This is for you.

As part of our entry for the Ashoka Changemakers’/Amgen Foundation Patients| Choices| Empowerment competition, we put together this video with stories from some of our members.

It’s to thank you and show you how people are being helped and how we’re moving forward. I hope you enjoy it! Please also feel free to enter a comment at the Ashoka site to show your support for CureTogether winning the competition. Thanks!!

IFTF’s HealthCare 2020 map – click here for the full version

Our friends over at Institute for the Future have released their vision of health and healthcare in 2020. We’re excited that CureTogether is included on their map!

They placed CureTogether at the intersection of taking a Commons approach (self-organized participatory solutions that bring a new culture of cooperation) to Making Information Actionable (filtering and integrating health-related information in meaningful ways).

What do you think of their vision for the future of health and healthcare?

]]> http://curetogether.com/blog/2010/08/19/the-future-of-health-in-2020/feed/ 0 http://curetogether.com/blog/2010/01/26/top-3-trends-in-participatory-medicine/ http://curetogether.com/blog/2010/01/26/top-3-trends-in-participatory-medicine/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:19:44 +0000 Alexandra Carmichael http://curetogether.com/blog/?p=1108 Participatory Medicine: new health insights from patient generated data

I was recently at the Mayo Clinic Transforming Healthcare Symposium to give a talk on how Self-Tracking will change the future of health. Here is an overview of the talk, as well as slides and video…

“The New Wave of Self-Tracking
Ubiquitous, invisible biosensors. Constant, streaming measurements. Analytics for your health.

Detailed self-tracking will transform our understanding of our bodies, our health, and our medicine. Geeks are already tracking everything from calories to blood pressure to steps taken during the day (Quantified Self). People with chronic conditions track their treatments, pain levels, and side effects (CureTogether).

The ultimate promise when this goes mainstream is true personalized medicine, where each person gets a treatment plan individual to their body. It’s an exciting future, and the seeds are being planted now.”

The trends and forecasts presented by IFTF for what healthcare will look like in 2020 were striking, inspiring, and cautionary. 100 people from all manner of health-focused organizations were there, sharing ideas and brainstorming “if only…” scenarios in Open Space sessions.

2020 Forecasts

Since the meeting was for IFTF clients, I’m not allowed to get into too many details, but I can talk about general trends. The most interesting trends for me had to do with the increasing role of commons in healthcare, the seamless and ubiquitous presence of sensors and health-related technology, and the challenges of making information actionable.

Video scenarios were presented for both positive and negative possible futures. Ted Eytan did a very cool presentation on kp.org, which has demonstrated amazing adoption. Bob Johansen talked about Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World. And around the room, I heard a lot of talk about Diabetes in particular, and incentives in general for how to encourage people to make positive changes for their health.

Quantified Selves

In the “if only we were all quantified selves…” open space session I led, people asked a lot of questions about what to track and what can be learned from tracking. The conversation wandered from epigenetics and Bayesian statistics to garbology (studying people’s garbage to see if they’re tracking truthfully) and gratitude.

One thing that surprised me was a question about how to track “being present” and how to measure the effect of “giving” behavior in your life. Applying quantitative principles to qualitative or spiritual behaviors and states would be an interesting study. Someone also suggested having the Quantified Self group agree to a collective experiment where we all track a particular thing for a defined period of time and compare our results – great idea!

We talked about what would happen if everyone had their genetic, health, and lifestyle data pooled together in a big open commons. While the challenges would be privacy, security, and effective analysis, the potential is to cure disease, understand behavior, and effect positive change for individual and collective health.

Now that’s an exciting future.

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Daniel gives a quick, early overview of CureTogether from December 2008, and Alexandra talks about who to trust for health information in March 2009.

Enjoy!

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Alexandra Carmichael on trust and health information sources from Kevin Kelly on Vimeo.

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Random Episode Numero 2 from Glenn McElhose on Vimeo.

- @Doctor_V: Examples of how curetogether has sped the research cycle for migraine?? If not, how would it??
- @accarmichael: @Doctor_V Research questions curetogether has opened up so far have been in comorbidities – what conditions occur with migraine?
- @Doctor_V: @accarmichael responded immediately to my question…thanks Alexandra
- @accarmichael: @Doctor_V You’re welcome! Thanks for the question

So Twitter is really an immediate, personal way of interacting with the community
of people you’re trying to reach with your message.

A great analysis of all the Health 2.0 Tweets was put together by Chris Hogg (@cwhogg).
He assembled his findings into a very cool slide presentation, below. Look for CureTogether
on slides 16 and 17.

How have you used Twitter to spread your message?
Are you inspired to give it a try?