Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

An interesting phenomenon is occurring. Doctors are adopting smart phones at an exponential rate, even faster than the general public, a trend very surprising for a traditionally ‘technology averse’ group. A mini-revolution in the medical industry, and happening quickly it seems.

Why is this happening? One reason may be that these phones (like an iPhone or Blackberry) offer easy connectivity and computing ability and are being used to access the internet and social media sites. Traditionally, Doctors work from many different locations each characterized by high-stress inefficient paper-based workflow processes – manually filtering and prioritizing communications in each place mean that critical communications are easily missed.

MovinMeat is an ER physician (with an excellent blog http://allbleedingstops.blogspot.com/)

Potential solutions to managing an overwhelming information flow may help explain the fast adoption by doctors of this new technology, particularly of the iPhone whose reputation depends on ease of use. According to Spyglass Consulting over 90% of physicians were using smartphones to “communicate, manage personal/business workflows, and access information including medical reference materials” and showed a strong preference to the Apple iPhone (44%) to the RIM Blackberry. Here is adoption of the smart phone in general by comparison:

Share of 2010 Q2 smartphone sales to end users by operating system, according to Gartner. Source Wikipedia

Why have busy doctors taken time to embrace the iPhone? Here is perhaps a practical example of why – an iPhone application created by Peter Bentley, a researcher from University College London, that turns an iPhone into a stethoscope. Not only that, if patients have the same app, they can monitor their own heartbeat and send the results, by email (& by phone) to their doctor to analyse. According to the Guardian a free version of the app is being downloaded by more than 500 users a day.

“Experts say the software, a major advance in medical technology, has saved lives and enabled doctors in remote areas to access specialist expertise… Bentley’s iStethoscope application is not the only mobile phone programme lightening doctors’ bags and transforming their practices: there are nearly 6,000 applications related to health in the Apple App Store. The uptake has been rapid. In late 2009, two-thirds of doctors and 42% of the public were using smartphones – in effect inexpensive handheld computers – for personal and professional reasons. More than 80% of doctors said they expected to own a smartphone by 2012.”

Well.  That’s something to be sure.  It would be interesting to know if this technology takeover is happening in other health professions, and if for the same reasons.

What is FindTheBest?

FindTheBest is an objective comparison search engine that allows people to choose a topic, compare options and decide what’s best for them. FindTheBest is organized into nine broad categories including Health and each listing can be sorted by numerous key filters (have a look at the left hand side of the image below). It’s not bad!

So what does that mean in practice? I had a look at health, specifically Life Span Expectancy and Mortality rates and it gave me the results for each and every age so I could compare. So, hypothetically speaking, looking at the category of: female, age: 42.  It told me that statistically speaking a woman aged 42 has a 0.17% chance of dying and 39.57 more years to live. I compared this with stats for 20 years further on when, at age 62, she has a 0.89% chance of dying and 22 more years to live:

The take home message? This hypothetical female has passed the half way mark and has decided to eat more bananas and exercise a great deal.

Thanks to @DrVes for the spot and for the blogging tip!

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.”

I was asked by a clinical researcher today what the point was of social media. To put this in context, this is about site that I set up 10 months ago, in a niche area of neuroscience research. The blog now has a steady 4000 unique visitors a month, 7000 page views all through the use of social media. The point may seem obvious, except it was the owner of the site who was asking me.

I was about to trot off the stats in order to justify my existence but then thought, he’s right. Can I really measure the effect? Can I provide evidence-based results that shows that those 4000 visitors have had a positive impact from visiting the blog, and that it has improved their clinical practice?

I can provide readership stats, but clinical impact. Nope.

Australian online health searches and demographics

Information on Australian’s online health information is scant to say the least.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics [1] tells us that

• Australia has a population of over 22 million
• Australia’s life expectancy at birth remains among the highest in the world—almost 84 years for women and 79 years for men  [2]

but what about their use of the internet and social media in relation to health? There is precious little in the way of information to be found.

There is some data on hospitals using social media in Australia

but that doesn’t tell us anything about the use of social medicine by the general population as a whole.

To give us some idea of online health habits, Pew Internet provided some excellent statistics related to search in America:

• About a third (31%) of online teens ages 12 to 17 use the internet to look for health, dieting or physical fitness information
• Older teens are more likely than younger teens to look online for health information (38% of teens ages 14-17 vs. 13% of teens ages 12-13).
• Teens also use the internet to look for information on health topics that are hard to talk about, like drug use, sexual health or depression.
• One in six (17%) internet-using teens look online for information about sensitive health topics.

  

• Girls are more likely than boys to look online for sensitive health information (23% vs. 11%).
• Younger boys are the least likely group to look for information on a health topic that is hard to talk about—just 4% of online boys ages 12-13 have done so, compared with 13% of older boys ages 14-17.
• Teens from the lowest- income families – those earning less than US$30,000 annually – are the most likely to seek health information online. Just about a quarter (23%) of online low-income teens look for health information compared with 11% of teens from households earning more than $75,000 a year.
• In 2009, there are no racial or ethnic or education level differences in those who look for sensitive health information online compared with those who did not.

If you do have information on Australia’s use of the internet in relation to health I’d be delighted to hear about it and add it to the list of web metrics.

References

• [1] http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Media-and-Young-Adults/Part-4/1-Online-health-information.aspx?r=1
• [2] http://www.abs.gov.au/

After evesdropping into the conversation Doctors were having about their use of social media, I came back to thoughts in a previous post on how a busy clinician would use social media – and speculated that there are two ways it can be used – in actual clinical practice and as an information source.  It’s all very well to theorise, but is it actually the case?

This from Vegard Ølstørn, a manual therapist in Norway:

I started blogging as a manual therapist in February 2010. I wanted to do this because of mainly three things. I thought that was a way of keeping myself professionally updated. My thought was to write down a summary of interested things I read, write down how I am working, what I am thinking about my work and maybe present exercises I give etc. This way I put some pressure on myself to think twice why I do what I do.

My blogging is also done as information to my patients before or after they see me. Google listings for advertisement is important, and if patients read how I work before they come to see me, I think that is a positive start. I am also planning to use the blog as a resource for patients, where they can read about exercises and things I have presented after treatments.

Lastly, blogging also builds my professional brand amongst my peers. Other clinicians can comment on my way of doing things and interesting discussions hopefully comes out. I find it interesting to read how other clinicians solve their daily challenges, so it is nice to share my view on things.

Status today is that traffic to my site is increasing and I have got both new patients as well as interested clinicians from my blogging. For the word ‘manuellterapi’ I am scoring 4th in the Norwegian google search, so the traffic is increasing. I like it.

I really liked the quote by Dr Mike (@sandnsurf):

“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.”

Thanks Vegard, and if you have a case study that you would like to have included contact me.