The Changing Landscape of patient-doctor relationships

We’ve been discussing about personalized medicine and electronic medical record as the supporting backbone of healthcare informational transformation.  Technologies, whether are in form of powerful genomic sequencing methodology or medical record synergizing pipeline, has changed the macro medical delivery system, and as a result poses more and more actual influence on our daily practices and mindset of health care. The patient-doctor relationships, for instance, is among one of the major changes ongoing.

For much of the twentieth century, medicine and healthcare was primarily an information- asymmetric market where physicians, hospitals, pharmaceutical industry, insurance companies and government agencies dominated and enjoyed the information advantage. Now, empowering by internet and social networks, we are seeing a shift of health care from a hierarchical delivery system to one that features more transparency, collaboration, patient involvement and proactivity. A customer driven medicine involving non-traditional healthcare provider has come into being.  For instance, drugstores franchise such as CVS and Walgreen, and Wal-Mart have respectively developed their in-store treatment center. Many out-patient facilities and mobile clinics are expanding pretty fast. More and more consumers get health information through online websites; many patients buy drugs online as well (I’m buying my Vitamins regularly online since I moved here in U.S.) Remote monitoring devices and mobile health application allow people to monitor their own basic bio markers such as weight, blood pressure, pulse, and sugar level etc., and send the results back to patients and health care providers. Patients can store their medical records online and access to them wherever they go. Some get personalized feedback via email and reminders when they gain weight, don’t comply with their regime or have high blood pressure.

Social networking sites represent another powerful way that consumers and patients are enabling to be more informed and self-helped. PatientLikeMe.com, an innovative health-information website encourages members not only share their personal disease fighting experience, but also go further to provide their symptoms and treatment data, the aggregation of which will creating a rich database of disease treatment and patient preliminary self-diagnosis. Nowwaht.org.au, an Australia based website, provide a supportive, informative and inclusive online community for young people living with cancer.

What’s the impact of the above phenomenon? Technologies enabled patients shift from the passive reactor to health care information to a proactive explorer. Instead of simply relying on doctors’ diagnosis and isolated with each other, consumers are now virtually connected and empowered by information shared with each other. They not solely rely on someone else’s decision of their healthcare, but gain a bigger say in their own medical and lifestyle choice. This represents one of the major change technologies, especially internet; bring to the practical relationship changes among key stakeholders within healthcare system.

Here's a short video profiling the idea of PatientsLikeMe. Check it out:)