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Virtual Communities - Confusing?
- Rahul Potluri (24 April 2006)
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Virtual Communities – Definitely a big step forward
- Vivek Kakar, Rashmi Kumar (26 April 2006)
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Human communities can be empowered using virtual space to build health
- Pedro Urra (5 May 2006)
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Rahul Potluri, Medical Student, Birmingham University, Birmingham, UK, B152TT
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I appreciate the authors view about the immense benefit of virtual health communities. They are approachable and easily accessible sources of information where readers can share each others experiences of health, in a method not previously possible. The vast numbers of experiences may surely be of benefit to many readers medically and more so from the psychosocial aspects associated to any medical condition. However, I was wondering about the need for caution with the rapid growth of the number of groups (according to the article, there are more than 7000 communities on yahoo alone). In a medical world revolving around “Evidence Based Medicine”; Are the growth of vast numbers of these groups beneficial to readers or to the contrary become confusing?. This is especially more relevant when expressing medical information. When reader A promotes the benefits of drug X which a clinician does not agree will be of any benefit for reader B with the same condition, because of lack of evidence. This could lead to a situation where both the reader and to a lesser extent the clinician are confused about the best treatment available. In a profession where every consultation is moving towards “patient centered”, the pressures on a clinician will also grow despite all the guidelines in place. It might be worth considering the promotion of “clinician approved” virtual health communities where all patient experiences’ are shared with substantial background evidence so that both the patient and the clinician will be clear about the best medical practice. This is surely necessary in the changing medical profession today to ease the pressures on the clinicians but how much of this may be practical in encroaching individuals’ freedom is debatable. Rahul Potluri, Medical Student, Birmingham University, rxp289@bham.ac.uk Competing interests: None declared |
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Vivek Kakar, SHO Anaesthesia Southmead hospital, Bristol BS10 5NB, Rashmi Kumar
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Editor- The explosive increase in the health related information on the internet and the number of health related online communities has not only increased the awareness levels amongst common people but also helped the healthcare professionals. The online interactive group activities or virtual communities fall into two major categories from a medical point of view. First is a group of professionals who actively seek each other and share authentic information. Professionals from one part of the world with expertise in one particular field share their experience with people from other parts of the world. Interaction can be purely unilateral e.g. expert review of pathology slides and X-rays of cancer patients, or it can be bilateral e.g. group of intensivists discussing the practices at their institutes. These groups also provide a cheap, fast and reliable mode of sharing relevant information or knowledge for the clinicians who often find it difficult to spare enough time from their busy schedules to attend conferences or courses in order to keep themselves up to date. Not to mention the cost of these events. Second is the group of people who run into each other online because they share a common health problem e.g. cancer, infertility etc. They are anxious, not necessarily well informed and most vulnerable to accept or disperse information which is unauthenticated. I agree the information shared in these groups can often be incorrect1 but most of these patients are well supported in the community by virtue of their condition, others who seek information just out of interest make it a point to discuss it with their healthcare providers. In either case false information gets rectified. Major benefit of these groups as rightly mentioned by Jadad et al.2 is the extent of psychological support these groups provide to their members in coming to terms with their illnesses by interacting with people having similar problems. Ability to maintain complete anonymity is an added advantage for some. Carers also benefit from these groups as much as the patients themselves e.g. relatives of patients with schizophrenia. Already a significant component of patient doctor interaction involves computers and the internet and it is easy to predict a future, not too far, where every hospital website would be a highly interactive online community, and computers & internet will be indispensable for an efficient health care service. With the changing clinical governance framework it is essential that every healthcare provider has significant working knowledge of computers and internet in order to be an efficient part the system. References 1.Esquivel A, Meric-Bernstam F, Bernstam EV. Accuracy and self correction of information received from an internet breast cancer list: content analysis. BMJ 2006; 332:939-42. 2.Alejandro R Jadad, Murray W Enkin, Sholom Glouberman, Philip Groff, Anita Stern. Are virtual communities good for our health? BMJ 2006; 332:925-926. Competing interests: None declared |
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Pedro Urra, Director of Infomed, National Center for Information in Health Sciences Infomed calle 27 No 110 e M y N. Vedado. La Habana. CP 10400 Cuba
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Human communities can be empowered using virtual space to build health We have been using virtual space to empower health professionals to manage the information they need and to share knowledge. In Infomed, that is the Cuban health information network, the creation and improvement of virtual communities have been one of the main strategies in order to manage the information pollution. If you visit our portal for example, you can find that we have facilitated the work of health professionals in order to create information spaces that they manage and where the professional groups manage by themselves the information according to goals and needs of the health programs in our context. That means that the human communities of practice, with their experience, their relationships have been empowered in order to share knowledge and to manage the complexity of the information needs of such communities. At the same time, they share with other communities their perspectives and information selection and recommendations and use other communities views to complement their approach. Then , if you need information about
hypertension for example, you can visit the hypertension portal space of
Infomed (http://www.sld.cu/servicios/hta/) that is maintained by the Cuban
community of specialists with clear reference to real people and to their
teams and their institutional expressions, if you need information about
rehabilitation you can visit the virtual space of the rehabilitation
community (http://www.sld.cu/sitios/rehabilitacion/) and so on. The use of
virtual communities has been quite useful and has promoted the
appropriation of the virtual tools by health professionals without
renunciation to the way live is. I mean considering the way we normally
work. We need of course more research and we are doing that. Recently the
Journal of Medical Internet Research published an article about the
Infomed experience (Séror AC A Case Analysis of INFOMED: The Cuban
National Health Care Telecommunications Network and Portal J Med Internet
Res 2006;8(1):e1
Competing interests: None declared |
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