The Rise of Person-Centered Healthcare and the Influence of Health Informatics and Social Network Applications on Mental
Online social networks have the potential to enhance many aspects of patient care. In mental healthcare may allow for more accurate symptom tracking and assessment tools and provide more convenient platforms for implementing therapeutic techniques. Online
- PDF / 306,971 Bytes
- 23 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 90 Downloads / 174 Views
The Rise of Person-Centered Healthcare and the Influence of Health Informatics and Social Network Applications on Mental Health Care Michelle Burke Parish and Peter Yellowlees
2.1 Introduction Social networks are rapidly becoming the new frontier of healthcare. The use of social networking in healthcare has been spurred by a shift to person-centered healthcare models and a patient driven movement towards greater transparency and communication with providers. Connecting with patients over social networks could allow providers to be more fully informed about patients’ day-to-day issues, symptoms and lifestyle choices. The click of a mouse could open a window into patients’ daily lives and give patients access to their providers in the convenience of their own home. Social media could foster a revival of the house-call or rather become the digital house-call of the future. Such an approach may find no better home than in the field of mental health where relationships and communication are paramount to treatment success. However, one might ask, what would this picture of mental healthcare look like? Might mental health care soon involve clinicians logging onto online social networks: checking patients’ online activity, evaluating patients’ moods, administering surveys and determining if additional appointments are needed, adjusting medications, reviewing video of a significant event or issue uploaded by a patient, or even running software algorithms or other diagnostic tools to evaluate a patients mental state though the language and information shared over social networking? Although this picture of mental health treatment may seem a bit farfetched, the technology to support these methods exists and research to examine these approaches is already underway. As patient-provider interaction online increases and the popularity of social networks booms to an alltime high, clinicians having direct links to their patients through web-based and mobile applications is just around the corner from becoming common place. Yet,
M. B. Parish P. Yellowlees (&) Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Davis, U.S.A
M. Lech et al. (eds.), Mental Health Informatics, Studies in Computational Intelligence 491, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-38550-6_2, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
17
18
M. B. Parish and P. Yellowlees
research in this area is new and limited, and important ethical issues as well as patient privacy, security and confidentiality must be considered as this ‘‘new frontier’’ in healthcare merges into the mainstream.
2.2 Person-Centered Healthcare and the Influence of Health Informatics in Mental Healthcare 2.2.1 Rise of Person-Centered Healthcare The use of information technology in healthcare has long been driven by the need to expand services to those less reachable and to increase the convenience of health care delivery. We have recently seen a paradigm shift in healthcare from provider-driven models to more person-centered approaches. Person-centered healthcare is a patient dr
Data Loading...
