Report Explores How Social Media is Changing Cancer Care
THINK-Health has compiled an interesting report detailing how social media tools are dramatically changing cancer care and medicine at large.
The 28-page report, entitled The Wisdom of Patients: Health Care Meets Online Social Media, was prepared for the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF), a nonprofit organization based in Oakland.
The report provides some key statistics on health-related internet use. It also discusses how networking in online communities is transforming everything from doctor-patient relationships to data collection for clinical trials.
The Wisdom of Patients explores the potential risks and benefits of using wikis, blogs, and other social media platforms to conduct personal or professional research. There’s explanations for a terms like “prosumers” and “Health 2.0″ which are popping up more frequently in the health marketplace, plus some insightful comments provided by people who’ve founded popular health-related web sites.
While this report isn’t going to give a current patient any specific answers about the science of cancer, it’s certainly worth the read if you’re a cancer advocate, patient, researcher, provider or IT professional who uses — or is considering using — the internet to share the information you’ve learned during your cancer journey. As the report’s author wrote,
“When patients managing the same chronic condition share observations with each other, their collective wisdom can yield clinical insights well beyond the understanding of any single patient or physician. Similarly, when physicians share information with each other online, the results go far beyond the doctor’s lounge…”
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, MA, MHSA
Health Economist
If you’d like to read more, you can download the free report at www.chcf.org/topics/chronicdisease/index.cfm?itemID=133631.
Source: California HealthCare Foundation Chronic Disease Care
Related Links: National Cancer Institute; American Cancer Society
Related Podcast: Internet Health Records: Convenience at a Cost? from NPR
Technorati Tags: MySpace; YouTube; Facebook; I’m Too Young for This!; health IT; chat rooms; patientslikeme; digg
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