User-Driven Healthcare and Narrative Medicine

A book edited by Dr. Rakesh Biswas and Dr Carmel Martin

This book explores various individual user driven strategies that are moving towards solving multiple clinical system problems in healthcare, utilizing real life examples.

E-healthcare, Health 2.0, and user driven healthcare are different recent routes to improving healthcare outcomes that are steadily increasing in popularity among patients and healthcare professionals, particularly with the growth of the Internet.

Although there are popular books on e-healthcare that discuss the evolving methodologies and challenges in implementation, there is not a single book which addresses the wealth of information already available on the Web, created by individual healthcare users in terms of their experiential disease narratives and the potential learning generated along with improved healthcare outcomes.

This book would be able to not only fill this gap, but also pioneer a new approach to healthcare, promoting social networking and learning between multiple users and stakeholders, primarily patients, health professionals, and other actors in the care giving collaborative network across a Web interface. Also, as a first on the topic, it is likely to become an important source of reference in the years to come.

Target Audience
The audience for this book is wide, beginning with undergraduate students of many disciplines of healthcare who would find the conversational narratives an immense source of stimulation to delve deeper into clinical system disorders. The book would again serve to instigate innovative teaching learning methods among medical and healthcare teachers who could utilize the patient narratives to stimulate and inspire their students toward patient centered learning.

Beyond the healthcare academic community, this book would be a resource for academics researching social networking with particular reference to healthcare. Last but not least, this book is a potential resource for patients interested in social networking to improve their own healthcare outcomes.

Handbook of Research on Electronic Collaboration and Organizational Synergy

Cite as: Biswas R, Maniam J, Lee EWH, Umakanth S, et al (2008 ) Electronic collaboration toward social health outcomes, in (Eds.) Salmon J, Wilson L, Handbook of Research on Electronic Collaboration and Organizational Synergy, Hershey, PA: IGI Global publishing Nov 2008

This is an illustrative process description of a collaborative project utilizing a multidisciplinary approach.
The requirement for collaboration originated in an attempt to optimally answer the needs of individual
patients and health professionals for information to allow them to achieve better health outcomes.
This chapter introduces the problem statement through the auto-ethnographic reflections of three project developers. These reflections illustrate individual experiential agendas that initiated electronic collaboration among diverse stakeholders in the health care network. Each reflection also illustrates the sequence of events in a collaborative process beginning at the individual level and growing through the interaction of multiple individuals including patients, their relatives, health professionals, and other actors in the care giving network. This chapter describes how collaboration was sustained and further developed into an operational model.

The Conscious Notebook: a narrative human ontology

Present trend in computer ontology is toward the development of artificial intelligence and human ontology is an intervention to positively support it with natural human intelligence such that it is infused with the pluralism that characterizes human social structures.

This book plans to make a beginning toward that end utilizing a meta-narrative that examines the life of an academically failed physician and his relatively academically successful daughter. The short individual narrative beads that are threaded into this larger narrative represent a multi genre science and fantasy of medicine. On one hand it balances a postmodern stance with its incredulity toward absolute evidence based truth on the other a tolerant pluralism that simply recognizes all approaches as credible as long as the resultant is geared toward positive outcomes (and not driven by fear of negative outcomes).

The book portrays a non-linear narrative ontology interspersed in linear discourses on its relevance to human cognition and ontology. It creates a fictional conceptual model of a human that is visualized in physical form analogous to a notebook computer that hides an infinite backend process of cognition analogous to the human mind.

This particular backend entity is labeled con (shortened from a consciousness that is universal to all humans and other sentient life also sometimes represented simply as being) and is fictionally endowed with powers that enable it to run on multiple notebook computers (analogous or metaphorically morphologically indistinguishable from humans). This helps the meta-narrative to explore human cognition and its physical manifestations in an Earthly plain. 

The story line begins with Con taking the plunge with his notebook June into an Earthy material life. A plunge that makes him fall through life and is bound to end in death. Death smashes his notebook’s hard disc into tiny bits and pieces. The nonlinear narrative as a result tries to pick up these broken fragments of memory and brings out Con’s journey through the human body (in its tree like statistical self-similarity with the Earth and the universe, which may be represented in an atom). It portrays microcosmic interactions inside the human body at a macrocosmic level of day to day living on an Earthy scale.

Con becomes well versed with the anatomy and circuitry of the various intricate components of his machine but also realizes that it has developed in an evolving assembly line whose creators are long dead and nobody till date understands perfectly how the damn thing works. However there are theories, stories of atoms and molecules and their subatomic families regularly utilized to explain how semi conductor chips work inside our bodies. Throughout the ages, stories take on multicolored hues, theories on the nature of Con, Earth and self-evolving machines…the science is ever changing.       

Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies

Human illness is largely a phenomenon that is constructed within social networks where people and events are interdependent. At an individual level, every human forms his or her own cognitive conceptual models/ontologies as a part of her/his social cognitive interactions labeled social cognitive ontological constructs (SCOCs). Other than this, individuals also form similar conceptual constructs from collective social learning. Health professionals develop their main constructs (medical ontology) from collective social learning and top down knowledge. This chapter makes the case to merge dominant centralized health professional expert generated medical ontology with decentralized, naïve, patient user generated common sense medical ontology, in a manner that generates minimum conflict and negative emotions. User driven health care provides collaborative learning networks among patients, families and care networks, and professionals and other actors, across a web interface. Sharing human experiences documented in persistent clinical encounters stored in web based electronic health records through available web 2.0 technologies can transform medical ontology and augment patient-centered care.


Key words, Illness, Social constructs, Social cognition, Medial ontology, User driven health care, persistent clinical encounters, electronic health records

User-Driven Healthcare and Narrative Medicine

Co-edited with Dr. Carmel Martin, Associate Professor, Family Medicine, Northern Ontario School of Medicine, Ontario, Canada

I am keen to have your advice and guidance about a book that we are editing,for a US based publisher, entitled, “User-Driven Healthcare and Narrative Medicine". We invite chapters written by patients along with health professionals and other stakeholders as co authors in their continued effort to learn more about the disease that they have been involved in managing together.

Short of that we also welcome chapters written by patients or health professionals separately on their own experiences in dealing with certain diseases (or even in general their practical experiences with various diseases and the role of web learning with its easy or difficult to obtain similar experiential narratives and EBM literature that may have gone a long way toward improving or perhaps even harming health outcomes).

Feel free to forward this to any potential contributors you may have in your mind.

One of our goals in using patient stories is to create a bottom up patient centered learning model separate from the traditional text book disease centered model still prevalent in medical school curricula.

Using real patient or health professional stories relating the patient's or health professional's journey helps to create a real world patient centered context in the growing minds of students in the healthcare profession who are at an impressionable stage.

These students are an important target audience for this book.

Please find the details in this web link:

http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=657

There is also a chapter template available online at:
http://www.igi-global.com/development/author_info/

Appreciate your help and guidance in formulating strategies toward
this book and look forward to your response.

Do let me know if you have any more queries. I understand that the above is very different from any book that is usual for medical students or the healthcare community and so understanding the requirements is challenging to say the least.

I can also forward some pdfs of possible sample chapters (already published as articles) and a sample article on "user driven healthcare" if interested. 

Open Information Management: Applications of Interconnectivity and Collaboration

Chapter XVIII: Open information management in User-driven health care

Rakesh Biswas, People's College of Medical Sciences, India
Kevin Smith, National Digital Research Centre, Ireland
Carmel M. Martin, Northern Ontario School of Medicine, Canada
Joachim P. Sturmberg, Monash University and the University of Newcastle, Australia
Ankur Joshi, People's College of Medical Sciences, India
Vinod Narkhede, People's College of Medical Sciences, India
Jitendra Jain, People's College of Medical Sciences, India
This chapter discusses the role of open health information management to develop a novel, adaptable mixed-platform for supporting health care informational needs. This platform enables clients (patient users) requiring healthcare to enter an unstructured but detailed account of their day-to-day health informational requirements that may be structured into a lifetime electronic health record. It illustrates the discussion with an operational model for a pilot project that can help to explore the potential of a collaborative network of patient and health professional users to support the provision of health care services, helping to effectively engage patient users with their own healthcare. Such a solution has the potential to allow both patient and health professional users to produce useful materials, to contribute toward improved social health outcomes in terms of health education and primary disease prevention, and to address both pre-treatment and post-treatment phases of illness that are often neglected in the context of overburdened support services.

Life long learning in health care: a global perspective

Co authored with Brian Cobb, State University of Bangladesh, Carmel M. Martin, Northern Ontario School of Medicine, Ottawa, Canada, Joachim Sturmberg, Monash university, Melbourne, Australia, Joseph Pappachan, Manipal University, Melaka, Malaysia

This chapter begins with reflections on the process of medical learning in the formative years and proceeds to describe continuing medical education or life long learning in health care as a process of learning from a regular exercise in clinical problem solving that is ubiquitous in all health care specialties. It describes the present status quo of a top down compartmentalized structure of medical education and its gradual modification by a bottom up, evidential and experiential ‘point of care’ continuing medical education. To add a global perspective it discusses viewpoints from different practitioners of health care and education and finally summarizes future trends in continuing health education.