Importance of Communities in Healthcare: Nexthealth.NL

"The changing of customers habits and behaviours wrought by technology means the old ways just do not work anymore."

- Tomi Ahonen + Alan Moore, Communities Dominate Brands


This Washington Post article has extremely interesting implications about how 'personal' portability influences grounded interactions with geo-local delivery of medical services.

Let's look at the concept of communities and 'personal' portability first.

More than 70% of the 100,000 people tracked (secretly) via this study of cell phone usage never ventured more than 20 miles from their home turf.

That is an astonishing figure.

If almost 2/3rds of us stay within 20 minutes of home, local hospitals still have the opportunity to be concrete care monopolies, acting as 'medical homes' for a vast majority of grounded community members.

The portability of personal health records (PHRs) and electronic health records (EHRs) may have a much more community-based focus than previously supported by research from within the healthcare community (although RHIO organization would seem to implicitly rely upon an assumption that most medical care will be 'locally' delivered within a tight geographic base).

If this is the case, then why aren't RHIOs working?

Becaause siloed 'brick and mortar' communities of care no longer hold exclusive sway - where we live in 'real life' is no longer our only definition of 'home.'

And where we seek medical services in real life is no longer our sole definition of 'healthcare.'

The idea of 'local' community has expanded exponentially with web-based Health 2.0 technologies combining content + community.

Health 2.0 communities like Diabetes Mine and Patients Like Me have delinked healthcare and geographic limitations: intimate, everyday community interactions (which hold vital healthcare implications) no longer happen solely offline.

Even those of us who are homebound or live with 'limited' mobility now have expanded geographic communities in which to live with and learn about our health, enabled via web access.

While brick and mortar healthcare organizations address what's physically wrong with us, I'd argue that online healthcare sites and services allow us to rally additional support, which is accessible at will (when and where we need it most) and address the psychic issues related to illness and healing.

Online healthcare and wellness communities help patients and other consumer segments address a 'crisis of meaning' and reconcile challenges inherent in straddling two worlds.

If you have a chronic condition, in one world, you are a powerless 'patient,' defined by your diagnosis within the medical ecosystem. In another world, the real world, you are a person doing your best to live well, minimizing constraints caused by a lack of coherence between your 'patient' identity and your 'personal' identity.

It is largely the web-based communities which are generating debate about how to reframe healthcare as a conversation and reclaim our personal health narratives.

The good news is that these conversations are jumping offline, but not fast enough.

Those of us debating healthcare evolution in the blogosphere need to be doing more to cooperate with offline policy makers and implementers who can drive innovation from within the current hospital-based system. We need to push past our safe-haven comfort zones online.

Online, the e-patient experience is not automatically devalued. Instead, e-patients involvement with patient-centric, web-based 'medical homes' encourages constructive, community-based reconciliation of patient and personal identities.

E-patients are 'owning' health, recovery, and wellness goals rather than silently suffering the dehumanizing experience of being labeled a patient 'other.'

We are reclaiming what it means to be healing (or dying) in a system that devalues the "human-to-human" empathic approach, subverting recuperative effects of communication below clinical approaches to 'cure.'

Sharing our personal illness and recovery narratives, in sickness and in health, is a vital component to sparking healthcare change, at both an individual and a systemic level. Connections and online health/wellness communities are viral and exponential -people connecting people.

Nexthealth was started to address advantages of connecting innovators who want to spark healthcare change and are willing to drive "what's next," integrating healthcare design, planning, and delivery both online and offline.

Only through person-to-person interactions, 'connecting the dots' on the web, and in the real world, and creating a road-map to consumer-centric, patient-directed care can we support a healthcare delivery ecosystem that values conversation and cure equally - that supports both empathy and efficiency initiatives. That reconciles the patient and the personal experience.

Please join us. Nexthealth.nl does not aim to subvert or exclude any group - it will take a global hive community of firestarters to spark change and build roadmaps leading to "what's next" in healthcare.