As I was going through some of these insightful blogs on this page, I just wondered if Social Networking could be of any help to the older generation, who are generally aloof from websites like Orkut, Facebook etc. What could be an incentive for them to be part of such a group (beyond business or career opportunities)? Is there a common interest among such people? Then I came across this interesting piece of article(“Medicine 2.0: Social Networking, Collaboration, Participation, Apomediation, and Openness”) on the internet http://www.jmir.org/2008/3/e22/ ) that talks about a paradigm shift in the health information economy (Transfer of gravity from health care providers to patients) and the role of “Social Networking (SN)” in it. The editor stresses the need for health care system to move away from being a hospital-based medicine that is traditional and closed structured to one that promotes good health and empowers consumers to take responsibility for their own health by engaging them in biomedical research. Health care, I believe, is one area that interests one and all irrespective of the age and is of relatively higher interest to the older generation.
The advent of social networking idea that involves modeling relationships between different people in the field of medicine is quite new. For example, what is traditionally “modeled” in electronic health records is usually medical information (symptoms, diagnosis, therapy), but not the explicit modeling of the patients’ or health professionals’ complex social network. A combination of social networking approaches with emerging technologies such as Personal Health Records will lead to a new class of applications like PHR 2.0. This may result in a powerful new generation of health applications, where people share parts of their electronic health records with other consumers and “crowdsource” the collective wisdom of other patients and professionals.
Younger generation spends hours keeping their Facebook profile current, constantly updating their status. But if the same generation of users were to invest their time and energy into similar tools for health (what the editor calls a “Healthbook” application), the consequences could be immensely positive. Fostering public participation and engagement in research issues, and user engagement in health care decisions will lead to improved possibilities for knowledge translation and getting research findings into practice. The amalgamation of social networking platforms like Facebook and PHR 2.0 will create unprecedented levels of patient participation into areas like health care and will bring them closer to health professionals and researchers.
So, will social networking be the killer application that gets people interested in personal health records, motivates users to take responsibility for their health and health information? Probably yes but there are certainly some open questions here. How comfortable are people in sharing their Personal Health Records and to what capacity? What about the authenticity of the this data available to general public? How can we create “Trust” among people? Is there a body that makes sure that the information is not mismanaged or ill-utilized? What is the effect of this information on younger generation who might act on some semi-finished research results? What about the resistance from the doctors’ community? It will be interesting to watch how these different issues that are inter-linked unfold in the near future.
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1 comment:
Very interesting. You can see how useful it is to look at SNA across industries, as it is inherently multi-disciplinary. For example, my colleague James Fowler, who appears twice in your references, is a political scientist who is doing SNA to track diseases and, currently, obesity in American children
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