Digital Pharma: NHS-backed health social network launches
pharmafile | October 3, 2011 | News story | Medical Communications | Digital Pharma blog, NHS, social media
A new NHS-backed social network has launched to provide support to patients with long-term conditions through ‘personal health planning’.
How Are You? was created through a partnership between the NHS East of England and Cambridge Healthcare, a startup formed last year.
Cambridge Healthcare says the new site will be free for patients to use, but that revenue from third party application developers would allow it to be self-sustaining.
“When a user provides how they’re feeling or inputs their virtual patient record, the content dynamically changes to provide relevant resources and features to that individual,” explained Dawson King, founder and Cambridge Healthcare chief executive.
“Imagine a cross between Twitter and Facebook, but encrypted and you decide how much and with whom you want your information shared with.”
The site, which has been seven months in development, is integrated into existing NHS IT infrastructure and opened yesterday for public registration.
Users can sign in using their Facebook or Microsoft Windows Live ID usernames and there is also Twitter integration that displays public discussions on relevant condition-specific tweets. Soon users will be able to make greater use of Twitter, by replying to tweets and have conversations around a hashtag from within their How Are You? status feed.
Ultimately the site’s plan is to be able to ‘syndicate conversations’ across different social media providers on chosen topics, enabling group discussions around conditions, medications and other topics of interest.
Personal health planning
At the heart of the new network’s offering is ‘personal health planning’, which it describes as a way of “empowering people with long-term conditions to be able to take greater ownership and responsibility for their care and to have more control over the management of their long-term conditions”.
The site allows patients to create a personal health plan that has been developed for people with long-term conditions to help them take control of their care.
“When used properly, the personal health plan will enable you to go to the right place for the information and services that you want,” the site’s backers say.
It says this won’t mean forcing people to self-manage but will support those that want some degree of control and responsibility over their long-term condition.
Planned upgrades will allow patients to give healthcare professionals access to their records, order prescriptions online and make and cancel appointments via the website.
The next couple of months will also see greater patient group integration, an interactive GP directory and, central to Cambridge Healthcare’s plans to make How Are You? self-sustaining, an Application Programming Interface (API) service.
Opening up a “premium” API for How Are You? will, Cambridge Healthcare said, “allow and encourage third parties, including service providers, institutions and device companies to develop a whole range of applications for patients and clinicians that they can access from [the portal]”.
Dominic Tyer is web editor for Pharmafocus and InPharm.com and the author of the Digital Pharma blog He can be contacted via email, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+.
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