Here's a
Health
Affairs piece from mercola.com,
on "The Rise
Of Consumerism -- Impact of the Internet"
Information technologies have fueled another societal trend that will continue
to have an impact on the health
care workforce. The flag bearer of this trend is the Internet, which brings
information access and interpersonal
communication on an unprecedented scale to hundreds of millions of persons
worldwide.
According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, as of September 2001, 143
million Americans, or about 54
percent of the population, were using the Internet, and new users were
adopting the technology at a rate of
more than two million per month.
The continued insinuation of computer and network use into the fabric of
society is assured by observations that
90 percent of US children between the ages of five and seventeen now use
computers at home and at school.
A 1997 survey of Internet users found that 65 percent had sought health
information at least once, and more
than a third used the Internet to find health information regularly.
The sight of a patient sitting in the waiting room reading printouts from
health-related Web sites in preparation for
presenting them to the doctor has become common in health care settings,
a practice that some practitioners
encourage and others dread.
The rise of consumerism in health care moves toward positioning the patient
as the final authority for choosing
among diagnostic and treatment alternatives and the health professional,
to a role akin to "tech support" for
purposes of explanation of alternatives and interpretation of medical terms
and concepts.
Effects On The Health Care Workforce
For the foreseeable future, the "graying of America" that will usher the
postwar baby boomers into their
retirement years will increase the need for health services, both traditional
and novel. This demand should fuel
growth of all health professions, including physicians, nurses, and allied
health professions.
The forces of ubiquitous communication and computing technologies and access
to information do not appear at
this point to be sufficient to cause the extinction of any current type
of health professional.
Among health professionals there will certainly be winners and losers,
however, and the emergence of new
categories of jobs. As health practitioners serve as advisers and teachers,
their communication and teaching
skills will be highly valued by empowered and knowledgeable consumers;
failure to communicate effectively will
be likely to place a health care provider at an economic disadvantage.
New Occupations
Obtaining and synthesizing information from electronic sources are time-consuming
tasks, which explains in part
why physicians and other health professionals underuse the information
sources now available to them. More
than thirty years ago a modification of the traditional role of the reference
librarian, called the "clinical librarian,"
brought an information access specialist into the hospital wards as part
of the medical care team, to identify
questions related to the care of individual patients for which additional
information was needed and to find that
information from printed or online sources.
Personal health advocates and advisers
While physicians and other health professionals may not wish to avail themselves
of expert help in finding
relevant information, it can be predicted that some of the lay public will.
Personal health advocate and personal
health adviser services targeted at providing tailored education for an
individual's unique combination of health
problems and concerns are an obvious commercial opportunity for an educated
populace connected by a global
Internet.
These intermediaries, who would not themselves provide health care services
but would help others to
understand their medical conditions and also negotiate the complexities
of selecting and using appropriate health
care services, could eventually have their own basis for credentialing
and licensure if viewed by state medical
boards as a form of medical practice.
Continuing Education
The thorniest problem arising from the explosion of medical knowledge and
its implications for medical decision
making is the retraining of the existing health care workforce. In most
practice settings, licensed health
professionals can simply avoid information technologies if they so choose.
Physicians, nurses, and other professionals who do not use online sources
to get up-to-date information are
practicing within a professional standard of care that will need to change
as the complexity of clinical decision
making escalates. In the coming era of "personal genomics," where one's
own DNA sequence is used to select
the correct drug from among hundreds of alternatives, computers will be
essential intellectual amplifiers for
health professionals.
The systematic correlation of treatments delivered with health outcomes,
an utterly obvious step for continuous
quality improvement that is largely missing from today's health care environment,
other than in research studies,
requires the use of standardized electronic medical records. And effective
electronic medical records require the
direct participation of health care providers in their creation, maintenance,
and interpretation.
The health professional who refuses to use a computer is a justifiably
endangered species in this emerging
environment, but new methods are needed to add competency in information
management and technology use
for mid-career professionals.
This goes beyond simple computer literacy and includes knowledge of the
principles of information retrieval,
clinical epidemiology, biostatistics, and how to critically appraise the
published literature. Since the best teachers
are role models, an opportunity will exist for a new specialty within the
health care workforce of technology and
information science educators, who are themselves health professionals
with extensive expertise and experience
in the application of these knowledge management tools to health services
delivery.
Existing short courses and degree programs for already licensed health
professionals are harbingers of a more
systematic approach to the retraining of mid-career professionals.
The growth of biomedical knowledge and the ubiquitous availability of computer-based
information access and
knowledge management tools will expand the types of jobs in the health
care workforce and provide new
business opportunities for support industries.
No current category of health professional appears to face extinction,
but pressure will mount to abandon the
current model of autonomous practitioners depending upon their personal
memory and experience to deliver
optimal care.
Empowered consumers and a glut of health information available via the
Internet will lead to continued growth of
nontraditional and alternative health products and services and to a remodeling
of the relationship between
providers and patients.
In health care as much as or more than in other human endeavors, knowledge
is power, and the
redistribution of access to knowledge will mean an inevitable redistribution
of power over the decisions
that affect the delivery of health care and the makeup of the health care
workforce.
Health Affairs September / October 2002
DR. MERCOLA'S COMMENT:
This is an excellent overview of what is coming in medicine. The last paragraph
is the main point of the
article, and is in synch with my vision for medicine.
Indeed, knowledge is power, and that is what I have sought to provide you
for over five years in this
no-cost-to-you format. All of my past newsletters are provided to you at
no charge so we can begin to
seed the soil for the massive health care transformation.
This is also from the above article:
"As of this writing Medline contains about 11.7 million citations and is
growing at the rate of more than
400,000 new entries per year. A wry observation about this volume is that
a conscientious practitioner
who reads two articles each evening will, at the end of a year, be approximately
550 years behind in
keeping up with the literature.
A more reasonable and disquieting observation is that even if only 1 percent
of the new literature is
relevant to health care delivery, that same provider is potentially five
years behind the current state of
knowledge."
These amazing facts make it crystal clear that it is absolutely impossible
for any single human to know
all that is possible to address a problem. That is where the absolute beauty
and enormous potential
power of the Internet and brainstorming comes to play. The technology is
finally here to pull this off.
Very shortly I will be introducing a software program we have been working
on for several years that is
called Knowledge Filter. The program will allow us to capture the collective
wisdom of tens of thousands
of some of the brightest minds on the planet in natural medicine and then
share that knowledge with
you.
Again, all free. You will be empowered with the information you need to
avoid resorting to the traditional
medical paradigm to solve your health concerns.
If you are unable to implement the knowledge you have found on the new
site to solve your problem the
second phase of my mission is to help you identify the absolute best and
brightest health care
professionals that are in your hometown to help you recapture your health.
This will be one very exciting ride and if you follow the suggestions to
recapture your health on this
site, most all of you will live long enough to see the traditional paradigm
transformed.
We are in for a health revolution, guaranteed.
As an aside, The National Library of Medicine, that has Medline, is currently
the number one health site
in the world and my site is currently number 8. After the software is introduced,
we aim to add to the
site more articles and traffic than the National Library of Medicine. People
from all over the world will be
using this tool to answer their health questions and accelerate their own
personal and family's journey
away from disease and towards health.
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