It often breaks my heart when patients do not use their expertise and skills to help each other. Many of the infertile couples who come to me work in the Information Technology industry and are computer whiz-kids. Many of them also have horror stories of how badly they have been treated by their doctors; and how difficult it is to get reliable information about good IVF clinics.
The tragedy is that all they do is complain about the doctors - they do very little to try to help others who are in the same boat. They feel they are powerless, because doctors have all the power and expertise.
This is not true ! It would be quite easy for IT-savvy patients to create a platform which would allow them to rate doctors; and then share their first-hand experience and expertise with each other, so that other infertile couples could benefit from the experiences of the entire community. There is strength in numbers - and knowledge is power.
Bulletin Boards do allow patients to communicate with each other - but this is highly disorganised and unreliable. I am sure clever patients can think of a better way of sharing their knowledge !
I'd be happy to fund a Web 2.0 project which empowers patients to do this ! Any takers ?
No comments:
Post a Comment