“There are surely no better people in this world than locals who find themselves at home.” –(Me)

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”

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.

But mommy-blogging isn’t a new idea – why the excitement?

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.

Local is the best.

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!

To end off: a reflection from my own life…

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…

I can’t help thinking: wouldn’t it have been so much more comforting simply to, well, know?

Toronto’s Medicine 2.0 scene is heating up!

Hot on the heels of my recent visit to the Center for Global eHealth Innovations in Toronto, the Center released an exciting new (and free!) iPhone app for Type I diabetics to track their blood sugar: Bant.

Bant is short for Banting, the Canadian who discovered insulin at – where else? – University of Toronto in 1921. And not only is the name stylish, but so is the design.

I downloaded the app yesterday and gave it a spin, with impressive results:

• The first screen is Readings (left), where you select the meal for which you want to add a glucose reading. Then you can simply drag and drop the appropriate marker to the desired time and concentration on the graph. The blue section indicates the goal concentration range.

• As you accumulate data points, you can view a graphical summary under Trends (left).
• Individual readings can also be adjusted from the Bant Book screen (middle), which includes the options to add text notes and/or share your thoughts via Twitter (right).

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Just wanted to post about VitalHub, the latest in iPhone + EMR — being developed and implemented in-house at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto!

Watch the beautiful video of it in action, courtesy of the Apple website.

The essentials:

• VitalHub allows health care professionals to access records from 66 applications being used at Mount Sinai Hospital, including those storing clinical data, reference materials, and patient information.

“We now have access to exactly what we have in our computers here in the hospital. We can get access to our patients’ data whenever and wherever we want it. Knowing what’s happening with their drugs, radiology, laboratory values, microbiology results — it really enables me to make decisions on the go.”

• Access from anywhere.

“Whether using Wi-Fi or 3G on iPhone, doctors can access VitalHub no matter where they are,” explains Dwivedi. “They can review a patient chart before they come into the hospital, whether they are at home, in a restaurant, or at an airport.”

 

• Security is provided by password and VPN certificates.

FYI, Sinai is one of several large hospitals located just down the street from U of T/MaRS/Center for Global eHealth Innovations (and also where I did my honors thesis!) so I think this is very exciting for the downtown Toronto eHealth conversation!

Yesterday, I was reading on Hans Oh’s blog that eHealth seems to be becoming “mainstream” — in that it’s cool to be devoting time, effort, and research monies towards it, there are articles on NEJM about it – and it seems that VitalHub, which is very openly promoted by the hospital, is an example of that happening in Canada. I am glad to see that people are really noticing what Dr. David Kibbe said: that actually many physicians have been happy to adopt the iPhone, but such a small percentage have adoped EMRs. It might just be that we have been waiting for innovations like this, piggybacking on technologies that are already accepted by health care workers.

We’ll keep an eye on the official website, Apple’s site, and the Baron Group blog for further information in the coming months.

Torontonians (and others), what do you think?

I thought it was about time to write a post about the woes of doctor-patient email.

Last week, a friend was having some issues with his phone, so his family doctor’s office couldn’t get in touch to inform him of the date of his specialist’s appointment. He didn’t know about the trouble until he popped in for a visit, which was when his doctor asked him – if he didn’t hear by a certain date – to call the specialist himself.

A good solution to the problem, but I couldn’t help wondering why email wasn’t an option. I mean, practices routinely collect our emails now, but I still don’t see them used very often. What if my friend kept having phone issues? What if he forgot to call?

Later, after the appointment had been worked out, he told me that the specialist ended up sending him an email with instructions on how to prepare for the procedure. This was appreciated, and got us both thinking about what exactly are the barriers to doctor-patient email.

What counts as private info? How do other providers deal with this around the world?

Let’s look at what’s out there.

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“Geography is destiny in medicine.” –Jack Lord, MD

In my undergrad English lit courses, I heard a lot about “character is destiny”. Which is a fancy way of blowing things out of proportion – e.g., Romeo and Juliet didn’t die via the quality of being “star-crossed”, but because they were super emo.

Well, this week, I watched a TED talk by Bill Davenhall (below) that claimed “geography is destiny”.

This idea is not so exaggerated. Just watch it (9 min.):

What it says: Where you’ve lived may determine how healthy you are.

There’s the classic equation:

health = genetics + lifestyle + environment

and of the three aspects, Davenhall argues that “environment” has been ignored for far too long by physicians.

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