Infographics are a great way to keep up to date with healthcare trends, they are easy, quick and even fun to read. I never thought I would get a Pinterest account, let alone suggest that others get a Pinterest account. However, Pinterest has the best infographics and the best platform for sharing them, so I am suggesting you sign up.  Follow my Pinterest to stay up to date on Health Policy, Health IT, and general Healthcare information. Today’s infographic is from CDW Healthcare, CDW is a publicly traded company that provides hardware, software and IT solutions for healthcare.  I chose to write about this infographic today because patients are the consumers of healthcare and therefore we all work for them. The consumers of most other industry are now able to “shop around” and are educated consumers. This infographic shows that the expansion of consumer education and power has moved to Healthcare. Patients can now search social media, research their doctor on HealthGrades, view their profile and credentials on the practice website, and read their providers blog to ensure they are staying up to date with industry trends. After patients have vetted their doctor they want to learn more about their condition.  84% believe they should have full access to their medical record online. Beth Israel of Boston has piloted a program, Open Notes, where patients are able to read all notes made by their physician including mental health notes. BIDC has found this program to be very successful and claims that patients feel “more in control of their care and are taking better care of themselves”. It is much easier to motivate yourself to watch your diet and exercise when you can see a graph of your increasing cholesterol everyday. Surprisingly, only 52% of patients feel that they would be comfortable undergoing a video consultation from their physician.  It will be interesting to see if the coming years if this is just fear of the unknown and patients will feel comfortable with telemedicine once it is an integral part of our society.  However 82% of patients say that consultations over a mobile device are the best option for them.  These results appear to be conflicting but it is likely that patients would like to have phone video/consultations for run of the mill colds, UTI’s, Strep Throat and Sinus Infections and would like to actually see their doctor in person if their symptoms are complicated, severe or serious.  The final part of the infographic touches on wearables and the idea of the quantified self.  Currently, these devices are centered around fitness, cannot integrate with the EHR or any other device and have poor analytics.  While, I love my Garmin swim watch, the analytics cannot even calculate my fastest times, let alone pack the data (all in excel) up from all my swimming sessions  and transport it via HL7 to my various patient portals, none of which can even talk to eachother yet.  So while  88% of physicians want patients to monitor their vitals at home, it will be difficult for the provider to have access and provide care on these values in the near future.