hospital impact
Post details: Health Care and Social Media
Health Care and Social Media
by Tony Chen
We've been talking about how hospitals and social media mix (and don't mix) for a while now. A while ago I wrote a little on whether hospitals should blog and more recently, I provided some examples of how hospitals are utilizing these new technologies today.
Health 2.0 as a topic is about to hit mainstream. Do you know how I know that? Simple - the California HealthCare Foundation just did a 28-page report (PDF) on it. While I'm sorta joking, give them some credit for tackling these emerging issues in healthcare. Case in point: they published a very influential and compelling report on retail clinics back in June 2006, when these clinics number in the dozens, not hundreds (almost thousands now!).
We all know that the trend of web 2.0 is hitting all industries, so it is inevitable healthcare will be impacted as well. I think the real innovation will come when consumer-savvy folks put their heads together with web-savvy folks and medical experts. We will see new types of patient communities, new collaborations between industries, and in general, the lowering of walls between traditional silos. We'll see more healthcare organizations investing in some sort of presence within online networks as more eyeballs (especially the viral type) seem to be glued there. And we'll see personal health records thrown into the mix as well, making it easy for consumers to manage it (instead of feeling like it's managing us).
How else do you think this'll all shake out?
Comments:
Even though "Web 2.0" has its roots in blogging and online HTML editors, it didn't really catch fire until two things happened: social networks took their current shape and other forms of media apart from text went mainstream with Flickr, YouTube, and LastFM.
Somewhere between clinical descriptions of "where it hurts" and SecondLife are a range of online applications that are just starting to come into being that are really going to make Health 2.0 the corner-stone of 21st Century healthcare.
Anyway, that's my take on Health 2.0. If you're interested, you can read more about it here: http://healthcareinformationsystemsblog.blogspot.com/search/label/web2.0
04/29/08 @ 07:57 This report is not about Web 2.0 as much as it is about how the application can apply to improving care and creating megacommunities of change in health care.
It is based on a mindset that is rarely expressed here and not understood well by many.
Technology cannot drive change. It has to be in balance with what is needed for society and all who serve in health care.
Good Technology is simply based on this.
In a dialogue with Paul Ray, a market researcher, I worked with, we came to agreement long ago that people want to be well. Our tools and technology and system of providing and how we pay has not caught up.
Paul's traditional client base in industry - high tech, construction, and medicine are very slowly coming around to this. Fetzer Foundation hired Paul to find out what people (patients) wanted back to 1994. We took that data and organized a focus group in 1997, that struck on defining the obstables to patient care and leading change in this industry.
It was clear that initiatives would have to emerge that were not dominated by experts and heard the voice of patients.
California Health Foundation has for years investigated all voices in health care and done that well.
04/30/08 @ 13:38 Leave a comment:
Valid
XHTML ::
CSS ::
RSS ::
Atom :: b2evolution
the first healthcare and hospital blog for tomorrow's hospital leaders
