That’s a good first step, but the ill-fitting EHR technology is still unable to communicate with the world, let alone your mHealth. To speed things up a little, the government is paying doctors to make you manually transmit your previously secret information to your mHealth. With one click of a blue button, you can liberate decades of your most private secrets, and send them to roam free through all the mHealth apps out there and combine themselves in most fortuitous ways with data from Amazon, Target, Verizon and all other agents toiling on your behalf.
And if you think this is some sort of utopian wishful thinking, I suggest you read the recent issue brief from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), about the government’s plans on “Using Health IT to Put the Person at the Center of Their Health and Care by 2020”. It’s only eight pages long, with large fonts and soaring rhetoric that mentions the word physician only once and makes no reference to doctors, because this is all about you, the person and future patient. By 2020, the ONC envisions that “The power of each individual is developed and unleashed to be active in managing their health and partnering in their health care, enabled by information and technology.” You get goosebumps just thinking about the tens of thousands of elderly folks with heart disease, cancer, and dementia, suffering in silence and yearning since the Second World War to have their powers developed and unleashed.
This wonderfully clear ONC manifesto, lays out a roadmap to a “brighter, more inclusive future”, enabled by the “emergence of health IT, including consumer eHealth tools” (a.k.a. mHealth).
- A future where: “Individual self-determination and the public good are both optimized”
- A future where we: “Motivate policymakers, employers, and other stakeholders to establish guidelines and environments that promote and support healthy behavior”
- A future where we: “Soften or erase the boundaries between what occurs inside and outside of the health care system by promoting increased information flow”
- A future where we: “Encourage providers to value patients and their data”
- A future where we: “Build appreciation for and competence in technology-enabled self- and shared management of health and health care, by both providers and individuals”
- A future where we: “Encourage interaction in online communities via social media”
- A future where we: “Facilitate the aggregation of health and health care information for individuals and populations from diverse sources, including non-clinical information if desired”
- A future where we: “Promote technology that shows trends in diverse health status measures, including deviations from normal for the given individual”
- A future where we: “Promote easy-to-use technologies that integrate individuals’ health activities and treatment into the rest of their lives, where and how they already live, work, and play”
This is just a happy roadmap and ONC is not certain if “consumers and providers will fully embrace the resulting cultural shift”, but they are “optimistic that stakeholders will rise to these challenges”. I am too, and Mr. Kurt Vonnegut was already optimistic back in the middle of the previous century. Unfortunately, Mr. Vonnegut died before his power could be developed and unleashed, and thus was spared the joy of watching the stakeholders rise with the shifting cultures, but wherever you are Kurt, here is a rainforest coffee toast to your prescience. Amen.
Margalit writes regularly about intersection of healthcare & technology on her site: On Health Care Technology
Featured image credit: Colin_K via cc
Image credit: Peter Parkes via cc
