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Understanding Clinical Complexity Through Conversational Learning in Medical Social Networks: Implementing User-Driven Health Care

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Handbook of Systems and Complexity in Health

Abstract

With the increasing pressures to keep up with the most current literature, skills such as the ability to be empathic with patients, emotional intelligence, the ability to collaborate, and well-rounded decision making may be set aside in the race for information mastery. This can affect patient care. It is well documented that a significant part of a patient’s recovery can be attributed to the dynamics between the patient and those they come to for medical care. In fact even placebo intervention is more successful when the patient trusts in and can form a therapeutic alliance with the treating professional [1].

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Notes

  1. 1.

     This section was edited by Amy Price.

  2. 2.

     See glossary at the end of the chapter.

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Acknowledgements

Priyank Jain and Yogesh Jain who are two of the physicians described in the illustrative example of “clinical complexity” in this chapter thank

The team at the Cochrane Students’ Journal Club, The Forum for Medical Students’ Research, India (INFORMER) and the South Asian Cochrane Network and Centre, Vellore.

The team of students and faculty members from Tabula Rasa.

Peg Ford—patient advocate extraordinaire for sharing her story and inputs with us.

Vasumathi Sriganesh, CEO at QMed Knowledge Foundation India for her help in citation finding.

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Correspondence to Rakesh Biswas M.D. .

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Additional information

Conflict of Interests: The authors have no financial conflict of interests but the solutions represented in the chapter are colored by their passion in this area and these solutions still require further experimentation by neutral bodies before they can be accepted as concrete evidence.

Glossary of Social Tools

Blogs

Blogs are content management systems that can host text, images, audios or video in an interactive format where users can place comments and create a discussion. Free platforms are available on Google’s Blogspot (http://blogger.com) or the open access Wordpress (http://wordpress.com) services.

E-mail Groups

Are moderated lists which allow sharing of information, video, audio, or other attachables and hence act as asynchronous discussion platforms. Free e-mail groups can be created on Google (http://googlegroups.com) or Yahoo (http://groups.yahoo.com) or Posterous (http://posterous.com).

Facebook

A social networking site that allows peer-to-peer interaction, build groups with different levels of privacy (from open to secret), build fan pages to showcase content, and create albums to handle images. Also allows video and text chats.

Google +

A Google powered social network that has similar functionality as Facebook with a special video chat system called “Hangouts.”

Google Reader

A tool to read updates from sites that can generate dynamic “feeds” also known as RSS.

RSS

“Really Simple Syndication” is a system which generates dynamic feeds whenever new updates or additions are made to a site. These can be pulled in by tools like Google Reader to read the updates.

Twitter

Microblogging site which allows for sharing of images, video, or audio, along with links. Contents of a single post are to be limited to 140 characters.

YouTube

Free video hosting site run by Google that can host a number of different formats of varying lengths.

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Price, A. et al. (2013). Understanding Clinical Complexity Through Conversational Learning in Medical Social Networks: Implementing User-Driven Health Care. In: Sturmberg, J., Martin, C. (eds) Handbook of Systems and Complexity in Health. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4998-0_44

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