Social media is changing how medicine is practiced and healthcare is delivered. Patients, doctors, communication or even time management, everything is changing, except one thing: medical education. We need a revolution!
When a UK physician wanted to visit Hungary every week just to attend my university course focusing on social media and medicine, I decided it’s time to make this course global.
Today, The Social MEDia Course goes live with 16 flash Prezis, exciting tests, badges and achievements. Enjoy and have fun while learning! Medical students, physicians and even patients, everyone is welcome to take the course which is, of course, for free.
Here is a video about the course (and also a Prezi).
Yesterday, I was invited to talk about social media and healthcare/medicine for a very diverse group of students (economics, marketing and political science) and they had great questions from different perspectives. Once they asked me how we could motivate doctors to be a bit more web-savvy.
First I told them I think doctors don’t have to become web-savvy, but they should know about internet-related issues as their patients will have more and more questions about this area.
Second, patients have a huge motivation behind using social media and internet itself. This motivation is the condition they have to cope with which means they need information and in many cases the easiest solution is to turn to the internet.
For doctors, the motivation is not that clear for everyone, but I’m pretty certain the growing number of e-patients will be the real motivation for them. When a GP has 40 patients a day and 30 of them have internet related questions, well, that will probably persuade them to at least know about this issues.
A new study by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions indicates physicians are not using IT broadly to engage patients. No more than 20 percent of doctors are providing online scheduling or test results for their patients and just 6 percent are using social media to communicate with them, according to Deloitte.
Andrew Ritcheson, PhD, is a senior program manager and consulting psychologist for Dynamic Research Corp., a business consulting group that has provided support to both the Defense Dept. and the Dept of Veterans Affairs in implementing a range of health care initiatives. He said that although many physicians are open to receiving help from younger colleagues, there is a fine line between helping and insulting. There are ways to keep everyone’s focus on a goal of improved care, rather than worrying about if someone crossed that line, Ritcheson said. Everyone must know they can reach that goal as a team, with each member contributing his or her own strengths and acknowledging that each has something to learn from the other.
E-patient Dave deBronkart has been the most important and amazing voice of the e-patient movement for years now after surviving a kidney cancer years ago. When I asked him to comment on how medical students should become doctors who are aware of the e-patient movement, he sent me and my students this message.
He announced a few days ago that he has skin cancer again.
An odd consequence of speaking at medical conferences is that sometimes my face is displayed, real big, on monitors at the front of a room. That happened in November at the Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q) annual meeting in Washington.
At the end, Lisa Letourneau MD, MPH of Maine Quality Countsraced up, pointed to my jaw, and said “You should have that checked. I think it’s a basal cell.” (That’s the least serious type of skin cancer – see Wikipedia: “Basal-cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most common type of skin cancer. It rarely metastasizes or kills.”) A few days later I took the picture at left, and started watching.
I’ve decided to explore my options by doing what companies do when they’re shopping for a solution: they write a Request for Proposals, and let vendors reply. But in this case what I published isn’t cast in stone – I invite discussion and suggestions. And, significantly, I start with the context: partnership; participatory medicine -
I cannot wait to see how the industry and the healthcare system respond to such innovative approach.
You all know the story of Jay Parkinson, MD who launched the first online GP service years ago in New York. After it became a “franchise”, he left and started a new company, The Future Well. A few months ago, I met him at Stanford, asked about his new projects and he mentioned the Sherpaa idea. Well, here is the official launch and the concept of Sherpaa.
To me it seems that Sherpaa tries to help patients when there are easier solutions for a health-related problem compared to using the traditional healthcare system. They give a specific example, what happens when you cut your finger:
You call your Guide
We ask you to snap a photo of the cut and email it to us
We look at it and it looks like something that can be handled outside the ER
We give instructions on what to do in the meantime as we schedule a stitch up
We call Dr. Sung (our plastic surgeon)
You are free to meet Dr. Sung in his office in an hour
You are on the road to recovery
—without sherpaa
Cost in ER: $4000
Time in ER: 8 hrs
—with sherpaa
Cost in Dr. Sung’s office: $1000
Time with Dr. Sung: 30 min
I believe the idea is timely and the structure is well-designed knowing Jay’s enthusiasm and proficiency. The only concern is how the healthcare system will look at their machinery. What do you think?
Do you remember when Google Flu Trends was launched and we were all amazed by the great idea behind that? And do you remember when a study from the University of Washington came up concluding that Google Flu Trends is not as accurate as CDC’s national surveillance programs? So it is social media, it’s trendy and innovative but useless in medicine and healthcare.
Here is the over-shined iPad2 which everyone loves and would like to use at hospitals and clinical practices and we see an amazing number of apps designed for that. A new study now concluded that diagnostic imaging on iPads is twice as slow.
A study from the University of Maryland found that radiologists using iPad 2s to evaluate patients for tuberculosis (TB) took twice as long to make a diagnosis as they did when using a 27-inch LCD monitor. Still, the study of 200 negative and 40 positive TB cases that included five radiologists, found the two displays to yield no significant differences when it came to diagnostic decisions.
Whatever tool, device or service we use in medicine, we must stick to the evidence based approach.
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.
2011 was a very intense and exciting year regarding the developments and new insights of the relationship between medicine/healthcare and social media. Here are my favourite stories from 2011 selected and featured month by month.
Webicina.com launched a challenge in which stories from patients and medical professionals about how social media helped them were invited with grand prizes (Lenovo Thinkcentre, iPad2 and Amazon Kindle Fire, among others) to win. A special prize goes to someone who can tell his/her story at the Doctors 2.0 and You conference in Paris with registration fee and accommodation covered.
Congratulations to everyone who submitted their stories which will be featured on Webicina one by one as each story must get its attention, each one represents real and clear values of using social media in medicine and healthcare.
The Winners!
1) The winner is Katherine Leon from the US with her story The “Tap Code” of Social Media in which she shared how she managed to cope with postpartum spontaneous coronary artery dissection by joining Inspire.com’s related community. She won a brand new, Lenovo® Multi-Touch m90z ThinkCentre, an all-in-one powerful computer with a 23” full HD monitor. An excerpt from her fantastic and inspiring story:
While forging relationships on the community, I wasn’t aware of the term “social media.” I would talk with my husband about “my SCAD friends” or “my online friends with SCAD.” They were just as real and important as any “in-person” friend in my life. Even today, our taps on the cell wall usually don’t translate to our families or social circles. But in the world of social media, we truly communicate and gain understanding of our fears, confusion and struggles.
2) The silver medal goes to Susan McKinnon from Australia who told her story about Transient Global Amnesia and Social Media on Youtube. A really moving story illustrated with many pictures. She won an amazingly thin and light iPad 2.
There are great MND communities on both twitter and facebook. We share research news which gives hope and keeps us upbeat and positive. Without social media, everyone would sit in isolation and feel hopeless. I actually find tweeting very cathartic and can voice frustrations as well as share good moments. I’ve made connections with wonderful people all over the world. Some have helped me to fundraise or raise the profile of MND. Life with a terminal illness is a veritable rollercoaster but social media has made everything much easier and more enjoyable for me.
Everyone who submitted their entries receive a Webicina T-shirt (either an e-patient or a web-savvy physician format).
We hope you enjoyed this contest and based on the success of it, I’m pretty sure Webicina will launch similar competitions soon.
Until then, please keep on using social media for good reasons and let’s prove that social media can facilitate the developments of medicine and healthcare. And the best way to demonstrate this is sharing your own story!
In a letter published in the Journal of Emergencies, Trauma, and Shock, physicians in Scotland described the use of a webcam, Skype, and an iPhone 4 to connect a provider in Calgary to an expert over 200 miles away in Aberdeen for assistance in performing a pulmonary ultrasound.
The idea behind most diagnostic tests is simple: Identify a telltale chemical and look for it in a blood sample. The PSA test for prostate cancer is the best-known cancer diagnostic, but diagnostics exist for other cancers too — ovarian and colorectal to name a few. And while the tests are not infallible, they can help find hard-to-detect, early stage cancers and monitor treatment.
Dave deBronkart, “e-Patient Dave,” was diagnosed with stage IV kidney cancer in 2007. The median survival time for his condition was 24 weeks. Thanks to the help of an online network for patients with his disease, he quickly learned about treatment options and found support for his recovery. The treatment was successful, and now e-Patient Dave is cancer-free and has found a higher calling: empowering patients to have access to the best health care possible — by connecting with resources online.
eyeforpharma believes that the pharma industry must pay more attention to patient needs across the board, and that teen cancer patients are a great place to start. To this end, the organization is hosting its first annual Mobile Health Competition. The competition aims to highlight new and exciting mobile apps that help teen cancer patients better manage their conditions and improve their lives.
You cannot afford to take a “wait-and-see” approach or you may soon find yourself trying to catch up with competitors. Even if you do not currently have an active social media presence, your employees and customers are already using social media. Start now, start small and measure progress. Take precautions: develop a policy to govern your employees’ use of social media. Also use social media to monitor, enhance and protect your brand/reputation.
