Put aside your legal restraints and give thought to a scenario.
I have an electronic store which contains all my personal health records. It has everything in one place for my doctor, optician, dentist, osteopath, Chinese herbalist, acupuncturist and podiatrist.
It’s mine and is a holistic view of me and my personal medical history since birth.
Nice. But seemingly impossible?
But the technology to make this happen is available now. It is possible to create this tool although getting access to the data to populate the tool is hard at present.
There is a tectonic shift taking place as the economies of scale which used to mean that corporations and governments had all the advantages when dealing with individuals are being broken down by the internet.
Online, everyone has the opportunity for messaging, discovery, sharing and learning in a nearly-free environment.
This means that scale is not needed in order to dominate a relationship.
Companies and individuals are beginning to ……………..
Companies and individuals are beginning to realise that the power is shifting towards the individual.
The Power Shift
People can now withhold information from companies ( the UK’s telephone preference service, privacy opt-outs) and block corporate communications (spam, junk mail filters and un-subscribes).
The movement of power and the reversal of the relationship is being called “VRM or Vendor Relationship Management”.
It is a distributed worldwide group of interested individuals who are together working on how to put this into practice across skill areas such as coding, communications, corporate strategy and customer service.
Its leaders are two dynamic visionaries, Doc Searls and Adriana Lukas.
Doc was a co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto which
foresaw the rise of the internet and is coincidentally ten years old this month.
Adriana is a media-disrupter with a track record of political blogging and social media leadership. I know them both personally.
Education Leading Health
And here is an example of the individually-controlled and managed personal data store being created.
(Ctrl-Shift (http://ctrl-shift.co.uk/)), is a consultancy that “helps organisations understand the empowered consumer” that has put out an RFL for a “Portable personal education record - PPER”.
I’ll quote what they request verbatim
The vision for the PPER sits within a broader vision of the “empowered learner”. The engagement of learners in their learning has long been the holy grail of educationalists, with personalised learning often discussed yet shrouded in mystery about how it can be delivered.
The PPER provides an opportunity to be part of disruptive change of the UK education system, creating a dynamic demand-led market, supported by learning supply that is more agile and better able to serve society. The PPER will help empower learners to manage and develop skills and offers opportunities for reducing the costs of skills development. ...
The PPER also offers the opportunity to drive a more agile and efficient learning supply market and by supporting a closer relationship between learners and potential employers offers an opportunity for a coherent demand side voice.
The opportunity presented by the empowered learner and the PPER promises economic growth both in the domestic and education international market.
Now do a search-and-replace for the word education with health and you get the idea about what a Portable Personal HEALTH record might be able to do:
- The engagement of patients in their healthcare both preventative and curative
- The creation of a dynamic demand-led market for healthcare provision
- An agile healthcare supply side that is better aligned with patient needs
- The reduction of costs for healthcare provision
- A closer relationship and supply-demand alignment between patients, funding bodies and healthcare providers
Nirvana?
I don’t think so. The technology to support the tools already exists. The ability for most of the developed world’s population to get online (see Lord Carter’s “Digital Britain” Report) and increasingly for the developed world (See: One Laptop Per Child) will facilitate and enable rapid adoption of this ‘reversed’ relationship control.
And as Facebook and Myspace have shown, if an online website works and you find utility in the tools therein, people tell their friends and adoption goes viral.
This is not a possible future. This will happen and the challenge for pharmaceutical companies is how they need to reorganise internal processes to cope with such an empowered stakeholder community.
Crisis – certainly, it’ll rock boats, destroy companies and careers but the industry will be re-energised and more balanced as a result.
Expect full adoption within the next 10 years and if you aren’t planning on being retired by 2019, get going on VRM and Volunteered Personal Information strategies because you are going to need them to save your job.
(Tomorrow’s Blog: “One click away from disaster………”)
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