Update (Feb. 22nd, 2010): Thanks to Kevin, MD for featuring this post on “Twitter and Facebook Can Help Conduct Group Patient Visits”! I’m very honored!
The concept is simple. Group Medical Visits already exist. So:
It occurred to me over the past week that if you were to get inside my Evernote, you would instantly learn so much about me.
In some ways, the structures of our individual “clouds” say a lot more about us than any diary could. E.g., “this is how I curate”, “this is what matters to me”, “this is my weakness – the stuff I need a cloud to help me remember”.
But this is also what makes Evernote so great. They never really tell you how to use it. It’s up to you. In this way, your Notebooks become insanely personal. And if you come up with something neat, maybe you’ll feature on the Evernote Tumblr.
Well, here’s a glimpse of mine (click to enlarge):
One thing I noticed from my own notebooks was the conspicuous lack of personal health information. I have, of course, read all about the dangers of doctors storing any patient information in Evernote (HIPAA nightmare…), but I wonder whether patients themselves go ahead and keep records in Evernote?
Let me know if you’ve seen this!
And now I want to ask you: what’s in your Evernote and why? And, secondly, if you’re a patient, do you/would you store personal health information on it?
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For further reading on Evernote in medicine and health, check out DrV’s post at 33charts: 8 Ways Physicians Can Use Evernote
Better yet, nearly instant upgrade. It actually gives me an absurd giddy feeling. Example: This weekend, I upgraded to WordPress 3.0. The interface doesn’t look that different, but I watched the video documenting the tweaks and fixes, and felt lighter anyway. It’s a little voice that squeals: my blog is shiny – and so am I.
So I get a kick out of MealUpgrade.com, a new website by Shape Up America and the National Turkey Foundation (bizarre? Scroll to the caveat…).
It’s an “app” submitted to the Apps for Healthy Kids Competition, an initiative by First Lady Michelle Obama to help combat childhood obesity. The competition challenges developers to build apps that use the USDA Nutrition Data Set (made available via the President’s Open Government project) in creative, engaging ways. Meal Upgrade allows you to choose a typical dish and learn how to “upgrade” it (reduce calories) by substituting ingredients.
For example, the snapshot below shows how to upgrade from a hamburger to a turkey burger, with other options like switching to whole wheat bread and having baked potato instead of fries.
It could also tie into doctor-education projects like the one mentioned recently by Healthymaginations, through which doctors learn how to “select, purchase, and cook” healthy food, hopefully influencing patients.
It’s unfortunate that the website is not actually “working” in the background, because the possible meals that can be upgraded are “hard-coded”, so to speak. I would thus suggest:
And a caveat: as this project is sponsored by the National Turkey Foundation, the upgrades are heavily biased towards substituting turkey for other protein…slightly annoying yet understandable!
The submission period for Apps for Health Kids is ending on June 30th (my birthday!) and then the voting will begin. I hope to see a lot of other great entries, and am super-psyched about the concept of Open Government.
Next, I’m thinking – Upgrade My Workout?
Lifehacker’s already got Upgrade Your Life so now let’s focus on specific parts of that!
She was in for her hip.
“Anything I can do for you, Ms. _____?”
I’m only 5’ 2’’, but I had to bend over anyway to be level with her mouth. Her lips were dry, cracked, and trembling, yet they curved into what could only be a smile at my approach. Slowly, they formed a word.
“Water.” And as an afterthought, “Please.”
When I brought the styrofoam cup back to her, she stared inside for a moment before taking a sip. And then stared very hard at the leather-covered stool not a foot from the tips of my black oxfords.
Instinctively, I sat.
“Water,” she said again.
“Water?”
She gestured towards the computer screen, where her two x-rays were pulled up. There were huge metal pieces in the hip. Arthroplasty.
“This,” she pointed. “And this! Soon I won’t need the water anymore. Do you know what this means?”
- –
Turns out Ms. ______ was actually a coffee drinker. She lived down the street from a local-owned cafe that had vintage pictures of Marlene Dietrich and Mary Pickford on the walls. These ladies were her mother’s favourite. And Mary Pickford was Canadian, born right here in Toronto — did I know that? It actually took me a minute before I realized that I was being told a story.
“Water,” she repeated, poking at the styrofoam cup I’d given her.
She and her mother had this routine to do with water. Every morning, she took coffee and water for breakfast. She adored the coffee at the local cafe, but it was too strong for her. She asked her mother to go out, buy it, and bring it back.
“And I say, ‘Ma, remember to ask for a cup of hot water’ so I can dilute it. And she’s so happy to do this little job for me and swears she’ll have it.
“Then she goes out the door and I put the kettle on the stove. Why? Because she always forgets. And I need the hot water.
“Then she comes back with the coffee, beaming. And I’ve got this little cup of hot water to put in it. I pretend she got it for me and I never say a word about it.
“I say, ‘I love it, Ma. It’s perfect.’”
She looked away and took a breath.
“But one day there won’t be that little cup anymore. I’ll be going to the cafe myself and some stranger like you will get the water for me. And I will never say I love it again.”
- –
She was scared to death, she told me. But not about her hip.
“That’s just a part of my body.”
But, she continued, your mother is a bigger part of your body, just as you were once the most ostentatious part of hers.
Her mother had dementia, or Alzheimer’s or something like that: she couldn’t even say the word. It was bad.
She was her mother’s sole caregiver. But with her own health and mobility growing increasingly precarious, she knew she would soon have no choice but to put her closest confidante, the biggest part of her own body, in an institution.
So, yes – the water. That was the real threat. The agony. The nightmare. Now I’m afraid of it too, and I’m only the one who sat down.
- -
I definitely think it is worth wondering:
What stories are we missing?
And what/who are we really seeing? The ailment, the patient, the story, or the nightmare?
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction inspired by collective real-life experiences.
Guess what? I’ve suspected it for a while, but now I know. For me, local is still king. I recently found a stellar blog on pregnancy by Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center here in Toronto. And it made me more happy than another hospital social media success story in XYZ city ever could.
Look at Toronto in this picture. Look at Sunnybrook. We may be tiny, square, and pink, but with this blog, the pink thing has the Mother’s Touch. That’s something to smile about, I think!
Mother’s Touch follows two mommys-to-be (both due in Fall 2010) on their pregnancy journey, with all the posts written by the mommys themselves. So far, they’ve tackled topics ranging from what to do with ballooning breasts, to the big reveal of the gender of Andrea’s baby (I won’t spoil the surprise ). It’s a darling endeavor by a hospital that, along with Bloorview Kids Rehab and Mount Sinai Hospital, seems to be leading the internet media charge in Toronto.
Mommy-blogging has been around for a while. 23andMe has an entire community dedicated to this. Individual mommys have been at it for years on their own Blogger- and WordPress- islands, and many have amassed devoted followings that persist even after the babies are not-so-baby anymore.
However, I would like to posit to each hospital interested in social media yet afraid of saturation: you still have something very valuable to offer. You have local.
There is something immensely potent about local. The benefit of social media is supposed to be the connections forged with strangers at opposite ends of the earth – and that’s still a great perk – but definitely not at the risk of losing local.
If I were pregnant, I’d want the best of both worlds. I’d have a look at 23andMe’s stuff. But if I’m having my baby at Sunnybrook, I want to talk to women who have experienced Sunnybrook. I want to read Mother’s Touch; I want to join a local Twitter hashtag conversation (#preggersinTO, anybody?); I want to be connected to women who will be due the same time as I. There are so many possibilities for a local hospital to do something…maybe not novel, but certainly remarkable.
So far, Sunnybrook seems pretty ahead. Here’s a part I clipped from their website:
That’s 6 different modes of social media they are currently into! Wonderful!
I have also been very glad to find a lot of other Toronto health organizations tweeting and Facebooking, but I think they need to go further. I won’t name any names, but it’s a little sad when hospitals Tweet like crazy…and yet a search for Twitter on their websites yields 0 hits.
Come on Toronto! This is my battle exhortation to you! Lead the way!
Mother’s Touch is just one blog. But it makes me think that this is the end of an era. This is the new What to Expect When You’re Expecting. True, I’ve never read WTEWYE, but I remember when my own dear Mommy was pregnant with my sister. I was 11 years old and utterly perplexed by the stack of pregnancy books on her dresser. Wasn’t it enough just to see and feel herself being pregnant, and talking to Daddy and me? I didn’t truly appreciate the need of the patient, my mother, for empowerment and knowledge. I believe now that she would have found a blog run by the local hospital pretty useful. Even years later, she still remarks on how much she was surprised by the top-notch care she received at delivery and convalescence…
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This work by Elizabeth Han is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
