Between Brackets

No, it’s not George Clooney’s own vanity website It’s a site that’s about sharing your medical data with other patients like you.

In the traditional healthcare system: you feel sick, you go to the doctor, she prescribes you some drugs, you go to the drugstore, you take your pills, and you -hopefully- get better.

PatientsLikeMe.com works around the notion that getting yourself involved in the process of listening to your body and symptoms, thinking about how and what you feel, makes you more conscious about your illness. Recording your medical data and sharing it with others, makes it possible to have a better view on your symptoms to yourself, others and doctors. Instead of going to the doctor and having a fuzzy description of what you feel, you can give the doctor a detailed description of what you have been feeling over many days, weeks or months.

The internet makes it possible to create bigger communities of patients suffering from the same disease than in the physical world. Often the small communities on peoplelikeme, are even bigger than the groups of patients that were followed during the clinical trials of drugs that treat their diseases.

People record all kinds of daily habits: what did I eat today? How do I feel today? …? And because they record it regularly, they have a lot of information when they go to the doctor.

Business plan? Peoplelikeme works together with pharmaceutical companies.

Nick Hunn worked on the new low energy bluetooth standard that -according to him- we will see implemented in hundreds of millions of devices as soon as the beginning of 2011.

His presentation revolved around the central question: what if everything were interconnected?

Not only your TV-set, your computer, your iPhone/iPod, digital cameras and the likes. But also door-knobs and handles for instance.

And what if these door-knobs and handles were fitted a sensor to measure your pulse, or the pulse of elderly people? This could vastly improve the collection of data.

Nick Hunn also gave us his thoughts on mHealth:

• mHealth won’t make healthcare less expensive.
• doctors don’t want it, nor do patients.
• mHealth is not about curing disease. It’s about how much people want to pay (to improve their quality of life…)

So how will we change society so that it wants to improve health care?

Well, to get mHealth going: stop thinking like doctors, start thinking like patients.

For the statisticians among us: the average person takes 50000 pills in a lifetime (200000 in the US). I put my spreadsheet to work and this is the result: if you reach the age of 70, you’ll have ingested an average of 2 pills a day.

Read up on more of his thoughts here.

Another Mobile Monday Amsterdam is in the can, this time in a new venue: De Duif. Not a bad location at all.

Topic: mHealth. What is it? What’s its state? Where are the opportunities?

Bart Collet (owner of an Elderly Home, and mobile addict) gave us his view of the subject. I summarize very lightly:
there are two opportunities for cost savings in the health industry:
appointment alerts: please don’t forget your dental appointment tomorrow.
Treatment alerts: did you measure you blood pressure today? Did you take your medication?
developing countries are making a lot of progress in mHealth. They have limited budgets and therefore think differently. They also have more spotty networks and must therefor make their software very reliable. Finally they have less regulation, less lobbyists than in developing countries.
‘Normal’ device manufacturers (like Nintendo) are starting to enter the medical market as well. These are potentially disruptive forces in the medical appliance world, because these new players are agile, have fresh ideas, less legacy. Of course they don’t have the maturity and experience in mHealth yet.

Interesting opening presentation.