Patient Centered IT

Just a quick wrap-up of what I experienced at Mozilla drumbeat. First of all: this was a non healthcare event. It was about open education, sharing, improvement and freedom of the web. Personally I hooked on a thread about web development skills and how one could enforce various skills, badges(certificates) to have a better web for all. Mozillas way of doing this is to offer open courses via P2PU transferring the open source to education.

This is what I learned

1. WOW. First emotion was kind of an eye opener to see the value of openness in education. In fact motivation to learn relates much more to a position of activity than passively consuming course materials.
2. THE PATIENT. A Patient Centered IT Blog takes care of patient education. Open education align perfectly with a situation patients are usually in. Highly motivated and with an excellent prognosis for their outcome if participating actively. Collaboration among patients and physicians aligns perfectly with transparency and openness in healthcare delivery.
3. BUT. Number 2. seems easy but it’s not. We are not dealing with openness in healthcare although we’d love to. The steps to design a self driven syllabus for patients have to be designed carefully and with participation of patients (virtually everybody 🙂 ). This addresses a community which easily exceeds any reasonable number. This is intimidating but can be done with focus on particular problem domains like Epicondylitis humeri radialis.
4. THE WEB. The event was about webcraft skills. It is not easy to design Patient Centered Websites without the usual clutter and noise of medicine. The main reason is that patient thoughts and physician daily practice are so different. Any feasible collaboration requires education for the improvement of health literacy. Starting with a simple thing like finding a date for a radiography of the chest could be the starting point of an individual learning experience. Empower patient by powering Patient Centered Websites.
5. OER. Patients have knowledge. They deliberately provide it in many situations. Supporting collaboration in Patient Centered Environments makes patients OER’s which is just great 🙂
6. BADGES and CERTIFICATES. A key factor in healthcare delivery is transparency in terms of processes and quality. Community hosted certificates are a great idea. Put patients in the position where you want to have web developers too. In fact sometimes patients are tougher…
7. AWESOME was the most frequently used word @ drumbeat
8. CHEERS to Pippa, Chris, Chris, Janet and everyone for sharing this experience!