Web 2.0: Impediments and Opportunities

The topics discussed were:

Why Web 2.0 – Trademark buzz word

• There is little liking for the term Web 2.0, as it was a specific buzzword grabbed onto as a brand and will likely dilute quickly (Web 3.0). However, there is a new degree of communication happening, a sense of change happening. This is driving greater collaboration, tools and peoples interest in collaborating. The cost of communication is going to zero in practice for most. It is becoming free for large groups to communicate.
• Web 2.0 is good for breaking up of silos by providing wide distribution of communication.
• How does this play with healthcare? Healthcare has silos. Delivery is siloed – you are a physician or not. There are interests in devices, drugs, nutrition,
• Who are the stakeholders?
  • Physician
  • Nurse practitioner
  • Surgeons
  • Administrators
  • Patient
  • Family
• A concern in Web 2.0 in general is protecting an area of business and building value.
• In Healthcare there are entrenched concerns: Legal, regulatory, ethic – perceived as not very challengeable. Every innovation is looked at through a prism – e.g., ethics
• Potential for Web 2.0
  • What is the ethics for Web 2.0, this argument needs to be made if it will play there
    • Acknowledge risks and meet them
    • Manifestos – large group of people can sign on to a way of doing things
    • 1995/96, the popular objection is that we can’t trust the internet: Who holds the trust: physcians, other professionals? What role was there for ‘patients with print outs’?
    • Similarly, how do we respond to the sentiments like “Blogs are garbage”?
    • Can’t just ban the internet
    • Need to consider the high ground. ethics

Ethics

• Norms for behaviour
• Individuals buy in or not of ethical norms
• What would it take for people to change there actions?
• Enforce integrity by increasing transparenc, wide sharing of information (e.g., Web 2.0)
• Incentives and disincentive for change – increase transparency and scrutiny to motivate change
• But such public sharing changes accountability
• How do you trust it? It is self adjusting in the long run, but at what cost in the interim?

What is it in Web 2.0 we are interested in

• Social media, blogs social media
• Open media
• Consumer generated media
• Grass root bottoms up
• Promotes collaboration
• Increasing communication – liberalizing in effect – Balancing out of power
• Promotes a business model – sources of information, publishing, reappropriating, republishing – the Web 2.0 mashup
• enables a large number of indiviuals who can now contract their services to many others – enbabled by 2.0

Does this play in healthcare?

• Is there a gap in mentality
  • Closed thinking
  • Stakeholders hold their stakes
• Crossing boundaries to care for others
• How to promote connections, maintaining own records, aggregating their own
• A very nice story of Sophia’s Garden Foundation was related in this regard: a Web based survival kits for families
• This was a personal story about how a terminal childhood disease impacted a family that was essentially in a situation of being kicked out of medical systems
• Web 1.0, and social networking was used to address the many issues, healthcare, personal, care giver support, etc.
  • Contact to doctor and institutions
  • Look on web to get information
  • Informed ourselves in biology, go to disease organization, aggregate information
  • Googled a pediatric neurologist
  • If we could have built community like Web 2.0 could have done this easier
  • The family kept the information, hence this was not a HIPA question, reducing this institutional concerned
  • Emailed to experts in France, Isreal
  • A key family strategy to get individuals, groups, and organizations involved was to identify the sweet spot for each organization contacted. Package the information for communicating to each organization.
  • Tools available now would have been easier