Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

A GP who is also an education professional and an expert user of social media, Anne Marie is a natural and presents a superb discussion posing some difficult questions of her readers:

How are people using social marketing in health? Now you have surgeries tweeting, blogging, opening YouTube accounts but what has social media got to do with me as a health professional?  What does ‘engagement with consumers’ using social media, ‘establishing a brand’ got to do with health and health care organisations?

Anne Marie has a real life example of a Government organisation encouraging people to use twitter to contact a sexual health nurse, Zena.  Zena is using twitter, a website and a facebook page to contact patients. But:

• What about private issues being discussed between health professional and patient on a public site?
• How to guide patients online? To use it in a safe way?

This is what this presentation is about – well worth a listen to and if you are really struck with how good this is, the comments on Anne Marie’s blog from health professionals including Zena and patients are enlightening too.

Health professionals and social media

And my two pennies worth: – I admire what this sexual health nurse is doing – not only getting her head around the technology, but putting herself out there as a professional in social media opens her up to all sorts of discussions, comments and criticisms, in a very public way.

I agree with Anne Marie’s concerns that what happens online stays online.  Forever. And from the comments from patients here it’s worth remembering how vulnerable people are especially when they have health problems, their concerns may overtake their care for privacy.

I see what professionals like this nurse are doing as advertising good information to people on a variety of networks, giving them the channels to communicate/find someone, and then taking the conversation off line.

Even if you have the best expertise in health – if you don’t use social media how are patients going to find you?

In response Anne-Marie wrote

“I agree that social media may be a useful way to disseminate contact details. But I do have grave concerns about encouraging its use a contact medium. And it may be heresy but the people who probably most need Zena’s help probably have the least access to social media in any form. This is where enabling patients to make contact by SMS is really useful. Those are 140 private characters.”

Social Media has provided the opportunity to listen to conversation, and observe the musings of many professionals. In particular we are afforded the opportunity to listen in on the conversation between medical professionals. Some medical bloggers such as @Doctor_V have embraced the nuances of social media providing stimulating discourse on the ramifications of health technology, social/professional media, medical education and online debate. The resulting discussions are often vigorous, stimulating and entertaining.

I am evesdropping on their conversation, and pondering the different views. Here are some examples of conversational rhetoric:

This from a cardiologist, Dr Wes on Medicine to Social Media: Get Over Yourself. @DoctorWes provides useful tips and insights for physicians as they take their first tentative steps into social media

I have noticed an interesting psychodynamic to most medical bloggers, social media enthusiasts, and internet-savvy individuals use social media: … we all are narcissists

We love our blogs, our posts, our ‘wall,’ our ‘followers,’ our ’subscribers,’ our ‘friends’, and our ‘unique visitors.’ ….. But I find it funny that social media ‘experts’ continue to ponder why doctors don’t ‘engage’ more in social media. After all, it’s the rage, right?

…One might think that the instantaneous communication afforded by social media would be the perfect place for ‘on-line collaboration.’ Yet in reality, using social media, even doctor-limited online forums, might be the worst place a doctor could ask for advice, especially when uniquely identifiable issues specific to an patient are discussed with others in such a potentially public, legally-discoverable way. For many doctors, the legal, ethical and political climate is simply not conducive to permitting patient-specific discussions on the internet.

….No matter how you parse it, doctors don’t avoid the internet and social media because they’re simply Luddites, they avoid the internet because they enjoy the benefits of anonymity, privacy, efficiency and legal protection that comes with dropping off the grid.

And this from Dr Ves quoting from Risky Business – Tweeting the Symptoms of Social Media (PDF). Dr Ves’s blog, and social media presence is a rich source of information. His motto is to share what you find useful, share what you’ve learned. @DrVes provides a plethora of useful tips on blogging, tweeting and online feed management

To date there are at least 540 hospitals in the United States utilizing social media tools: Hospitals account for 247 YouTube channels, 316 Facebook pages, 419 Twitter accounts, and 67 blogs.

The number of individual and independent medbloggers is in the thousands….[yet there] are a number of other scenarios that could lead to liability. For example, what happens if an ‘off-duty’ physician responds to a health question by a neighbor while doing yard work? Suppose the same exchange occurs through online ‘messages’ between a physician and one of the physician’s ‘friends’ on Facebook, creating an electronic record of the exchange that could potentially support the existence of a physician-patient relationship, thereby creating certain liability arising therefrom

And this very personal comment from Dr Mike [@sandnsurf], an Emergency Medicine physician in Australia. Although he blogs predominantly on medical education, he also provides insight into the development of social media as a tool for physicians.

..for [me], the foray into the underworld of social media has been an enlightening and liberating experience.

I love reading physician anecdotes, experiences and case-based blogs, and this has inspired me to share similar stories for educational purposes.
I love the frank, open and sometimes harrowing comments, descriptions and experiences of patients and reading their side of the doctor-patient relationship.
I love the opportunity to debate, comment and interact with other physicians who have given up their time to share their experiences and thoughts and to express their ideals.

I now interact with people from all round the Globe, and although these ‘friends’ are virtual – they still afford comfort in collaboration, interpolation and juxtaposition…this conversational expansion has enhanced my local work practice by helping me rise above the petty bickering and political inanity of water cooler gossip.

I gave up explaining to colleagues what I do and why I do it a long time ago. I believe the ride we are taking is not purely a narcissistic extension of our individual dictum but more an opportunity to broaden our horizons, embrace difference and promulgate evidentiality.

Blogging can be lonely. Especially lonely if we constantly rely on viewer stats, page rank and comment counts to justify the time we take to document our cogitations …but I am surfing the blogging wave to taste the salt water; feel the rush of wind in my face; and brush up against dolphins…not to observe from the beach, ice cream in hand, blistered by the rays of apathy and indifference.”

This study of social networks is from Harvard Professor Nicholas Christakis, who during this TEDtalk came out with this superbness:

Our experience of the world depends on the architecture of the ties around us, it depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we are residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network.

Human beings assemble themselves and form a kind of super organism. A super organism is a collection of individuals which show behaviours or phenomena that are not reducible to the study of individuals and must be understood by reference to and by studying the collective

Compare this ’super organism’ to a hive of bees looking for new nesting site or flock of birds and then apply it to market crashes, adoption of innovation etc. We form social networks because the benefits of a connective life outweigh the costs such as the spread of good and valuable things

What is spread is not a behaviour, but a new ‘norm’, an idea.

About Nicholas Christakis

At Harvard, Christakis is a Professor of Medicine, Health Care Policy, and Sociology, and he directs a diverse research group investigating social networks.

His work examines the biological, psychological, sociological, and mathematical rules that govern how we form these social networks, and the rules that govern how they shape our lives. His work shows how phenomena as diverse as obesity, smoking, emotions, ideas, germs, and altruism can spread through our social ties, and how genes can partially underlie our creation of social ties to begin with. His work also sheds light on how we might take advantage of an understanding of social networks to make the world a better place.

Thanks for the hat-tip Chris and Raz.

A first – the conference recently attended (Noi2010) is the first I have been to that had a social media in health workshop.  The audience was in the main experienced clinicians who were trying to make sense of what was happening online irrespective of whether they had a website and were also curious to see how the conference organisers Noigroup and some Presenters were using social media.

I learned from the questions that were asked:

• What is the difference between a blog and a website
• Why is social media so important
• How much time will it take
• Is it free?
• How do I make money from using this
• How do I manage my personal identity on line vs my company -are they the same
• How often should I blog
• Where do I start

Here’s the presentation or you can download a pdf version of the presentation from here

Here’s a powerpoint version if you want to skip through to a particular slide

There is a lot going on in the stratosphere. Universities are having to attract more students to make their budgets add up – this is another good  SXSW 2010 presentation from the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, Miami University.

How are Universities responding to the challenge? Some sites with free education:

Academic earth -Video lectures from top scholars

University of South Carolina -Online lecturers for medical students

YouTubeEdu – videos uploaded by Universities, and it’s just celebrated it’s first birthday according to YouTube blog. UPDATE: see some social media marketing videos from some top Universities here.

Universities on YouTube -list of UK universities on Youtube

iTunes U – Universities on iTunes -free lectures, podcasts from universities such as Stanford University

Tufts University

part of a new educational movement initiated by MIT that provides free access to course content for everyone online. Tufts’ course offerings demonstrate the University’s strength in the life sciences in addition to its multidisciplinary approach, international perspective and underlying ethic of service to its local, national and international communities.

Open Yale Courses

Free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.

Khan Academy

Founded by Salman Khan Salman Khan with the goal of using technology to educate the world. Sal received his MBA from Harvard Business School. He also holds a Masters in electrical engineering and computer science, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and a BS in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology….

Education Portal

for students searching for the best universities with the best free online courses

UC Berkely – Webcasts and courses

MIT Open Courseware

The Open University

Open Learning Initiative

University of Southern Queensland

A list of Educational video websites can be found  on Wikipedia

There’s also

• School of everything, A website that helps people who want to learn meet up with people who want to teach,
• Beanbag learning – find a tutor to fit what you want to study, and
• TeachStreet for those who want to learn something new.
• Edufire – live video learning
• Grockit – practice for exams

There must be many more similar initiatives as Universities respond to the financial challenges they face and the technology now on offer to them and their students.

Something close to my heart – sharing of information. This TED talk by Tim Berners Lee shows the benefits of sharing data on the web – for clinicians and researchers this is a big deal, publication of experiments in top journals can result in major funding and raw data is often closely guarded.

But…when data is freely shared the results are impressive.