User Generated Health Care

I have an idea that would help improve the health care sys­tem.  This idea would dra­mat­i­cally speed the process of diag­no­sis, reduce unnec­es­sary test­ing, more quickly iden­tify effec­tive courses of treat­ment and rad­i­cally reduce the costs asso­ci­ated with the entirety of it all.   I call it User Gen­er­ated Health Care.  The idea is sim­ple as works as follows:

• You visit the doc­tor as the result of an unknown prob­lem with your health, or the health of a fam­ily member.
• The doc­tor asks you an ini­tial set of ques­tions allow­ing for a pre­lim­i­nary diagnosis.
• Based on your answers, the doc­tor loads a spe­cific set of ques­tions onto a mobile device,  which you take home. (Could be secure web site, or other tech­nol­ogy tool.  This is the eas­i­est prob­lem to solve.  Could even be as basis as refur­bished cell phones and sms)
• The mobile device prompts you to answer a few short behav­ioral ques­tions, doc­u­ment­ing diet, med­ica­tion, mood, sleep, and over­all well­ness at spe­cific inter­vals or times of day.  These ques­tions are numer­i­cal in nature so that they can be mapped rel­a­tive to other pieces of data.
• The device prompts you weekly to answer a more exten­sive ques­tion­naire — explain­ing your over­all impres­sion of how a spe­cific course of treat­ment is work­ing, doc­u­ment­ing symp­toms and side-effects and rank­ing your over­all state of health.  Again these pieces of data are set up in such a way so that value can be attached to them.
• You return to the doc­tor, who has already ana­lyzed the aggre­gated data you have pro­vided.  Because this data is dig­i­tal, data ana­lysts could exam­ine the data for sta­tis­ti­cal cor­re­la­tions that would yield action­able infor­ma­tion for doc­tors and med­ical pro­fes­sion­als to present to you.
• You talk to the doc­tor about the next 6 weeks and what you will do, instead of the last 6 weeks and your vague rec­ol­lec­tion of what you did.
• Your con­ver­sa­tion includes charts, graphs, and sta­tis­tics about the infor­ma­tion you provided.
• You are given another course of treat­ment (or kept on the same) based on the care­ful analy­sis of fac­tual data.

Doc­tors repeat­edly say that patients are one of the most val­ue­able sources of infor­ma­tion.  Yet the gath­er­ing of infor­ma­tion from patients is typ­i­cally restricted to the 15 or so min­utes you get to dis­cuss your sit­u­a­tion.  If you or they are tired, hav­ing a bad day, dis­tracted, hun­gry, hav­ing a good day, or are in essence “human,” the gath­er­ing of this data is highly flawed at best. The entirety of the con­ver­sa­tion is going to be shaped by the feel­ings of the doc­tor and patient in that moment — which may be very dif­fer­ent from gen­eral reality.

This would pro­vide a steady stream of mea­sur­able data.  This data could be kept pri­vate very eas­ily.  This data could be com­bined with video tes­ti­mo­ni­als capured on demand.  This data could be com­bined with the opin­ions of oth­ers (with their con­sent of course) as to observ­able changes.  This data could be aggre­gated across demo­graphic, geo­graphic, and socio­graphic groups to look for over­all trends — help­ing to yield fur­ther insights.  This data could be used ot alert us of new dis­eases, new med­ical break­throughs, and new tech­niques that yield tan­gi­ble results.   All it takes is a few min­utes to answer a few ques­tions that would explain “how are you doing?”

I know the idea is not per­fect.  I am not cer­tain that it is not in use some­where.  I can say that I have never wit­nessed it for any of my friends or fam­ily mem­bers, and that I would wel­come the oppor­tu­nity to help cre­ate and par­tic­i­pate in such a sys­tem.  If this idea is already out there, then con­sider this my vote of sup­port.  If not, then con­sider this a call to help me fix some­thing that is bro­ken.   Either way, I am good with the out­come being bet­ter infor­ma­tion for the hard work­ing med­ical pro­fes­sion­als who care so much and work so hard to keep us all alive and healthy, and ulti­mately bet­ter care for those who need it.

For the time being, if you like this idea, you can vote for it on CincinnatiInnovates.com. If it wins, $25,000 will be donated to bring­ing it to life.  I will donate that money to a health care orga­ni­za­tion with the express pur­pose of pilot­ing it.  You can vote for it daily while the con­test is active.  I doubt it will win, and really don’t care about the money, but men­tion it none the less.  More impor­tantly, I hope this sparks an idea — per­haps one very dif­fer­ent from this one — that helps.

Once the con­test has elapsed, you can help by dis­cussing this idea, improv­ing this idea, and mak­ing this idea — or some mor­phed for of it — a reality.