Health 2.0: patients-led research

Patientslikeme is a social network of patients created a couple of years ago. The patients shared their experiences with the disease to other patients. Health professionals can also participate. Now there are active communities on neuromuscular disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson's, fibromyalgia, mútliple sclerosis, diseases associated with mood (anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder ...) and AIDS. At present, more than 23,000 patients share their data.
At the end of 2007, there were some data that suggested that lithium could slow the progression of the evolution of the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Fornai published a paper in this topic in February 2008). From these data and using the platform Patientslikeme, Karen Felzer (a californian researcher in seismology and daughter of a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and Humberto Macedo (affected amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, from Brasil) launch a study to see the effect of lithium in a broad group patients. This is an inquiry without "professional researchers". A research study organized by the patients themselves. In a short periode of time they recruited more than 200 participants, which folow-up for six months. In November 2008 published the results showing that lithium has no effect on the evolution of the disease. Patients have done a quick and transparent study.
This new model of patients-as-partners is a key element of Health 2.0

Stretching Moodle for healthcare innovation

Moodle has become the preferred e-learning platform for the academic community. Moodle combines active learning and pedagogical innovation.
Some of its features (student centredness, open source, lecturer control...) have convinced to reach LMS summit. Even though the current version is not 2.0ish, it is expected that it will be fairly improved in the next version (actually named 2.0).

We did consider to stretching Moodle for business (healthcare) innovation purposes and these are the results of our group session.

What is an innovation group?
A group of people that share a common goal and think and discuss to advance a topic to be implemented in a real context (application). Group members then share visions, documents and thoughts during and undefined time span.
It may exist a working plan (but it may considerably differ) and a set of deliverables might be set beforehand.
The innovation group drivers are participation, thinking differently, making knowledge explicit, bringing new ideas...

What Moodle could offer for innovation?
[Needs & Tools]

1. Gathering opinion: Queries, Surveys (internal use only), Forums (debates, input quality appraisal)
2. Subgroups: Queries
3. Managing tasks and events: metacourse as parent and multiple activities as dependants
4. Communication: internal messaging
5. Participation monitoring: monitor engine, reporting (activity, participant), input quality appraisal through forums.
6. Resources management: based on active roles
7. Collaboration: blog (personal rather than group blog), wiki, glossary (automatic linkage)

Tasks: to receive input from participants (non shareable)
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