What is the future of Health 2.0 in Europe?

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What is the future of Health 2.0 in Europe?

An interview with Bertalan Mesko, Hungarian medical doctor and founder of Webicina.com.
August 31st, 2011 - Pascal Lardier, International Director, Health 2.0

Health 2.0 – What is the future of Health 2.0? What were the major advances over the last few years? Where are we going?

Bertalan Mesko - It seems like tablets, mobile health, social media curation and augmented reality will play a major role in transforming healthcare over the next few years. There is no doubt about the growing importance of mobile applications that make it easier to manage chronic health conditions (i.e. measuring blood sugar content or blood pressure) and those that assist in making diagnoses (i.e. ECG applications on iPhones). Regarding augmented reality, the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre of The Netherlands launched a great project: aed4.eu allowing users and public authorities to add GPS locations of automated external defibrillators. This database of locations is then accessible through the application aed4eu on your mobile phone. This is a perfect example of how authorities and crowdsourcing can and should work together to improve healthcare. Tablets (iPads and Galaxy Tabs) are leading the way allowing greater information access even at the patient’s bedside. As the last few years have been focused on medical content curation, which resulted in great medical websites such as WebMD or Healthline, it is now time to turn our attention to medical resource curation. For that purpose, Webicina.com selects and classifies the most relevant social media resources by health conditions and medical specialties. The platform is now available – for free – in 17 languages. My hope is that we balance our efforts between technology developments and the optimal use of existing technology in medicine and healthcare. That would be the most important step in the future of health 2.0.

H20 - How has Health 2.0 changed the scenery and the healthcare stakeholders (patients, physicians, government, pharma companies)?

BM – Many patients are clearly empowered. They are online and they use the internet – especially social media – to manage their own health. Their voices can be heard much clearer than before: we just need to listen to their needs. Medical professionals (at least in some areas) seem to be reluctant to advances in medical technology. And patients will continue to see their doctors in person. But as the number of e-patients is growing exponentially health professionals will have to adapt, answer the questions and meet the specific needs of these new customers. Pharma companies would like to jump on the social media train, but the false regulations or the lack of regulations makes it extremely hard. We are now working on an open access set of guidelines about pharma using social media. This will be a useful first step. Governments are in a very complicated situation. They need to be able to predict which areas they should support and regulate. But this is a really difficult task right now. I believe the best thing they can do is to listen to the needs of e-patients and be open to innovations while using an evidence-based approach.

H20 - How is the relationship between patients and doctors changing?

BM – Basically, the medical acts remain the same: doctors will continue to receive their patients. But both stakeholders need to adapt and be able to deal with the rapidly growing amount of information available online. As the patient’s motivation is clearly more important (their health is at stake), they are more open to these innovations/developments while medical professionals use the internet and social media for other purposes: education, collaboration, diagnostic technologies, etc… Patients and doctors basically use the same type of technologies for different purposes. I’m sure social media, used with strategy and caution, will help fill the gap between patients and their physicians. For this purpose, we need to educate physicians and medical students about the new era of the world wide web. We already do in Hungary where health 2.0 is a part of the official medical curriculum – Med20course.com. We should also help patients understand how they can and should use social media to manage their conditions. Both processes take time but I feel we are on the right path.

Bertalan Mesko, MD is a medical doctor doing his PhD in clinical genomics. He is the managing director and founder of Webicina.com, the first free medical social media guidance service. He is a health 2.0 consultant for pharma and medical companies. Healthspottr.com included him in the Future Health Top 100 list. He is the author of Scienceroll.com and the educator of the world’s first Medicine and Web 2.0 university course. He was mentioned in Al Jazeera, Nature Medicine, the New York Times, British Medical Journal and Wired Science, among others.