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).
Katie McCurdy is an information-specialist so it wasn’t that surprising when she decided to design infographics showing and describing her medical history with plenty of details about her chronic condition (myasthenia gravis).
So for this week’s office visit, I have prepared a visual timeline, an infographic, if you will, that I will print and take with me to my visit. This timeline charts the progress of my Myasthenia Gravis since I was 13 – not only the hard facts like the medications I was taking at the time, but the way I *felt* during those times and the degree of weakness I was experiencing. Overlaid is the progression of my stomach problems over my lifetime, including the points in time when I took antibiotics. Laying these waveform-like patterns on top of one another reveals that often my MG and my stomach problems were involved in a dance of sorts, taking steep dives simultaneously.
If it’s well designed, it can be incredibly helpful to medical professionals. But what about her own doc?
The result was a more structured conversation that allowed me to communicate my story more efficiently while saving the doctor from having to listen to five minutes of my rambling.
Engagement, motivation and the real improvement of patient experience. Brilliant!
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?
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.
I’m a big fan of the quantified self movement. As a supporter of the approach of tracking our health-related data and as a scientist who loves working with any kind of data, the Quantified Self is just the perfect project for me. Myself, I use a Striiv.
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!
A few weeks ago, I was a keynote speaker at the Games for Health conference in Amsterdam. I talked about social games, crowdsourcing in medicine and science and also about the importance of including health gaming in medical education. I have to say I had a great time there, saw many promising innovations and as a lover of video games, I tried many projects and gadgets myself.
Projects and ideas I came across there:
Figurerunning: draw figures on the map when running by using their smartphone application.
Use your bike and run or walk around in the virtual world.
I met the founder of Crohnology at the recent Medicine 2.0 Congress at Stanford. It is developed by Sean Ahrens, a twelve-year veteran of Crohn’s Disease and software developer in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is a perfect example how patients can lead the way to a better healthcare.
This website is a project with one ultimate goal: to build an incredible platform of information sharing between patients in the Crohn’s & Colitis community. This platform turns the traditional medical model on it’s head: Instead of doctors giving a one-way flow of rapid-fire, limited information to patients, this is a project to allow patients to collaborate, share information with each other, and learn from each other’s experiences. We think this is a better model for medicine for patients living with chronic illnesses.
Yesterday, Mayo Clinic, the real rockstar health institution of social media launched another fantastic social campaign in which they aim at raising awareness of the importance of blood pressure, lipid levels and body mass index in preventing heart diseases. They started with a funny video and also created a website and a challenge for this. A perfect design, management and execution for a social campaign from a hospital (!).
The “Know Your Numbers” music video will help people around the world understand the importance of knowing their numbers for blood pressure, lipids and body mass index to help prevent heart disease.
As part of the campaign, viewers can use a free application on Mayo Clinic‟s Facebook page that will help them calculate their risk of a heart attack and learn how to prevent one. Visit the Facebook app here.
Video viewers also have the opportunity to enter a contest to earn points by helping spread the word about heart attack risk factors. Visit the site here.
