Speaker
C. Michael Gibson, MS, MD
Professor of Medicine
Harvard Medical School
President and CEO
Baim and PERFUSE Research Institutes
Topic
The Democratization of Medicine: Open Access, Social Media, AI, Apps, and Empowering the Patient as the Future of Clinical Research
Keywords
Clinical research; Open access; Social media; Artificial intelligence; Heartline study; WikiDoc; WikiPatient
Key Points
- As the internet is replacing the printing press, “copyleft” is replacing copyright in the open-access era. It is a participatory community with bidirectional flow of information through social media.
- Health data does not equal health care. Patients are looking to physicians to curate health information from huge volumes of data.
- Social media and open access during the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that physicians are citizen journalists, innovators, activists, and educators.
- In this new world, patients are enrolling in virtual trials via a phone app and will be followed up online through claims data and patient-reported outcomes.
Discussion Themes
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a call to arms to clinicians to combat not only the virus but the misinformation. As educators we must set the path and not allow uninformed people to take control.
Enabling patient-empowered trials has the potential for more generalizable study results and can lead to patient-specific predictions through use of artificial intelligence.
How do we validate the quality of open-access data and reports that are not peer-reviewed?
How can we diminish the hazards of skewed research outcomes arising from trial participant conversations on social media?
Read more from C. Michael Gibson in The Democratization of Medical Research and Education Through Social Media: The Potential and the Peril (JAMA Cardiology 2017).
Tags
#pctGR, @Collaboratory1