I’ve come across a very interesting service, Facewa.sh, that offers to wash all the non-desirable content from your social media accounts. It says after graduation, a professional life should start with erasing all the party photos and other materials.
While I agree with its mission, it should be performed by medical professionals themselves; and I teach medical students how to avoid such potential problems in time.
Now it only works with Facebook, in details, this way:
FaceWash™ will perform a search and return results in conceptual chunks, for example “Comments posted on your wall” and “Links that you have liked.”
Each result has a blue, clickable link that takes you directly to the post. There you can delete or privatize your post as desired.
Welcome to the cleanest Face you’ve ever had on Facebook.
Everyone has heard about the new Graph Search function on Facebook. It says “Want to start a book club or find a gym buddy? Connect with friends who like the same activities—and meet new people, too.” It will let Facebook users do searches by choosing different parameters (e.g. who goes to the same gym as me and is single).
Well, many bloggers are optimistic about this launch and think it will be used in medicine too. I don’t think so and everyone should hope I’ll be right. It’s fun to identify friends in my community who I share the same multiple interests with (e.g. sci-fi and reading books), but the same concept in medicine just should not work. Here are examples what Michael Spitz came up with:
“What do my friends think about HIV?”
“Do any of my friends have erectile dysfunction?”
“Have any of my friends had a bad reaction to taking Drug X?”
“What do you think about Dr. Y?”
“How was your stay at hospital Z?”
Only a minority of Facebook users would add the medical conditions they have to their profile; or publish a post about a side effect of a new drug they are taking. As such data would not be added to Facebook, it will not be used for search. Moreover, if Facebook makes it clear to my friends which gym I go to, that’s OK as far as this is within the privacy borders I set; but making clear which conditions I have or which drugs I take is just not the function I expect from a social networking site.
WolframAlpha works fine because data are added in a professional, anonymous and structured way. See all the medical examples they have.
There are other platforms such as Yandex Wonder doing the same as Facebook Graph but in a much better quality and with much more data (its access to Facebook was blocked when Facebook Graph was released, what a “coincidence”). But it still might not be used for medical purposes.
So expect to see this kind of search engines in the near future, but hopefully this new feature will not breach the privacy of patients and doctors on Facebook.
In my course in which I also describe what doctors should do when patients add them as friends on Facebook, we cover topics that are related to the everyday lives of physicians from the digital perspective. A few days ago, Joel Topf, nephrologist, told me on Twitter that he used my method when a patient added him on Facebook:
If the profile is personal, I reject the request and send a private message to the patients explaining why I did that: this is a personal account, while our relationship is professional. They always understand and accept my decision.
Then I asked Joel whether it worked out well.
My method is based on purely natural communication and transparent reasoning. This is why it works.
This is a really unique idea for raising awareness about one of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, the loss of long-term memory. The Facebook app wiped our Facebook timelines for one day.
An awareness campaign for Alzheimer’s Disease International is asking people to donate their Facebook timeline in support of World Alzheimer’s Day on September 21st. By downloading an app, Facebook users will be able to experience how it feels to lose their memories for a day.
The app will lie dormant until September 21st when it will activate, wiping users’ memories from their timeline including pictures, status, videos, friends, etc. These will be replaced with a message that reads: “Imagine your life without memories. For 36 million people living with Alzheimer’s disease, this is reality.”
WolframAlpha, my favorite search engine, keeps on coming up with amazing ideas. The latest one is that you can analyze your whole Facebook presence in details.
Pharma has been paying a lot of money to companies focusing on social media analytics and now they can get it for free.
More than a week ago, we all expected something amazing from Facebook as they were about to hold a press conference focusing on a new health-related initiative. Then Facebook announced they would let users mark themselves as organ donors on their own timelines. While it is a nice initiative, I expected much much more from a community site with almost a billion users, to be honest.
“Many of those people — an average of 18 people per day –- will die waiting, because there simply aren’t enough organ donors to meet the need,” Facebook notes in a blog entry explaining the move. “Medical experts believe that broader awareness about organ donation could go a long way toward solving this crisis.”
As the video above explains, designating yourself as an organ donor is easy. All you need to do is go to your Timeline, click on “Life Event” and then “Health & Wellness.” Then, you’ll see the option for “Organ Donor.” At that point, you can add when and where you registered and your personal story.
What about the aftermath, the results?
6000 people registered… Compared to the 1 billion users, we couldn’t say it is a real success. We will see how it evolves. But Facebook must come up with more creative projects.
A lot of colleagues from the pharmaceutical industry have asked me about the recent closure of J&J’s Psoriasis 360 Facebook page in the past couple of days. They asked whether this is a proof that pharma shouldn’t be on Facebook.
Psoriasis 360 was one of the best examples of pharma being open to use social media effectively. It was the first pharma-driven Facebook page initiated by Alex Butler, that allowed comments. People likes that, the industry used it as the example, it won awards. And now, it’s closed.
More than a year after launching its Psoriasis 360 page on Facebook, the Janssen UK unit of Johnson & Johnson is closing down due to a growing number of comments that had to be removed because specific drugs were mentioned or, in some cases, offensive language was used. The decision was posted on the Facebook page today.
I have managed large medical/pharma Facebook pages and I know it can be hard to manage a page with a lot of limitations, but in that case it must have been around 1-2 comments daily. Yes, daily. It means there is another reason behind the closure.
I’ve told all my pharma contacts this is the proof that a pharma-driven Facebook page (or any social media channel) can only be successful if someone with good communication/social media skills is behind that and is responsible for that. As soon as Alex left the company, they decided to close the page.
Take-home message: find the right people for managing and designing these social media channels otherwise it just won’t work.
Nescafe recently launched a campaign in Hungary. They were looking for ideas that they can support. In a nutshell, it happened that one guy submitted an idea related to his brother who has disabilities, and got some major support from 9gag (47 000 votes). The guy didn’t make it to the second round (a jury made the decision to select 20 entries). After that, he told 9gag what happened and the so-called 9gag army started flooding the Facebook wall of Nescafe and even CNN. I checked it myself that time and there were funny and non-sense posts on the Facebook wall of Nescafe every second! Basically they ruined it.
Later, Necafe withdrawn from the “war” and the guy posted this message on 9gag:
I made a deal with Nescafé. They will donate 5000$ to the Pető Institute, which is my brother’s school. Also they will give special treatment for my brother. Listen carfully now: we reached our goal, we did what we wanted. Nescafé made the right decision, so we need to appreciate it, and support it, so this could be a real Cristmas story, and you are part of it. Let’s finish this like a boss: can you guys write some thanks for the Nescafé walls? Also if you see hate somewhere, try to remove it, and explain it. I DO want to live on this planet, drinks and jingle bells all around.
They also created a Twitter account. What is the take home message? Well, never underestimate what one man can do online and don’t fight against 9gag.
A Facebook campaign was launched a few weeks ago in order to urge Mattel to produce a bald version of its Barbie doll that will help children with cancer and others who have lost their hair due to illness cope with their conditions while playing. An excerpt from a recent article:
“We hope it gets the message out that being bald is beautiful and is no big deal. There’s no need to cover up,” she said.
Sypin’s own daughter is one of those children. The 12-year-old, named Kin Inich, lost her hair after chemotherapy.
Even though her daughter isn’t a huge Barbie fan, Sypin said she is excited about the idea.
“She said if they make one, she would totally get it,” Sypin said. “The first thing she said was if they make that doll, she would buy a bunch and take them to a children’s hospital and give them to children with cancer.”
Last year, I published a list of my predictions for 2011 in the areas of healthcare, innovation and technology. Now after a year, I checked these items and actually many of them proved to be right (year of tablets, Prezi.com skyrocketing, Siri leading the way for voice controlled apps, etc.), but now it’s time to come up with the predictions for 2012. Here are my 12 predictions, please feel free to add yours in the comment section.
1) Digital only class in social media for medical professionals and e-patients. Well, that’s quite an easy prediction, as I will launch the global form of my social media in medicine university course this February.
2) Social media policy everywhere. Now that we have an open access social media guide for and about pharma; it’s time for the FDA to come up with their own detailed instructions; also universities, healthcare institutions and medical practices, everyone must have its own as almost everyone is using social media intensively.
3) Augmented reality in radiology. Augmented reality has been a major issue for some time, but seeing the video below made it clear for me, this is where we are going to head in 2012. Doctors can see through patients.
4) Health-fitness gadgets will rock 2012. Myself, I’ve been using Striiv as a fitness motivation tool which also logs my data and visualizes my exercises making it easier for me to make plans and see how I’m doing. Other examples include Jawbone, but you can find even more if you follow the Quantified Self project.
5) Innovations in screen technologies. The form, material and functions of the screens we know now will change dramatically in 2012. Imagine paper screen, holographic screens or flexible screens on your wrist.
6) Internet TV and the operating room. The news sites are full of Apple TV and Google TV, so it’s obvious really innovative internet TVs will be launched in 2012 which brings up the idea of watching operations live on your TV at home. Just check OR-live.com.
7) Pharma will be using social media more intensively. I’m not saying all the pharma companies will have properly designed and managed social media presence, but many brands will use social media more intensively as we should be over now the so-called learing phase and they are getting braver by time.
8) More and more tablet-specific apps. I know the number of medicine/health-related mobile apps is growing rapidly, but now it’s time to turn to tablet-specific clinical apps that could be used in radiology, clinical trials or just for grand rounds.
9) Tablets in healthcare institutions. Whenever I talked to professors and colleagues about how I use my tablet in medicine and healthcare, in a few weeks, many of them had their own tablets and started using those apps. This is contagious. In 2012, a lot of hospitals, clinics and departments will hand out iPad or Galaxy Tabs to their employees in order to facilitate teamwork and make the work processes more efficient.
10) Wikipedia will have more medical featured articles, less medical errors. We recently published a paper describing how Wikipedia can be used for global public health promotion. After years of focus on creating new medical entries in Wikipedia, now we the editors focus on including proper references into medical articles. It is going to lead to a huge improvement in quality.
11) More health bloggers turn to microblogging due to lack of time. Although I believe my blog is still my major platform online even if Twitter is the fastest channel and Facebook is the most interactive. But I understand those health bloggers who leave their blogs and turn to Posterious, Tumblr or Twitter exclusively. It takes less time to post a message or entry therefore they will use these with a bigger chance.
12) Google+ health pages on the rise. I like Google+ and I think it could be used in medical communication successfully. As Google+ has only been letting companies or institutions have G+ pages, we are going to see a rise in their number soon. Even Ed Bennett who maintains a list of hospital social media accounts will include these as well.
Let’s finish my list with a great presentation about the trends in healthcare for 2012.
