User-Driven Healthcare and Narrative Medicine: Utilizing Collaborative Social Networks and Technologies

E-healthcare, Health 2.0, and user driven healthcare are steadily increasing in popularity among patients and healthcare professionals.  In spite of this, there is surprisingly little written about the wealth of information available on the Web created by individual healthcare users, in terms of their experiential disease narratives, potential learning, and improved healthcare results.

User-Driven Healthcare and Narrative Medicine: Utilizing Collaborative Social Networks and Technologies fills this gap by exploring various individual user driven strategies that move towards solving multiple clinical system problems in healthcare, utilizing real life examples. Documenting individual concrete experiences, reflective observations, abstract conceptualizations and particular instances of active experimentation, this text is a valuable resource not only for the healthcare academic community, but patients interested in social networking to improve their own healthcare outcomes.