Project VRM and e-patients

I’ve been talking to the Project VRM group about healthcare applications of vendor relationship management, also related to the work of the Society for Participatory Medicine and the e-Patients Working Group that preceded it (of which I’ve been a founding member).

Doc Searls and I were talking about this again last week at Fiber Fete; he’s just posted a note about Dave deBronkart’s “Gimme My Damn Data” rant and its implications (expanded and well-overviewed by Dave along with Vince Kuraitis and David Kibbe) to the Project VRM site. Doc takes issue with the use of the word “consume” in the longer piece by Dave et al:

Patients today no longer only consume. They produce. What they want and need is more responsibility for their own health care. More importantly, a patient cannot be a platform if he or she is only consuming. By nature and definition, a consumer is a subordinate creature. It lives downhill from the flow of services. Platforms stand below what they support, but are not subordinate. They are the independent variable on which the variable ones standing on it depend.

Author: Jon Lebkowsky

Co-wrangler of Plutopia News Network, cohost Radio Free Plutopia. Podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. Former editor/publisher, FringeWare Review; associate editor at bOING bOING and Factsheet Five; writer at Mondo 2000, 21C, Wired, Whole Earth Review, Austin Chronicle; sub-editor at Millennium Whole Earth Catalog; blogger at Worldchanging. Digital culture maven, podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. On The WELL, Cohost of VC (virtual communities), Media, and Civil War (.ind) conferences.

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