A New Look at the Original Doctors 2.0 & You Manifesto

When we produced the first edition of the Doctors 2.0 & You conference in Paris over 8 years ago, we were in the early days of both the topics we covered (healthcare social media, mobile health including remote consults, serious games, patient engagement, digitized health systems) and the activities associated with the conference (tweetchats, livetweet, live video presentations in the plenary, start-up contests, patient keynotes…).

The crowdsourcing of the Doctors 2.0 & You manifesto in 84 sentences, which you will find below was part of the novelty we offered. The content was collated by Janine Budding and the editing was minimal, so that what they wrote is what you get.

Society and technology as a whole have shifted since then but some basics remain important to say again and again…

We are re-posting that manifesto now, because at Frontiers’ Health 2019, a new manifesto, thanks to one of the speakers, will be part of the session I was invited to propose on patient-centricity and digital health.  More on this to come soon!

 Denise Silber

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Acccording to Wikipedia, a manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. The Doctors 2.0 & You manifesto is not political.  It is a collaborative work in progress. Our goal is to identify the ways in which the inclusion of collaborative digital tools and social media platforms can improve care and translate this into the words of a manifesto.

Our point of reference, is  The Cluetrain Manifestoa set of 95 theses put forward as a manifesto, or call to action, for all businesses operating within the newly-connected marketplace.

The Cluetrain Manifesto tells us that the « market » is the conversation and that the Internet facilitates the bypassing of formal hierarchies creating a more informed marketplace and consumer through those conversations. Substitute « health care » for market place and healthcare organizations for businesses, and have a look at:

              Doctors 2.0 & You Manifesto in 84 crowd-sourced sentences

 

Some of the Pioneering Patients at Doctors 2.0

1. A patient is not a diagnosis but a human being in need of compassion.
2. “We are Smarter than Me” in coping with disease
3. Let’s go from the former Isolation of Illness to the We of the Wellness with hyper connectivity.
4. The key is that the patient is the source of critical information and engagement.
5. Patient-centric care is a hybrid of Internet-based education, mHealth technologies, telehealth, and provider supervision and visits.
6. There is a need for an active and critical role in the digital public space.
7. Physicians should understand the social changes and their changed role in healthcare systems (which in many countries are in dire straits) and the emergence of a new breed of patients.
8. Medical professionals of the future have to be team builders between social media, telemedicine, patients, healthcare providers and healthcare insurance and payers.
9. We need to move from evidence-based medicine to science-based medicine and find a way to bring the latest research directly to the patients and doctors.
10. Health is co-creation.
11. Health 2.0 is win-win, if we are all better trained to support a more informed patient.
12. Health 2.0 is a permanent round table among all stakeholders for the creation of a citizenship of health … all members of the same team!
13. Health 2.0 should improve the quality of exchange and management of patients when involving all stakeholders, professionals & patients
14. Patients like this Health 2.0 much better. In fact, they are co-creating it.
15. The World is flat. Healthcare is now Horizontal.
16. Diseases, treatments, healthcare actors are now convos on the Social Web
17. Adaptative Darwin Theory is fueling the healing connections at the Social Web; it’s not Serendipity, nor forced or guided connections
18. As a result, patients are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in their treatment changes healthcare fundamentally.
19. Crowdsourcing patients and doctors have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from books and research. Healthcare in co-creation is about adding value to the quality and speed of treatments for common and rare diseases.
20. Patients who come to the medical appointment with information about their symptoms are eager to understand what needs to be done to cure their disease and are more actively engaged with their doctors.
21. There are no secrets. The networked crowd knows more than a doctor or hospital does about their own products. And whether their treatment is good or bad, they tell everyone.
22. “Bye Loneliness, Hello Community! »
23. Social Media has been widely adopted throughout the world and in healthcare; professionals are no different than other people
24. The Social Web is leading into co-creation of a new participatory medicine
25. Social media brings an unprecedented ability for people to collaborate continuously on a global basis. This will enable scientists to quicken the pace of discovery and research leading to a greater understanding of disease with better treatments faster than ever before.
26. Social media includes the challenging issue whether the content complies with regulations. Social media will have to fall in line with the spirit of these regulations.
27. Social media offers us the advantage to reach out across multiple generations of patients to increase the dissemination of information.
28. Social media are primarily used to teach and to learn and hardly at all to treat. Since treating patients is healthcare’s core business, these networks have not yet reached that core.
29. We need to “Mind the Gap” between social media networks of patients and those of healthcare professionals. Bridging the gap will bring us a a step further.
30. Health convos on the Social Web are driven by Generosity and the Joy Factor.
31. Healthcare Social Networks and online conversations are challenging and transforming the establishment and status quo of the Healthcare arena controlling the power of education, professional and patient associations, etc.
32. The question is not whether physicians or healthcare opinion leaders have to use social networks or have to blog, but if they are aware of the challenges and social responsibility in these times of epatients, ehealth and never ending online health information.
33. The huge power of healthcare conversations will bring down the existing and constricting regulatory walls
34. There may be a need for more robust platforms for safe use of SoMe in healthcare.
35. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
36. “Stop just marketing, Start socializing”
37. Social is Healing.
38. We should not focus on technology too much, and we should certainly not use this argument as a reason to postpone innovation.
39. The Internet is enabling conversations among patients and doctors that were simply not possible in the era before the mass use of Internet.
40. TeleHealth has to be globally acknowledged by medical professionals as a sound alternative for meeting the patient in his clinic.
41. With the introduction of eHealth, medical professionals have to refrain from income-driven, perverse stimuli.
42. The Internet provides us with new ways to bring the latest research directly to patients and the doctors are co-investigators in the search for the desired improvement of Healthcare.
43. The legalistic requirements of evidence-based medicine (EBM), such as its insistence on treatments that have met the “gold standard” of “well-designed, large-scale, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, clinical trials,” actually prevent doctors from effectively diagnosing and treating patients.
44. Imagine a world where every individual had the option to speak to the best doctors in the world, where getting multiple opinions or an average opinion on a condition was possible.
45. Collaborative medicine will change the level of care some third world patients receive
46. The Internet had the catalyst role of democratizing medical knowledge that was until a few years ago only in the realm of health professionals
47. In just a few more years, the distant « voice » of doctors as the sound of the medical profession will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th Century French court.
48. Healthcare organizations that think it’s enough for a healthcare organization to just be online misunderstand the potential of an optimized mobile website, for their communication with patients and future patients.
49. Health care workers who don’t realize their markets are now networked inter personally, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation, are missing their best opportunity.
50. Mobile internet access is not a mere fad; widespread adoption of mobile communications means that an investment in mobile development now can set your healthcare organization apart.
51. Hospital websites that are optimized for smartphone browsers attract new patients and better satisfaction scores.
52. Patients have got some ideas for you: new skills, improved service, new tools for telecare, new stuff that saves time and money.
53. Co-creation and transparency are key.
54. Medical care should be easily accessible at all reasonable hours.
55. A patient must able to get in a doctor’s advice within 48 hours.
56. Social Media and mobile access are the tools to finally share information between caregivers and caretakers and for (big) pharma, the opportunity and obligation to communicate with patients and doctors instead of pushing their products for profit-driven reasons.
57. Patients can now access a huge amount of high-quality information that can be used for self-care and to understand when to seek professional care.
58. Access to information will increase a patient’s ability to affect the course of their disease and decrease their need to use the established healthcare system.
59. A key point for eHealth is the public access and use of the information about health (diseases, diagnostic, treatments…), but the huge quantity of information to patients and general public are difficult to interpret, because of the lack of medical education.
60. Through eHeath information, patients have the ability to access, view, monitor and communicate with the medical community that can have a profound impact on QOL scores and have a positive healthcare economic impact.
61. Medical information on the internet with a proportion of information not applicable to a patient’s specific situation can result in people believing they are informed when they are not.
62. The internet and eHealth are excellent tools in the hands of healthcare policy makers: they offer the possibility to quickly adapt to changing scientific and socio-economic conditions in healthcare.
63. Decisions on policies that regulate public health must be submitted to the public, so that citizens express their opinions freely.
64. The views of citizens on a decision of public health policy must be subject to assessment.
65. The Internet is the most suitable means to encourage public participation in evaluating the decisions of public authorities.
66. With the use of eHealth, SoMe, self-management in Health Care, productivity gain can reach 1 billion euros
67. eHealth reduces the amount of nurses, doctors, psychiatrists and leads to smaller staff shortages in health care.
68. eHealth limits the growth of health spending: large-scale investment in e-health and self-management concepts provide significant savings for business and insurances.
69. E-health, telecare and self management are available outside work hours for lower costs than normal daytime healthcare. Significant productivity gains will be realized.
70. The potential of e-health and self-management is underused.
71. Innovation-Driven Health Care, is health care that develops care in co-creation with patients
72. One human is different from the other, the physician should see the person in front of him in connection to any guideline and not vice versa.
73. The internet enables communities to form and people within those communities to communicate. This enables the support of patients by patients, particularly in certain disease areas like rare diseases where there may not be anyone with the disease nearby. This also enables the interpretation of the wealth of information based on personal experience so patients can understand the difference between the information and misinformation (but it can propagate misinformation). These both help patients to be more informed and better supported, again without using the established healthcare systems.
74. Smartphones now have more computer power than most medical devices.
75. Smartphones are enabling remote monitoring and investigation. This will change healthcare by removing the need to visit healthcare centers and enable the monitoring of a patient’s condition continuously.
76. Smartphones will change the way diseases and their burden on patients are understood, leading to new treatments and better care.
77. Public Relations does not relate to the public. Healthcare companies are afraid of communicating with all their patients: happy and unhappy patients
78. Compassion for care is not a parlor trick to pick up.
79. Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.
80. Paranoia kills conversation, and lack of open conversation kills healthcare organizations.
81. Patients have real power and they know it.
82. The recognition of a problem or situation mostly leads to innovations that have greater positive impact on a society than high-tech health innovations.
83. We know some doctors that are pretty cool online. Do you have any more like them? Stop hiding in hospitals and healthcare institutions and come out and play.
84. When patients have questions, they turn to each other for answers.

You’ve reached the end of the list. Congratulations!