Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

A little while ago I was interviewed about the work I do at BodyinMind.org.  This is a website that writes about pain research.  We started it just over 2 years ago, and now have over 9,000 unique visitors every month from over 100 countries.  That’s great you might think, but there is still the ‘So What’ factor.  Is this actually making any difference?  The jury is still out and we are trying very hard to measure whether what we are doing makes any difference at all to pain research or clinical practice.

The Mayo Clinic has been very influential in its use of social media to educate patients.  It has lofty aims – to connect researchers with their network for example (no easy task).  In this short video Mayo Clinic CEO John Noseworthy, talks about Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media and the Social Media Health Network and what he views as the essential role of social media in the future of health care.

Last year I compared Australian and US hospital social networks based on data collected by Mike Cadogan – Life in the Fast Lane, and Ed Bennet – Found in Cache.  This is the state of play just over a year on.

Hospital social networks 2010

US and Australian Hospital social networks Oct 2010

Hospital social networks 2011

US vs Australian Hospital social networks Aug 2011

In just under a year, Australian Hospital YouTube accounts have risen from 1% to 8%, Facebook remains the same at 9%, Twitter has risen from 0 to 1%, and the number of hospital blogs has stayed the same at 1% (we don’t have LinkedIn and Foursquare data). Australian hospitals still have a long way to go.  Especially with the recent news that one Aussie blog, the ImactedNurse.com and associated social media sites were closed.

This is part of a recent presentation given to Social Media Women interested in health online (their website is currently showing pics of the event – and men were present!). The presentation covered what does health and wellness in a digital age mean for consumers.

Healthshare is a social health network that connects people with similar health experiences, and is a place that patients as well as carers and families can get support and information.  Still in beta, this site states, and I like this, that based on your profile certain experts and doctors will be recommended to you, and if you follow them there is the option to read their research and be alerted to new research that comes out on a particular condition.  Here is more about what they do:

If anyone has experience of PatientsLikeMe  it would be interesting to know how they compare.

Daniel Kraft is a Stanford- and Harvard-trained physician-scientist, inventor and innovator. He chairs the FutureMed program at Singularity University, exploring the impact and potential of rapidly developing technologies as applied to health and medicine.