own" their medical information, so to speak.
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