Thanks, Mom!

My Mom was a nurse and she taught me so much about health and nutrition and how to live in healthy ways. She also taught me how to sew with a sewing machine, cook with a crock pot, and use paper lists to keep myself organized. I’m certain that if personal health record systems had existed when I was growing up, Mom would have showed me how to use that technology too. But PHRs didn’t exist back then.

Information technology is changing the way we live in dramatic ways. Prior patterns of how to live, provided to us by our parents and earlier generations, are no longer sufficient to navigate living in the “information age”.

Our generation is creating these new capabilities and part of what we need to do is develop the patterns for how to integrate the new information technology into everyday living.

It would be extremely hard for a person to do that by his or her self. But with a broad network of people working together, we can begin to address this kind of change. The Janie Appleseed Network helps us share this new know-how with each other as it is developed.

We are teaching the skills today’s mothers and fathers don’t yet have themselves. It’s our way of splicing this new way of managing health and care into the way families and individuals live day-to-day life.

Image credit: Author’s personal photo