Last week, it was my great honor to be featured on the Healthcare Leaders (#HCLDR) tweetchat, where we discussed the issues I raised in recent blog post titled “Aging & e-Patients: Challenges & Opportunities in Geriatrics.”
In this post, I’ll share a list of key tweets from the session. If this is a topic of interest to you, I really hope you’ll take a look! It was fun to see what came out of a diverse group’s brainstorming on how we might leverage new approaches, and new technologies, to improve healthcare for aging adults & their families.
To seed the conversation, I wrote last week’s blog post for HCLDR, which was specifically about how we might adapt the e-patient approach, in order to empower and inform older adults and their care circle.
Now, please note that by e-patient approach, I don’t necessarily mean tech-enhanced health activity.
Instead, I’m thinking of the approach by which people use the internet — and often online communities — to become more proactive about their health and healthcare. Among other things, this can allow people to be more participatory and involved during encounters with clinicians and the healthcare system. (This Wikipedia entry on e-patients is useful to those new to the term, even though it may not “reflect the encyclopedic tone” desired.)
The three topic questions were:
- T1: What are the barriers to older adults and family caregivers adopting a more “e-patient” approach?
- T2: How can we foster more online communities where aging adults and/or family caregivers learn practical geriatrics?
- T3: What can we do to bring more attention to geriatric medicine / healthcare for older adults?
You can also read the complete transcript of the tweetchat here.
[Interested in this topic? See my follow-up post about barriers to older adults being e-patients.]
