Thomas William "Tom" Ferguson (July 8, 1943 – April 14, 2006) was an American medical doctor, educator, and author. He was an early advocate for patient empowerment, urging patients to educate themselves, to assume control of their own health care, and to use the Internet as a way of accomplishing those goals. [1]
He was born in Ross, California and grew up in Coos Bay, Oregon. He eventually settled in Austin, Texas, hometown of his wife Meredith Mitchell Dreiss. He obtained a bachelor's degree from Reed College in Portland, Oregon and a master's degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University. He then went to Yale University School of Medicine, graduating in 1977 with an M.D. degree. However, he never had a medical practice. [2] Instead he became a prolific writer about patients as medical consumers and about the doctor-patient relationship, "arguing that informed self-care was a jumping-off point for better health and made for a richer, fairer, if nontraditional, partnership between physicians and their patients." [2] He studied and wrote about the empowered medical consumer beginning in 1975, and about online health resources for consumers beginning in 1987. "He urged patients to educate themselves and share knowledge with one another, and urged doctors to collaborate with patients rather than command them. Predicting the Internet's potential for disseminating medical information long before it became a familiar conduit, he was an early proponent of its use, terming laymen who did so 'E-Patients'." [1] He researched and promoted the popular use of electronic resources including the Internet to gather information and cope with medical conditions. [3] [4] In 1993 he organized the world's first conference devoted to computer systems designed for medical consumers.
In 2002 he gave some "distinguished achievement awards" to leading individuals and organizations in the emerging area of "e-patients" and participatory medicine: [5]
He exemplified his own philosophy when he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 1991. "He relentlessly pursued strategies for both self-care and the newest research and experimental practices for controlling this aggressive cancer ... Between relapses and debilitating treatments, he led a migration of medical consumer information to the internet, lectured widely on the emerging field of 'health informatics,' and earned a global reputation as a true innovator and pioneer in the field." [7] He died April 14, 2006, while undergoing treatment in Little Rock, Arkansas. [1]
Health On the Net Foundation (HON) is a Swiss not-for-profit organization based in Geneva which promotes a code of conduct for websites providing health information and offers certificates to those in compliance.
Health informatics is the study and implementation of computer structures and algorithms to improve communication, understanding, and management of medical information. It can be view as branch of engineering and applied science.
The University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) is a public medical school in Memphis, Tennessee. It includes the Colleges of Health Professions, Dentistry, Graduate Health Sciences, Medicine, Nursing, and Pharmacy. Since 1911, the University of Tennessee Health Science Center has educated nearly 57,000 health care professionals. As of 2010, U.S. News & World Report ranked the College of Pharmacy 17th among American pharmacy schools.
eHealth describes healthcare services which are supported by digital processes, communication or technology such as electronic prescribing, Telehealth, or Electronic Health Records (EHRs). The use of electronic processes in healthcare dated back to at least the 1990s. Usage of the term varies as it covers not just "Internet medicine" as it was conceived during that time, but also "virtually everything related to computers and medicine". A study in 2005 found 51 unique definitions. Some argue that it is interchangeable with health informatics with a broad definition covering electronic/digital processes in health while others use it in the narrower sense of healthcare practice using the Internet. It can also include health applications and links on mobile phones, referred to as mHealth or m-Health.
A personal health record (PHR) is a health record where health data and other information related to the care of a patient is maintained by the patient. This stands in contrast to the more widely used electronic medical record, which is operated by institutions and contains data entered by clinicians to support insurance claims. The intention of a PHR is to provide a complete and accurate summary of an individual's medical history which is accessible online. The health data on a PHR might include patient-reported outcome data, lab results, and data from devices such as wireless electronic weighing scales or from a smartphone.
An e-patient is a health consumer who participates fully in his/her medical care, primarily by gathering information about medical conditions that impact them and their families, using the Internet and other digital tools. The term encompasses those who seek guidance for their own ailments and the friends and family members who go online on their behalf. E-patients report two effects of their health research: "better health information and services, and different, but not always better, relationships with their doctors."
Gunther Eysenbach is a German-Canadian researcher on healthcare, especially health policy, eHealth, and consumer health informatics.
The Journal of Medical Internet Research is a peer-reviewed open-access medical journal established in 1999 covering eHealth and "healthcare in the Internet age". The editors-in-chief are Gunther Eysenbach and Rita Kukafka. The publisher is JMIR Publications.
Online health communities are online social networks related to health. They primarily provide a means for patients and their families to learn about illnesses, to seek and offer social support, and to connect with others in similar circumstances. These online groups can be composed of individuals with illnesses, groups of medical professionals with shared interests, non-professional caregivers and family of patients, or a combination. The term "online health community" is primarily academic jargon.
Edward ("Ted") Hance Shortliffe is a Canadian-born American biomedical informatician, physician, and computer scientist. Shortliffe is a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in medicine. He was the principal developer of the clinical expert system MYCIN, one of the first rule-based artificial intelligence expert systems, which obtained clinical data interactively from a physician user and was used to diagnose and recommend treatment for severe infections. While never used in practice, its performance was shown to be comparable to and sometimes more accurate than that of Stanford infectious disease faculty. This spurred the development of a wide range of activity in the development of rule-based expert systems, knowledge representation, belief nets and other areas, and its design greatly influenced the subsequent development of computing in medicine.
"Health 2.0" is a term introduced in the mid-2000s, as the subset of health care technologies mirroring the wider Web 2.0 movement. It has been defined variously as including social media, user-generated content, and cloud-based and mobile technologies. Some Health 2.0 proponents see these technologies as empowering patients to have greater control over their own health care and diminishing medical paternalism. Critics of the technologies have expressed concerns about possible misinformation and violations of patient privacy.
Connected health is a socio-technical model for healthcare management and delivery by using technology to provide healthcare services remotely. Connected health, also known as technology enabled care (TEC) aims to maximize healthcare resources and provide increased, flexible opportunities for consumers to engage with clinicians and better self-manage their care. It uses readily available consumer technologies to deliver patient care outside of the hospital or doctor's office. Connected health encompasses programs in telehealth, remote care and disease and lifestyle management, often leverages existing technologies such as connected devices using cellular networks and is associated with efforts to improve chronic care. However, there is an increasing blur between software capabilities and healthcare needs whereby technologists are now providing the solutions to support consumer wellness and provide the connectivity between patient data, information and decisions. This calls for new techniques to guide Connected Health solutions such as "design thinking" to support software developers in clearly identifying healthcare requirements, and extend and enrich traditional software requirements gathering techniques.
Healthgrades Operating Company Inc., known as Healthgrades, is a US company that provides information about physicians, hospitals, and healthcare providers. Healthgrades has amassed information on over three million U.S. health care providers. The company was founded by Kerry Hicks, David Hicks, Peter Fatianow, John Neal, and Sarah Lochran, and is based in Denver, Colorado. Rob Draughon serves as the company's CEO. According to USA Today, Healthgrades is the first comprehensive physician rating and comparison database. The application is part of a trend in health technology in the United States towards consumer-driven healthcare.
Health 3.0 is a health-related extension of the concept of Web 3.0 whereby the users' interface with the data and information available on the web is personalized to optimize their experience. This is based on the concept of the Semantic Web, wherein websites' data is accessible for sorting in order to tailor the presentation of information based on user preferences. Health 3.0 will use such data access to enable individuals to better retrieve and contribute to personalized health-related information within networked electronic health records, and social networking resources.
The Wikipedia online encyclopedia has, since the late 2000s, served as a popular source for health information for both laypersons and, in many cases, health care practitioners. Health-related articles on Wikipedia are popularly accessed as results from search engines, which frequently deliver links to Wikipedia articles. Independent assessments have been made of the number and demographics of people who seek health information on Wikipedia, the scope of health information on Wikipedia, and the quality and reliability of the information on Wikipedia.
Health information on the Internet refers to all health-related information communicated through or available on the Internet.
Infodemiology was defined by Gunther Eysenbach in the early 2000s as information epidemiology. It is an area of science research focused on scanning the internet for user-contributed health-related content, with the ultimate goal of improving public health. It is also defined as the science of mitigating public health problems resulting from an infodemic.
OpenNotes is a research initiative and international movement located at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Health data is any data "related to health conditions, reproductive outcomes, causes of death, and quality of life" for an individual or population. Health data includes clinical metrics along with environmental, socioeconomic, and behavioral information pertinent to health and wellness. A plurality of health data are collected and used when individuals interact with health care systems. This data, collected by health care providers, typically includes a record of services received, conditions of those services, and clinical outcomes or information concerning those services. Historically, most health data has been sourced from this framework. The advent of eHealth and advances in health information technology, however, have expanded the collection and use of health data—but have also engendered new security, privacy, and ethical concerns. The increasing collection and use of health data by patients is a major component of digital health.
Peter Yellowlees is a British-born American physician, researcher, entrepreneur, academic and administrator. He is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of General Psychiatry at University of California, Davis and is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Asynchealth Inc. He was the inaugural Chief Wellness Officer at UC Davis and held the Alan Stoudemire Endowed Chair in Psychiatry as the Director of Physician Health Program at UC Davis Psychiatry. He chaired the UCDH Wellbeing Committee.