HealthBlawg

David Harlow's Health Care Law Blog

    • Twitter
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • RSS
    • Email
  • About
  • Archives
  • Podcast
  • Press
  • Awards/Reviews
  • HIPAA
  • HCSM

Facebook Saves Woman’s Life: Newt Gingrich and Reality-Based Healthcare Systems Planning

December 10, 2010

I’ve seen at least half a dozen links to the op-ed coauthored by Newt Gingrich and neurosurgeon Kamal Thapar about how the doctor used information on Facebook to save a woman’s life.  In brief, a woman who had been to see a number of different health care providers without getting a clear diagnosis showed up in an emergency room, went into a coma and nearly died.  She was saved by a doctor’s review of the detailed notes she kept about her symptoms, etc., which she posted on Facebook.  The story is vague on the details, but apparently her son facilitated getting the doc access to her Facebook page, and the details posted there allowed him to diagnose and treat her condition.  She recovered fully.

Newt and Dr. Thapar wax rhapsodic about how Facebook saved a life, and sing the praises of social media’s role in modern medicine.  (I’m not sure how this really fits in with Newt’s stance on health reform, within his 12-step program to achieve the total replacement of the Left … but, hey, nobody has the patience these days for so many details anyway.)

Regular readers of HealthBlawg know that I would perhaps be the last to challenge the proposition that social media has a role to play in health care.  However, I think Newt got it wrong here.

To me, this story does not represent a shining example of the Facebook cure, a “House“-like bit of detective work neatly yieldling the result we all knew could be pulled out of the proverbial hat.  Instead, it represents yet another indictment of the colossal system failure that we call the U.S. health care system.  There is a lot that we do right, but here the system got it wrong.  In a more perfect world, where incentives are in place to encourage clinicians to spend more time with patients during office visits, perhaps this patient’s ailments could have been diagnosed earlier, and the emergency hospitalization and coma — with their attendant shocks to the pocketbook and body — avoided.  An appropriate system of incentives that leaps to mind here is the PCMH, or patient-centered medical home.  A close runner-up, perhaps better desccribed as a delivery-system model rather than an incentive-system model, is the ACO (Accountable Care Organization).  In a PCMH, a primary care team is incentivized (through patient management fees and other means) to take the time to dig deeper and manage a patient’s care in the best and broadest sense of the word.  In an ACO (though the rulebook has yet to be written, the outlines are present in the ACA and in NCQA and industry association guidelines now under development), the system is supposed to direct the patient to the setting where comprehensive care may be provided most efficiently.

While things certainly worked out well for the patient in this story, it is an anecdote without broader policy ramifications.  Is Newt calling for us all to include medical diaries on Facebook to improve our chances when we lapse into comas in emergency rooms?  To cite having a repository of data created by a patient on Facebook, perhaps in part out of frustration at not being able to communicate the big picture to anyone within the health care system, as an example of a health care social media success, seems to me to miss the point entirely.

Patients should be encouraged to monitor themselves and their symptoms, and to track them over time as an aid to their clinical teams, but we should all be able to enter information — either automatically, through connected health devices or mobile health tools, or manually — through patient portals that link to our electronic health records and generate alerts, when warranted, for our clinicians.  The investment in health IT being made by the payor and provider communities — and the federales — is predicated on the notion that having more complete information gathered together in a manner that is easily retrievable and analyzable will yield better results, both economic and clinical.  While some may argue that the conclusion has not been proven in the HIT world, it is a compelling framework for progress that has had application in realms of human endeavor beyond health care as well.

I’m glad Newt “likes” Facebook, but I’d like to see us work to realize the potential of a more effective deployment of resources to improve care coordination, patient engagement, cost containment and, of course, health outcomes.

David Harlow
The Harlow Group LLC
Health Care Law and Consulting

Filed Under: Accountable Care Organization, Ehealth, EHR, Health 2.0, Health care policy, Health Law, Health Reform, HIT, Medical home, mHealth, Mobile health, PHR, Social Media

you might also like:

  1. Facebook misstep costs RI physician fine, job

  2. Connected Health Symposium 2010

  3. Facebook on the Radio: Talking Privacy and Patient Data on NPR

« The Benefits Package: A new employee benefits blog carnival
David Harlow quoted in AMA American Medical News story on geolocation services »

Comments

  1. Chris Holland says

    December 10, 2010 at 4:58 pm

    I agree. “Facebook Saves Woman in ER” not a great headline in Modern Healthcare. Better to know a care giver took the time to take a proper H&P. Or if pt. unconscious, get it from her Med Record necklace or off the cloud she authorized w a password. Not sure the exple leads us non-stop all the way to a Universal HC System E Record.

    Without rehashing the whole freedom & privacy debate, I do think clinicians salivate over UK’s database more than care receivers do.

    Our goal shouldn’t be to protect everyone from danger, to say nothing about the fact that often we pose the greatest danger. Goal should ne to foster an economic env in which anyone gas access to life saving care and the right to provide the info they want to whomever they want and to gave info avail to make choices of care.

    While cool, Facebook & Twitter are unreliable sources of either. Furthermore we should make it impossible to initiate a suit accusing a doc of failing to search a pt’s Facebook user name for dx. info.

  2. Kristina says

    December 16, 2010 at 10:31 pm

    Unfortunately, there is no influx of doctors to take care of the baby boomers increasing in number. Great post!

    Since the system is unbelievably lousy, we should encourage individuals to list down their symptoms and history in a software, diary, website, blog etc. Or shall someone pls make a website where people can register and input their data and history for doctors to access in case of emergency?

Follow me on Twitter

David Harlow 💉😷 Follow 42,915 17,570

Mastodon @healthblawg@c.im #HealthCare #MedDevice #Compliance #Privacy @MyOmnipod #HIPAA #digitalhealth #HarlowOnHC #pinksocks Tweets are tweets No more no less

healthblawg
healthblawg avatar; David Harlow 💉😷 @healthblawg ·
1h 1620898131004072027

The Harlow #Healthcare #Innovation Daily https://paper.li/healthblawg/1489156253?share_id=0e46a740-a278-11ed-ad57-fa163e65ae25 #digitalhealth #hcldr #HarlowOnHC Thanks to @Mr_Don_Auto @KardonHIPAA @vadernauts #digitalhealth #healthtech

Reply on Twitter 1620898131004072027 Retweet on Twitter 1620898131004072027 0 Like on Twitter 1620898131004072027 0 Twitter 1620898131004072027
healthblawg avatar; David Harlow 💉😷 @healthblawg ·
5h 1620842034113175552

ICYMI> Interoperability and NLP with Kyle Silvestro, CEO of SyTrue — Harlow On Healthcare https://healthblawg.com/2022/03/interoperability-nlp-sytrue.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ReviveOldPost #digitalhealth #hcldr #hitsm

Image for the Tweet beginning: ICYMI>  Interoperability and NLP Twitter feed image.
Reply on Twitter 1620842034113175552 Retweet on Twitter 1620842034113175552 0 Like on Twitter 1620842034113175552 0 Twitter 1620842034113175552
healthblawg avatar; David Harlow 💉😷 @healthblawg ·
8h 1620801819612946434

The latest Harlow On Health Care Daily #HarlowOnHC #digitalhealth #healthcare #innovation #privacy #hcldr Thx: @TWDigitalHealth @MrsYisWhy @thecommunityvc #digitalhealth #healthtech

Image for twitter card

Artificial intelligence model finds potential drug molecules a thousand times faster

techxplore.com The entirety of the known universe is teeming with an infinite number of molecules. But what fraction...

paper.li

Reply on Twitter 1620801819612946434 Retweet on Twitter 1620801819612946434 0 Like on Twitter 1620801819612946434 0 Twitter 1620801819612946434
Load More
Follow me on Mastodon

HIPAAtools

Hipaatools

The HIPAA Compliance Toolkit

The Walking Gallery

The Walking Gallery

Quick Links

  • Home
  • Categories
  • Archives
  • Podcast Interviews
  • HIPAAtools
  • HIPAA Compliance
  • Health Care Social Media
  • Speaking
  • In the Press
  • Blogroll

David Harlow

David Harlow

HealthcareNOW Radio

Connect with David

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Email
  • Subscribe
  • Contact
  • Book Me: Speaking
  • About
  • The Harlow Group LLC
Copyright © 2006–2023
HealthBlawg is a publication of The Harlow Group LLC. See Copyright notice and disclaimer.
Fair use with attribution and a link is encouraged. Click for more on David Harlow.
[footer_backtotop text="Back to top" href="#"]