Highlight HEALTH 2.0 » social media

Highlight HEALTH 2.0 Interview: Phil Baumann

Walter Jessen — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 02:20:39 +0000

Phil Baumann is an anomaly; he began his professional career as an accountant, a treasury analyst and an enterprise process designer. After years in the enterprise, he decided to make a difference in healthcare and trained as a registered nurse. Following two years in the ICU, Phil transitioned into the pharmaceutical industry via a clinical research organization (CRO). In his free time, Phil Baumann blogs about how technologies influence us, focusing on healthcare applications of social media. He expounds regularly on his blog (PhilBaumann.com) and on Twitter (@PhilBaumann), discussing how healthcare and other related industries should approach emerging media technologies. Indeed, over the past two years, Phil has averaged over 500 tweets per month on Twitter (top five words: rt, twitter, #hcsm, good, social).

Last year, Phil Baumann started CareVocate Strategies, offering organizations personalized, professional and focused strategic guidance on how to understand their relationship with social technologies and communities, and how to best interact with their customers.

In July 2010, Phil started Health Is Social, a website where the healthcare and life sciences learn how to integrate digital and social media into their strategies. I had the opportunity to talk one-on-one with Phil Baumann about CareVocate Strategies, Health Is Social and the future of social media in healthcare. Last month, Phil was also recently invited to be on the Board of Advisors for Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media.

The Interview

Phil Baumann, thanks for taking some time to talk with me. Talk to me briefly about how social media relates to patient empowerment.

Before directly addressing patient empowerment, I’d like to offer a historical perspective of media and then relate that to today’s healthcare environment.

Social media are evolving technologies that are opening up and revealing new ways for people to network and connect with each other, share experiences and locate information. As such, they are destroying traditional power structures and relationships while creating new ones. Just as moveable type extended literacy from the small enclaves of empowered political and religious authorities to the populations they governed, today’s media similarly break open the 20th Century model of limited and unilateral channels of communication. One key difference, however, is that the changes the printed word brought forth transpired over 500 years. Today’s media evolve over just years, months, weeks. And these media are not just one form: they involve text, audio, video and mashups of all three.

The printed word re-shaped how we thought — from a more naturalistic and curvilinear way of viewing the world to a more literal and linear way. It was that way of thinking which the printed word spurred that had the most impact on civilization: it catalyzed technological innovation, mechanized political and economic relationships and ultimately sent us to the moon. Now as far as healthcare is concerned, we are seeing changes in power relationships between patients and providers. The information which traditional medicine held and provided centrally to patients is now leeching away into a Web of decentralized sources. So patients can now search online, connect with others from around the world and share experiences and stories in ways unthinkable only a few years ago.

Information is power; it’s energy that does work. But the information has to be reliable and vetted. And the brain which interprets and uses that information needs to be enlightened enough to make the most of it. Furthermore, it needs to be connected to other brains that can do the right kind of lifting.

And therein lies both the opportunities and dangers of healthcare social media.

How do we balance the absolute need for patient empowerment, with the vital need for proper assessment, diagnosis and treatment?
How do we ensure that both patients and providers are truly empowered?
What differences do different media make in terms of communication, information-gathering and curation?
How radically do we need to re-think medicine, healthcare provision and collaboration?
Social media in healthcare is forcing us to ask these questions. It’s imperative that physicians and nurses and researchers and others involved in healthcare to voice their views — and even re-think what they’ve learned.

Social media is also, quite interestingly, provided the very forums in which both providers and patients can tackle these questions. My hope is that we can harness social media towards a Healthcare Democracy, and not just a Healthcare Cacophony. That is, people need to work with each other, no over.

In September of last year, you started RNchat. What’s it all about?

The idea of RNchat was something I had working for quite some time. RNchat is about creating an ambient, intimate and pliant environment for nurses to learn about each other, trade experiences, brainstorm about finding better ways to deliver care and just generally socialize and have fun. I had been working on the basic premise of RNchat for a while. One of the reasons I began blogging and forging an online voice was because I realized that nursing didn’t have a strong enough presence online. When Twitter arrived, I saw it as a fundamentally new kind of communications and utility platform that could open up novel ways of connection — not just among people, but among machines. To me, it seemed to be a new kind of internet — a simple technology as deceptively valuable as TCP/IP. I saw the need for nursing to come into the 21st Century. Healthcare in general has been behind social media and I believed that without nurses, any conversation about healthcare adoption of social media and digital technologies would be unacceptably incomplete.

In 2009, Twitter chats grew in popularity. But almost all of them were Twitter chats about social media. They really weren’t much different from each other actually. Nothing wrong with that at all — but I wanted to actually use these media to do the work they claimed to achieve. So I started RNchat. The goal of RNchat was to provide a gateway for nurses into social media of course — but it was more importantly to get them to network with each other, develop comfort with an online voice and to create a unique place where their ideas an experiences could be publicly synergized. It’s been over a year now since it’s launched and has received much attention and has grown rather nicely. I even have a couple other nurses moderating the chats — Ellen Richter (@EllenRichter) and Terri Schmidt (@OnlineNursing).

This month marked the launch of MDchat for physicians. The physicians involved so far has found it to be a positive experience, just like the nurses who joined RNchat early on.

In July at Health 2.0 STAT DC, you talked about nurses and social media, calling them “the last Jedi knights of this republic”. How do you see nurses leveraging social media?

On one hand, I see nurses using social media just like everybody else. On the other, they bring a unique perspective about the human condition which is clearly important in understanding how social media influences our world. Nursers appreciate the subtle nuances of human interaction, communication and behavior. It is, after, what they do: they answer the question “What is the effect of all this healthcare stuff — from disease to treatment — on the human being?” So I see nurses getting more involved over time. The will build and lead new communities and platforms for professionals and patients to do a better job of creating better healthcare for all.

What motivated you to start CareVocate Strategies? My impression of CareVocate Strategies is that you’re focused on consulting individuals and organizations about social media. What are your future plans for the company? Tell me more.

CareVocate was intended to help understand how emerging media are changing how business gets done. I simply mashed up my enterprise, technology and healthcare background to build a business that would make it easier for clients to extend their presence to the Web. I don’t have a traditional marketing background, but over the years I recognized the need for traditional marketing to dovetail with emerging media. I think not having a traditional background has actually enabled me to provide fresh insights into 21st Century marketing. Another way to express this is that I didn’t have to unlearn processes and assumptions that evolved over technological conditions from last century.

When you look forward three or five years, where do you hope to find yourself?

I hope to continue learning about how technology is influencing us. Naturally, I plan to grow my business because we all need to do that. But I’m genuinely interested in paying attention to technology because we don’t have a theory of technology. It’s kind of odd, isn’t it? Technology is one of the most important things in our lives and has been for millions of years. But now, technology’s infiltration into our lives is deepening like never before — and the pace of this infiltration is accelerating at an increasing rate. Before our time, change was something you could deal with over a lifetime. Today, we will have to deal with it in much shorter spans of time. So although I see plenty of business opportunities in the next five years, I also see critical changes to our culture, politics, economy and health. I hope to be heavily involved in asking and perhaps answering the big questions technology is raising. I’ll continue to use social media to make sure others will be involved.

Why did you start Health Is Social? Is it an extension of CareVocate Strategies or something different?

Currently, I’m in the process of shifting towards Health Is Social because I want to expand services. Consulting is fine, but I find strategic and tactical education more valuable propositions. So going forward, I’m going to be offering more online services, including seminars, in addition to conducting workshops and speaking engagements.

How important is it for a company to have a social media strategy? Describe the foundation — what are the essentials for an effective social media strategy?

First, I think it’s very important for a company to have a strategy. I mean: a really clear and executable strategy. The question any business should first ask isn’t “How does social media fit into our strategy?” A more important question is: “Might social media and digital technologies actually change our strategy?” A company’s strategy may or may not need to change because of technologies. It depends on the industry, who the informational customers of the company are, etc. I’ll talk with a business about their needs and break up their approach to social media into three stages: Vision, Mechanics and Process. All three are difficult in their own way, but vital in figuring out before jumping in.

Vision is pretty straightforward. What does this company want to accomplish? Who are its informational customers: end-consumers? Employees? Vendors? Investors? What does this company hope to achieve with these customers? What does it do now and what do they want to do differently that may provide everybody more value?

Mechanics involves the resources, logistics and tools that need to allocated and set into place. Doing social media is far harder than a first look might appear. Resource-allocation, for instance, can be a real challenge. You need people and time and permission. All of those things cost money too — it may not be much, but it could be.

Process is where it all comes together. Vision and Mechanics are nouns. But process is a verb. How will this company execute its vision on a daily, weekly, yearly basis? How will it evaluate effectiveness, refine its mechanics and ensure informational customers are properly taken care of?

It’s very easy to get lost in social media. Even if a business ‘gets’ the value proposition, it needs to work out exactly how it will ‘do’ it. It’s not enough to have conversations and engage with people — its key, but it’s not a strategy that moves the dial. What businesses need to do is value and lead their audience. It used to be that you blasted your passive audience with messages you hoped would stick. But now, your audience has more power than ever before — and their messages can stick on you. And therein lies the greatest opportunity for business social media: you get to lead your audience intimately and talk WITH them. That’s invaluable, and being able to communicate directly with your audience can be a market research Holy Grail.

I know this is a rather open ended question, but I hope you’ll do some hand waving for me. Describe the future of social media in healthcare.

The future of social media in healthcare is wide open. It’s in its infant stage now. Social media is just a small part of a larger party. And the party is technological and personal connection and convergence unlike any before. People are now fascinated and focused on social media. But we are moving towards newer technologies in which Social will simply be embedded into them. Social is only one kind of connection. In healthcare, we’ll see more social connectivity for sure. But we’ll also see more technological and informational connectivity. For example, medical devices will soon ‘tweet’ their data to other medical technologies, and those technologies will connect to patients and nurses and physicians. But the future of social media really depends on how people use them. We need to understand better just how these technologies will work in healthcare and we need to be using the technology — much more than the technologies use us.

Highlight HEALTH 2.0 Interview: Phil Baumann originally appeared on Highlight HEALTH 2.0.

Health 2.0 Highlights: November 1st, 2009

Walter Jessen — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:30:27 +0000

A Clinical Infusion of Google Wave | phil baumann online
Phil Baumann provides an overview on Google Wave and asks if the underlying technology offers any glimpse into improving clinical collaboration?
Google sidewiki: what can pharma do? | STweM
Andrew Spong ruminates about Google sidewiki and whether pharma will engage in debate regarding comments added to drug information websites.
A TRIP Down Database Lane: A Talk With Jon Brassey | Significant Science
The TRIP Database (Turning Research Into Practice) is a clinical search tool designed to allow health professionals to rapidly identify the highest quality clinical evidence for clinical practice. Hope Leman interviews one of the founders of the TRIP database, Jon Brassey.
Over 400 Hospitals use Social Media | Found In Cache
Ed Bennett reports that over 400 hospitals in the U.S. are now using some form of Social Media.
Behavior Change: A Central Topic at Health 2.0 | The Decision Tree
Social contagion is of great relevance to health and was a central topic at the Health 2.0 conference last month.
Health 2.0 Conference Day 2: Consumer Aggregators | The Decision Tree
The world is becoming increasingly mobile. Several consumer aggregator applications presented at the Health 2.0 conference are focused on "on-demand" information and will enable patients to harness their medical data.

Are you a Twitter user? Tweet this!

Health 2.0 Highlights: November 1st, 2009 originally appeared on Highlight HEALTH 2.0.

Health 2.0 Highlights: June 6th, 2009

Walter Jessen — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:01:27 +0000

Want to know what I ware? | RobFraser.ca
Keeping with the meme of essential medical software and "core apps", Rob Fraser describes his physical and virtual desktop.
Create an automatic differential diagnosis list with Google Squared | Clinical Cases and Images – Blog
Dr. Ves Dimov spotlights Google Squared and provides an example of its use as a tool for medical educators to build and share their own squares.
Social media artists- the new generation patient opinion leader | whydot pharma
Influential bloggers reassuring patients, community leaders petitioning for a cause, crowdsourcing ideas for health, sharing stories to raise awareness … these are just some of the methods used by a new generation of patient opinion leaders.
Beyond Wikipedia | The Health Care Blog
Physicians, like health consumers, rely heavily on search engines. Although Wikipedia entires often appear at the top of organic results and are frequently the first reference reviewed, doctors should be concerned about accuracy.
Twitter goes Viral: Swine Flu Outbreak – Twitter a Dangerous Hype? | Laika’s MedLibLog
In the midst of the swine flu outbreak, Laika examines whether Twitter is a reliable news source or just hype and useless for finding accurate information.

Health 2.0 Highlights: June 6th, 2009 originally appeared on Highlight HEALTH 2.0.

Online Patient Community Battle for Survival: MDJunction

Guest Writer — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 05:01:54 +0000

This article was written by Hope Leman.

Welcome to the battle for survival among the online patient communities, a.k.a. health-focused social networks and patient support groups. Sometimes they are dedicated sites (e.g. Patients Like Me and Trusera), sometimes the patient communities are just one of the features of a greater health-focused site (e.g. RightHealth) and in some cases they form about half of the offerings of a health site (e.g. Healia, MedHelp). Not all are developing the levels of activity that will enable their communities to gain traction. Given the stiff competition, many of the primary health consumer online patient communities are dying on the vine. For example, as of this writing Healia’s Parkinson’s Disease Community consists of only 11 members, a small number for a fairly common disease.

Today we will take a look at MDJunction. According to the site, “… the ‘MD’ in MDJunction stands for Making a Difference.”

Immediate Online Patient Community

It certainly does seem to have quite a bit of recent activity, obviously a key indicator of the health of these sites. For instance, I am checking the site on a Sunday morning and on the home page a member of the Bipolar Type II Support Group posted just one second ago.

Oops — I just refreshed the page and now that has been bumped down to 15 minutes ago because of other even more recent entries. That’s certainly a high level of immediacy compared to an industry leader, Patients Like Me. I just checked the Patients Like Me Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Community and the most recent entry was five minutes ago.

This illustrates an interesting difference between Patients Like Me and MDJunction: Patients Like Me treats each community as a separate entity (albeit under the Patients Like Me brand name), whereas portals like MDJunction show on the homepage what the most recent activity was in any of the communities (sometimes called forums, depending on the site). Indeed, sometimes forums are within communities, such as Patients Like Me, and sometimes they are distinct entities within the greater site, as with MedHelp. The nomenclature varies with each site, which might be one of the reasons why some sites are less trafficked and some communities devoid of members — it takes time to figure out how each works. Not only can you determine immediately on the homepage of MDJunction what is being discussed in detail, you can note such things as who has just joined the obesity group, who has just registered, who gave another user a hug and so on.

That five minutes ago of MDJunction certainly trumps by a long shot in terms of immediacy the “… about 14 hours ago” of Trusera.

Dead spaces, medical authority and user-generated content

However, there are definitely some dead spaces in MDJunction. The Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Community, for instance, is utterly inert, save for some initial come-ons a year ago by MDJunction co-founder, Roy Lev. But that is true of almost every ALS community save that of Patients Like Me, given the amazingly strong loyalty the ALS patient community has shown to the first mover for an online patient community for that illness. MDJunction’s Parkinson’s Disease Support Group has 23 members and the most recent posting as of this writing was 12 hours ago. That’s fairly good for such sites in this fiercely competitive space.

One always fascinating aspect of the world of online patient communities is the general tone shown toward the medical establishment. For instance, MedHelp touts its ties to medical experts at prestigious institutions (e.g. the Cleveland Clinic). Patients Like Me features pleasant and skillful interjections by a resident nurse as well as commentary and answers by a neuroscientist, but otherwise medical authorities are absent. In contrast, the content of sites like MDJunction and Trusera is almost entirely user-generated, save for Lev’s fairly constant presence in various sections of the site. There are advantages to his omnipresence — it shows his commitment to the service, which is a nice bit of homey personalization compared to the infrequent appearances of Ben Heywood on Patients Like Me. But Lev’s ubiquity on MDJunction verges on hucksterism. It is up to users to determine how much involvement they want from the operators of a site.

Awareness ribbons

One rather interesting feature of MDJunction is the option for users to support a cause and increase awareness by wearing a ribbon. A chart delineates what colors of ribbons are designated for various diseases. For example, we read, “Burgundy ribbons are for myeloma, hospice care, Sepsis, APS (Antiphospholipid Antibody Syndrome), FVL, Thrombophilia, headaches and to support the Permanently Disabled” and “Blue ribbons are associated with Osteoporosis, ARDS, Osteogenesis Imperfecta, Child Abuse, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Colon Cancer Arthritis.” Users can affix icons of such ribbons to their comments on the site.

Conclusion

The ads in MDJunction are relatively unobtrusive. Given the punishing advertising climate these days, it will be hard for many of these sites to stay in business. MDJunction seems to have a fairly robust level of loyalty. It will be interesting to see how much of the discussion on medical topics generated on sites like MDJunction appears in search engines results. This is a new phenomenon that bears watching by those concerned about the possible dissemination of health misinformation on the Web.

Additional patient social networks and Health 2.0 resources are listed in the Highlight HEALTH Web Directory.

About the author: Hope Leman is a research information technologist for a health network in Oregon and is also Web administrator of the grants and scholarship listing service ScanGrants.

Online Patient Community Battle for Survival: MDJunction originally appeared on Highlight HEALTH 2.0.

iMedix: Reliable Health Search and Patient-to-patient Social Network

Walter Jessen — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:12:59 +0000

The Internet is used by 75% of American adults to search for health or medical information online; 1 in 10 are searching for health information right now as you read this [1]. Indeed, the amount of information available on the Internet related to health and medicine is staggering. While much of it is credible, an equal or greater amount of misinformation also exists.

Reliable sources of health information are extremely important to online health seekers. Enter iMedix, a health 2.0 service that combines a healthcare search engine and social networking. iMedix provides health consumers a way to find medical information that has been filtered for reliability and rated by patients with similar interests.

iMedix features

Search any medical condition, symptom, treatment or drug on top online health sources
Auto-complete and spell check search queries
Community ranked health articles
Health site reliability shown for search results
Ask questions about any health topic
Connect with people who share your health interests

The iMedix website makes it easy to transition between a reliable health web search, questions and answers asked in iMedix health communities and iMedix members — all with a single click.

Reliable Health Search

Why use iMedix to search for health information instead of Google? Simple … reliability of search results. iMedix is a community-powered healthcare search engine, which combines a vertical health search engine with a patient-to-patient social network. iMedix uses proprietary algorithms to evaluate healthcare websites and rate top sources. Dozens of thousands of websites that are approved by top medical accreditation organizations such as HON (Health On the Net Foundation) or URAC (Utilization Review Accreditation Commission) are cataloged by iMedix. Individual site accreditation is indicated in the search results along with a clear indication of the source of each article. The iMedix community then provides feedback by rating those sources, further improving the ratings. Thus, users benefit from the collective medical knowledge and experience of the iMedix community.

To the right of the web search results, several members of the iMedix health community associated with the search term are shown. Community members can also be searched by selecting the “Members” link at the top of the search results. The right sidebar also displays questions related to the search term, making it easy for users to transition from a web search to searching questions and answers posted by the iMedix community. Questions and answers can also be searched by selecting the “Q&A” link at the top of the search results. These three sections — web results, questions and answers, and iMedix members — are transposed with the user’s selection. If the user chooses web results, community members and related questions are shown in the sidebar. If the user chooses community members, related questions and web results are shown in the sidebar. iMedix thus allows a user to take a search term and, with one click, query three different data spaces.

The iMedix search engine supports the “AND” operator, allowing for complex searches with multiple parameters. Although you can use the iMedix search engine without signing up, you won’t be able to communicate with iMedix members nor ask or answer questions from the various health communities.

iMedix Health Communities

Although iMedix began as a blogging platform for patients, it has evolved into a patient-to-patient social network. iMedix health communities enable people to share and discuss their health issues with others. Currently, there are ~2000 communities, which iMedix plans to consolidate in the future. Popular communities are shown on the iMedix homepage. Users can easily sort health communities by disease, symptom or drug and browse them alphabetically.

iMedix users can “tag” themselves by indicating health interests in their profile. Many tags are used by iMedix to assign users to health communities, connecting them to other members with similar interests. Additionally, users can browse member profiles to find other users that share a health interest.

Asking a question is as simple as typing it in the “Ask Our Community” box on the right side of the page. The iMedix system extracts keywords and tags, and immediately distributes your question to relevant members. Questions and answers are moderated by community leaders as well as by the community itself. iMedix notifies you as soon as you receive answers to your question. Each answer that is given to a question can be rated by other users, giving it a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”. Individual answers can also be reported for abuse.

I found user answers to be a mixed bag. Some answers were informative while others … not so much. As with any social network, you take the good with the bad. Like other online social communities, users can “friend” other members, adding members that they find interesting or well informed to their friends list.

What was notably absent was conversation. People with health problems want to talk and share with others that have similar issues. If you’re familiar with Internet forums or messages boards, you’ll be disappointed in the lack of such an application on the iMedix website. However, iMedix users can chat in real time or send offline messages to one another through a private messaging system. There may be an abundance of conversation between patients, but none of it is publicly accessible.

Where iMedix Shines

Immediately after iMedix launched, VentureBeat wrote a disparaging review of the healthcare-community site. Several comments seem overly critical; disapproving of the uncluttered homepage (wasn’t Google praised for its clean, sparse interface?) and skeptical at the lack of a business model. Indeed, when iMedix launched in December 2007, a press release described a direct-to-consumer advertising channel whereby iMedix would connect pharmaceuticals, insurance companies and medical organizations with highly targeted consumers, i.e. iMedix users [2]. The iMedix Privacy Policy clearly states that they “will occasionally send you information on products, services, special deals and promotions”. Note that iMedix provides the ability to ‘opt-out’ of having personally identifiable information used for certain purposes. Other comments seemed to state the obvious: “In effect, iMedix users have only two sources of information — the intermittently useful search function and individual conversations with other users.” While VentureBeat thought it gave the site a “conspicuously information-deprived feel”, I think it highlights the utility of iMedix: filtering out all the noise and misinformation in online health information and presenting a clean, uncluttered and well-organized health search results page.

Conclusion

I really like iMedix and think it’s a great service that will complement the emerging use of of PHRs and genetic testing. As Susannah Fox described in the The Plausible Promise of Participatory Medicine:

For those internet users who are supplementing their doctor’s advice with health information found online, search is the first stop for most e-patients. Search is the de facto second opinion in the United States and search results often include user-generated content such as blogs, discussion groups, and Wikipedia.

Social media is not just stumbled upon by searchers; it is a starting point for many people. This trend is hard to measure since a lot of user-generated content has become “wallpaper” technology for many people — they absorb it without noticing it. But community is powerful and always has been. Technology makes this basic instinct easier to fulfill.

I’ve written previously about the Trust and Credibility of Healthcare Blogs. Indeed, I think about the credibility and reliability of internet-based health information all the time. It’s the principle reason why I include links and list references in all my articles. Although presentation trumps content online today, I think health seekers are becoming more savvy and looking beyond website design for impartial and verifiable sources of information. iMedix makes finding those sources of information easy.

iMedix has been in beta for 10 months. In a May 2008 interview with CenterNetworks, iMedix co-founder and CEO Amir Leitersdorf said that the healthcare-community site had more than 500,000 users each month and, with the help of the iMedix community, had ranked and re-organized more than 20 million health articles [3]. In July 2008, the company announced its first major media partnership and will be powering the search capabilities of PARADE.com’s health section [4]. It will be interesting to see how iMedix develops over the next year as its user base continues to grow and mature.

References

Pew Internet & American Life Project Tracking surveys. March 2000 â€“ May 2008. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Last updated: July 22, 2008. Accessed 2008 Oct 12.
iMedix Unveils Community-Powered Health Search Engine. Reuters. 2007 Dec 10.
Interview With iMedix’s CEO Amir Leitersdorf and CMO Iri Amirav. CenterNetworks. 2008 May 20.
PARADE.com Partners With iMedix to Enhance Health Portal. Reuters. 2008 Jul 23.

iMedix: Reliable Health Search and Patient-to-patient Social Network originally appeared on Highlight HEALTH 2.0.