U of M Grand Rounds: ePatient Stories

Preserving ePatient Stories with Permamarks for StomaCloak

In this video, Dr. Brian Stork presents a beautiful metaphor between his passion for beekeeping, and collecting ePatient stories via a new social technology tool, Permamarks, at the University of Michigan Grand Rounds.

Sometimes, when you are trying to solve a problem, I think it’s important to borrow a page from nature… Bees collect nectar and pollen, and they work together to change the nectar and pollen into honey. They store it in an organized fashion, and they preserve it.

“The Honey They Make Lasts for Thousands of Years”

Dr. Stork uses Permamarks to collect and preserve stories from Ostomates for StomaCloak – helping other patients find valuable information shared on the web – along with patient education materials and resources.

Our shared experiences are stored in the form of stories… So as part of my work, I started thinking about how do we preserve stories in the digital age.

Personal Archiving Tool

Permamarks was created by a young developer, Matisse VerDuyn, to give individuals the power to archive and preserve valuable knowledge that may otherwise be lost when web pages are revised or taken down – resulting in 404 error pages.  The tool allows for public, private, and confidential (encrypted) archiving and content curation.

Using this tool, we can not only collect and preserve a given story on the Internet, but we can also organize it with other stories, and we can share it using social media tools.