HealthContentAdvisors

e-Patients: A New Market for Health Content

• Posted October 12th 2009
• by Janice

The last week of this month (Oct 2009) I will give a presentation on the e-patient market at the first e-Patient Connections 2009 conference. E-Patients are highly motivated, energized, educated and online-savvy patients and patient advocates that are organizing to share experiences and to dig deeply into health information sources and medical research studies to find information about specific diseases and health conditions. Some of the leading organizers of the e-Patient movement have also formed a new association, the Society for Participatory Medicine, which publishes its first journal issue this month in the Journal of Participatory Medicine

Patient-driven healthcare is transforming our current healthcare system at a rapid rate. Patients are expected to make choices about providers, healthcare treatment options, drug choices, insurance plans, and more, but information is needed to power this trend. That means huge opportunities for publishers that can provide the right information in the appropriate format for the e-Patient segment.

The digital age is also turning patients into suppliers of information via the digitization of clinical and administrative health records. Also, e-Patients directly produce information by sharing data in online social networks, which are becoming better organized and structured to create data that can mined for research purposes.

My presentation, The Future of Health Content Publishing, will highlight:

1)      e-Patients as a market for new health care products that extend beyond current patient education products to provide deeper clinical information.

2)      e-Patients as suppliers of health content via social media (e.g., Cure Together and Patients Like Me) and as a by-product of digitized records and transactions (e.g., outcomes data, cost-analysis).

See e-Patient Connections 2009 for more information about this event; use promo code Info500 to receive a $500 discount on the registration fee.

e-Patients as suppliers of health content data fits into the theme of our Data Content09 conference, too. Data Content09 immediately follows the e-Patient event in Philadelphia this year. At Data Content09, I will lead a roundtable discussion on healthcare data analytics that will delve into the surging amount of data being produced directly and indirectly by all healthcare industry stakeholders (patients, physicians, providers, payers, pharma, policymakers). The emphasis will be on information sourced from patient records, transactions, and self-reported data. We’ll discuss how health content publishers can exploit these sources of data to offer richer healthcare analytics tools and stay a step ahead of new competition they face from EMR/EHR vendors, large health insurance companies and others that are building repositories of data as a by-product of the transactions they record and the information they collect digitally.

Note, some innovative health content companies are participating in Data Content09. Will Passano, VP of Skyscape is on our program and John McKinley, CEO of OurParents.com, is attending as a Models of Excellence award finalist. If you are interested in attending Data Content09, please contact me at:jmccallum@infocommercegroup.com or call me at 781.356.1766. I hope to see you in Philadelphia in a couple of weeks.