The plans to tackle the growing scrounge of asthma are innovative indeed.

Would that make patients feel more engaged and empowered in managing their health care, and would that ultimately make them happier if not healthier?
These questions are being raised by Dr. Samir Gupta, a respirologist at St. Michael's Hospital.
His research has found that a wiki – a website developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content – can be an innovative new tool for developing individual asthma action plans.
"We've introduced a new way of getting patients engaged in developing tools that might improve their health," Dr. Gupta said. "We're empowering patients, involving patients in the health care process."
Dr. Gupta said a lot of asthma action plans – a one-page set of instructions for managing a patient's asthma – are developed by experts without input from patients or the clinics that distribute them. When they are difficult to read or understand, patients don't follow them, especially these days when health care providers face competition from such things as the Internet and iPad apps for patients' attention.
Advertisement
He said the results were collaborative and without the frequent hierarchical issues that can define the patient-doctor relationship.
Dr. Gupta said this method of decision-making could be used in other medical fields, as well as in marketing, where consumers could have a role.
Dr. Gupta's study on wikis for asthma action plans appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
Source-Eurekalert