To betas, citizens! Form your testbeds!
In Brief: About a call from McGill University Health Center to participate in the beta testing of a personal web health record
Since June 2008, the McGill University Health Center (MUHC) is working with Medical.MD to create a personal web health record for patients. MedforYou 1.0 should make it possible to monitor one’s own health condition and medical procedures as well as those of family members, to manage lifestyle (nutrition, exercise) and to get real-time interactive support. MedforYou is a Facebook-style interactive website that is meant to be accessible to everyone.
The tool aims to allow the patient to organize their health related information and access it from anywhere where Internet is available. So it will gather information such as demographic profile, allergies, medications, health troubles, vaccination, social habits, family history, but will also include a medical “encyclopedia”.
Promoters believe that MedforYou will enhance communications between patients and health professionals. Applications like a dashboard of interventions, a personal journal, a schedule of visits and appointments, a list of one’s health professional, a messaging service and reminders of things to do will support this collaboration.
Comments on the beta version of the site are to be collected between July and September 2009. MUHC intends to offer MedforYou 1.0 to the population in October 2009. Other improvements are also planned for next year.
Medical.MD is currently discussing with TELUS Health Solutions to onboard MedforYou to its new “consumer health platform”, TELUS Health Space, powered by Microsoft HealthVault.
Given the weight of the players involved and the demand from citizens to access and manage their own health information, the solution MedforYou certainly has some chance of success, and even establishing a model for such applications.
Such a web service, however, sets many challenges. As an illustration, we can mention only those relating to:
- accessibility for people with disabilities, low literacy or simply… sick;
- response to specific needs of people with certain types of chronic, acute or temporary health situations;
- controlling use of the service by a third parties in the entourage of the patient (mothers of children that inevitably becomes teenagers; close ones to persons incapable to use it themselves).
So, are there no interest here that, not only “ordinary patients” participate in this beta test, but also people working with various categories of patients? Or involved in consumers or patients advocacy? Or in Web accessibility and the promotion of open software? Or journalists, on the technology beat or not? Because beta trials are not only opportunities for developers to refine their products to the test of individual realities. Are they not also opportunities to conduct some social and technological watch, to foster internal and public debates and to influence the development of technical applications for citizens’ organizations and society as a whole? In short, an opportunity for dialogue between designers-promoters and users-citizens? Even more so as participation in a beta test is in no way a kind of endorsement of product: this is amply demonstrated by all these journalists and columnists who frequently participate in beta testing as a means to monitor and criticize developments.
Thus, if you allow me to reword La Marseillaise on the 14th of July: To betas, citizens! Form your testbeds!
Source: MUHC press release, Medical.MD
Catégories : Brèves, Observations
Mots clés: Beta testing, Medical.MD, Microsoft, MUHC, Patient Record, Telus