{"id":5368,"date":"2010-04-12T11:33:40","date_gmt":"2010-04-12T16:33:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pmedicine.org\/epatients\/?p=5368"},"modified":"2010-04-13T07:13:32","modified_gmt":"2010-04-13T12:13:32","slug":"health-data-is-useful-if-it-informs-conversations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/participatorymedicine.org\/epatients\/2010\/04\/health-data-is-useful-if-it-informs-conversations.html","title":{"rendered":"Health Data is Useful… if it Informs Conversations"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>Dr. Roni Zeiger, MD is currently Chief Health Strategist at Google where he has helped create and lead Google Health. \u00a0He continues to see patients on occasional evenings and weekends at a local urgent care center. \u00a0Roni earned his MD at Stanford and completed his internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco. \u00a0Roni\u00a0received a masters degree in biomedical informatics from Stanford University.\u00a0He has written and edited several medical textbooks and has published articles on topics including continuing medical education, clinical decision support tools, and searching for health information on the web. \u00a0Roni also created a tool called Diagnosaurus which helps clinicians remember the possible diagnoses for given symptoms — the smartphone version of this tool has been used by more than 100,000 medical students and physicians. \u00a0Roni currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Society for Participatory Medicine<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n At Health 2.0 in Paris<\/a> last week, I said: “Data on its own is useless. It’s all about conversations.” \u00a0Let’s dig into this a bit more.<\/p>\n I’m a strong believer in evidence-based medicine. \u00a0We must learn from successes and failures, in particular those that come in the form of randomized clinical trials. \u00a0However, as I transitioned from my academic (and outstanding) residency training into clinical practice in the community, it became increasingly clear that we must make the majority of clinical decisions in the context of insufficient evidence. \u00a0And even when good evidence suggests a given course of treatment or testing, decisions often include complex pros and cons. \u00a0What should we do?<\/p>\n The answer, of course, is that we must have conversations. \u00a0The common goal of getting \u201cthe right information for the right person at the right time\u201d is important, in particular because it allows us to have the right conversations. \u00a0Doctors must talk to their patients about the consequences of a false-positive mammogram and the risk of a perforated colon — and death — from colonoscopy. \u00a0Patients must talk to their doctors about how much they can reduce their risk of stroke or heart attack by taking various medications, exercising, and adjusting their diets. \u00a0Some of these decisions are straightforward, but most involve personal preferences about willingness to take medications, make lifestyle changes, and accept risks of side effects or risks of future illness.<\/p>\n In some cases, the choice is between an untreated deadly cancer and a hopefully-less-deadly cure. \u00a0Such cases underscore how important conversations are about data and preferences. \u00a0Over time, we will have more data from traditional clinical trials, from patients who share their well documented experiences with others, and from analysis of data in electronic medical record systems. \u00a0The addition of genetic information to these data sets reminds us that in some ways, every person represents a unique trial with a single participant.<\/p>\n We are lost without data, yet data alone cannot guide us. \u00a0The increasingly rich data about health provides context for an increasingly important set of conversations each of us must have about our health related decisions and those of our loved ones. \u00a0This is what Participatory Medicine<\/a> is all about: conversations between pateints and doctors, between patients and patients… conversations among all of us working as colleagues to improve our health.<\/p>\n
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