Medicine and New Media

I was directed to this blog by @JohannesvdE this morning. Unfortunately it doesn't have comments. So I thought I would reporst it here to allow you to comment and see what comes up. I aspire to work with patients to treat them not their disease - but I'm interested in your thoughts.

"Physicians are professionals who take the utmost care to treat a disease and thus making people healthy again. Patients want to be cured to return home to take care of family, to go back to work, to return to sports or to enjoy retirement. Physicians focus on the best treatment, patients focus on continuing daily life. This slight difference of focus can cause a big difference in outcome on the life of patients.

The old lady with multiple problems might need more than one operation to cure all her ailments. However her daily life might not improve with multiple visits to physicians, and multiple operations.

An holistic view on the life of patients is necessary to see what treatment is needed and when and how it is provided. Someone who is working during the day might best be helped with a phone call with his physician.

Of course, in an acute situation, there is only one thing that matters; quick and good response to the disease. For the other non-emergency care a focus on the daily life of the patients and their needs will help to improve healthcare. It will result in a more pleasant experience and when unnecessary care is not delivered cost will go down"

Good use of YouTube to explain the impact of the NHS White Paper. Deserves a wider audience. This comes from @richardblogger

Before the general election he made some other YouTubes. Unfortunately very few people saw them. The Conservative plans for the NHS: And the myth that the NHS is not productive.

Here are the tweets from the conversation this morning which prompted this post.

(download)

Click here to download:

more-on-nice-and-pdfs-GfzscuyqIpEAnxHtaesm.zip (8.45 MB)

Yesterday, I was travelling back from a medical education conference in Cambridge with a GP colleague. He mentioned that in his GP surgery it took minutes to download the 'quick reference' PDFs of NICE guidance. He wondered if there couldn't be a one page summary as he currently felt that he didn't have access.

It's true. I don't think of NICE guidance as being accessible either. I wouldn't think of checking the NICE website near-patient. In the practice we try to review new NICE guidance as a group and incorporate it into our practice protocols. If new guidance is issued it should be possible to quickly check what has changed from the previous version so that we can consider how our practice protocol should be changing.

But at the moment that is not possible.

My last post was about why emailing information in PDFs or documents was not a good way to help frontline staff manage information in the 21st century. But as well as emailing PDFs many organisations use their website to act as doc stores of PDF. I've also posted about how the Vaccination Team at the DOH lock useful information up in PDFs. But the DOH is not the only organisation doing this.

This is how my local trust provides me and the rest of the population, both health professionals and service users, with information about sexual health services. Yes, a link to a PDF. Not a calendar which would allow me to see when the next clinic is that will fit an IUD for emergency contraception. Not a map that would allow me to see which clinics are closest to the surgery. No, a PDF.

But then I came across Si Brownleader's map showing sexual health services in London. (He has made a few more great ones since that!) So I decided to try and liberate the information within the PDF about our local sexual health services. And here is the result:

View Contraception and Sexual Health Services in Gwent in a larger map

#hyperlocalhealth information is important. But so to is information at a national level. Please think about how you are sharing information online. Could you make it easier for frontline staff to organise and share your content? If you want to do that then uploading PDFs to your website is not a good way to start.

GP practices get emailed a lot of documents which are very, very large files but maybe only a few hundred words long. They contain logos and signatures and they fill up inboxes. In fact this has become such a problem that emails which need to get through are bouncing from over-full email accounts.

A recent newsletter from the LMC gives the following advice:

"Very often it is a question of deleting items in the ‘deleted’ box, and ‘sent’ items, as well as filing those items that are to be kept on the main computer – quite time consuming, but it does help! "

But this doesn't sound like a very modern way to manage information. When I need information that has been sent to the practice I don't want to have to search for the PDF or Word document that contains it. I don't want it to have been filed in our 'main computer'.

We don't have to be sent copies of the documents as if email was a postal service. Emailing a link to the document would be perfectly acceptable. Put the documents on Scribd and embed them  in your website. Or don't put the information in a document at all. If it is a newsletter then start a blog. Tag your entries. Enable RSS feeds. Let me help you to distribute your content instead of stuffing our inboxes with something I can't easily share or find again.