Dana: Apparently you will never bother to read anything about what I really stand for, you are so in need of an enemy. So I am probably wasting my time responding to you.
I repeat: No one should have to lose his/her privacy or his/her children's privacy forever in order to benefit from health IT---in the words of Latanya Sweeney PhD on designing privacy in health IT systems: "Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, famously quipped, "Privacy is dead. Get over it." br
Sweeney's response: "Oh privacy is definitely not dead. When people say you have to choose, it means they haven't actually thought the problem through or they aren't willing to accept the answer.
He very much shares that attitude of the computer scientist who built the technology that's invasive; who says, "Well, you want the benefits of my technology, you'll get over privacy". It's exactly the kind of computer scientist we don't want to be graduating in the future. See:http://patientprivacyrights.org/2007/0/privacyisntdead-or-at-least-it-shouldnt-be-a-qa-with-latanya_sweeney
Deborah Peel, MD
While Luddites such as Dr. Deborah Peel keep telling patients to avoid online contacts, new research is revealing that social networks may be key to changing behavior, lowering the disease rate, and cutting health costs.
MIT management professor Damon Centola says it’s the density of a social network that is the key to success in changing behavior. His paper on this, “The Spread of Behavior in an Online Social Network Experiment,” is in the September 3 issue of Science. (Picture from Dr. Centola’s page at MIT.)
The conclusion contradicts conventional wisdom about social networks, which is that long ties will spread information faster than dense ones.
Information may spread faster through long ties, Centola learned, but it will be internalized and acted upon if many people near to you are all saying the same thing.
To prove his point Centola created a social network of about 1,500 people, organized around health. Half the participants were organized as strangers along areas of interest, the other half were clustered with people close to them.
The rate of adopting to a specific behavior change, in this case signing up for a health forum, was four times greater in those organized as a cluster, he found.
“Social reinforcement from multiple health buddies made participants much more willing to adopt the behavior,” he found. While disease may spread through a single contact, concerted action against it requires multiple contacts.
There are important implications for social networks aimed at health. Connecting people who are physically close may be more important than connecting people whose conditions are similar, for instance.
Change, in other words, requires an intervention. Even when you’re online.
