Tree of Knowledge

The Progressive Policy Institute’s latest Health Policy Wire highlights an interesting proposal for using ICT to improve the provision of healthcare. It’s a neat example of how government service delivery needs to change with the publics’ information consumption patterns.

Josh Seidman and Karen Sepucha at the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Information Therapy (great name!) look at how citizens obtain information about their health*. They find that unsurprisingly, people visit websites to access health information more commonly than they visit their doctor. They also find that despite this, patients recognise the credibility issues associated with this practice and prefer to receive information directly from their doctors. As the Authors say:

Change is coming to medicine, and the question is how to take advantage of the democratization of information and harness its potential to improve the quality of health care … The way information is created, exchanged, and shared is compounding exponentially, raising the importance of new tools to sort, search, organize and synthesize it. Methods to deliver the right information to the right patient at the right time are critical.

In other words, citizens are already taking advantage of ICT in their everyday lives, but government service delivery still hasn’t caught up with it.

Seidman and Sepucha propose that health providers ought to work with these changes in citizen’s information consumption and provide tailored ‘information therapy’ to help patients care for themselves. As the PPI describes it:

For example, a doctor who has just told a patient that she has diabetes could follow-up the visit with an email with links to information about managing diabetes. The patient will be much better equipped to process the information at home with the support of loved ones. Today, that process happens with haphazard web searches without any feedback going back to a physician or a nurse about whether the patient has found reliable information and has begun to master the disease.

It’s easy to see how such ‘information therapy’ could involve connecting patients to online communities of patients with similar conditions, harnessing the ‘new cooperatives’ identified by Tom Watson MP. The potential of linking ‘information therapy’ of this kind with electronic patient records (of the kind that Google and Microsoft are now working on) would be enormous.

The key message is that ICT is already changing the way citizens consumer information and organise themselves. If government recognises this and works with these trends, the potential for improvements in government service delivery are enormous.

*“Navigating a Changing Health Care System: How Consumers, Clinicians and Policymakers Can Make Sense of Shared Decision Making and Information Therapy,” By Joshua Seidman and Karen Sepucha, Center for Information Therapy, March 19, 2008.

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