From ScienceRoll: “Jan Martens at Medblog.nl … mentioned Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald who should be considered one of the best examples of e-patients in the world. See why…” Hey Jen McCabe Gorman, what is it with the Dutch?
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Wow. I also lived in Amsterdam for several years. I was even treated in that very same hospital. I found the standards of care to be pretty poor, to be honest. I feel for Maarten!
Thanks for highlighting his blog.
I think it has to do with the koffie…seriously though, Maarten, aka “Dutchcowboy,” is very involved with mobile tech development and open-source healthcare in Holland.
I’ve found the whole country to be a hub of micro- incubators for health and mobile tech. It’s a damn shame US concerns don’t pay more attention to what’s happening with healthcare, ehealth, and ICT on the other side of the pond.
There’s an unfortunate amount of reinventing the wheel that goes on on both sides as a result of lack of communication and collaboration. Groups like Nexthealth are trying to change that, one person, one program, one ‘spark’ at a time.
Maarten is leading the e-patient charge in Holland with his live postings and updates. A US Health 2.0 friend and I were talking about online healthcare earlier this year, and he said no one would want to share xrays of broken legs, etc. I told him of course we would – we share pics on Flickr, updates on BriteKite, email, text – we are a world creating symbiotic relationships between online and offline social networks.
Just like you get friends to sign your cast in the brick and mortar world, supportive, human-to-human healing is enabled by web tech like that used by Dutchcowboy to narrate his diagnosis, treatment, and how he’s dealing with the whole shebang.
I hope, as an e-patient, one day this is the norm rather than the exception.
Hi Amy,
Could you please specify why you state that the standards of health care were pretty poor? Just curious.
Regards,
Jan
The medical profession there seems to believe in as little intervention as possible, to a fault: I met a doctor whose mother passed away in a Dutch hospital because her physicians wanted to hold off for a “natural” resolution to her kidney issues. I personally had to FIGHT for treatment and medications every time my children got sick there. The doctor friend of mine, who worked at the University Hospital in Leiden, said himself that the Dutch medical profession was “way behind.”
Just my experience…