If there's one thing I learned at the first-ever Social Health gathering--an unconference of healthcare marketers, bloggers, digerati, and government librarians (more on them later)--it's that social media programs leveraging the power of patient communities will have the greatest chance for success.
As a 19-year-old college student newly diagnosed with a rare cancer, Doug Ulman remembered wanting to learn as much as he could about his disease. This was long before social networking and precision search, so Doug and his family spent time reading books in Borders, Barnes & Noble, and local libraries.
After remission, a second cancer diagnosis, and incredibly, a third, Doug received a chance e-mail from Lance Armstrong, the champion cyclist who was also a cancer survivor. For two years, Doug said he and Armstrong continued e-mailing, hoping to invent a resource where younger people with serious illnesses could congregate and learn.
Today, as CEO of the Lance Armstrong Foundation and the Livestrong.com health community, Doug said he's confident that social media will change healthcare forever. He shared some impressive metrics with the Social Health (SXSH) audience, gathered in the Texas capital on the eve of that other interactive festival. Of note: His personal Twitter account, @LIVESTRONGCEO, has more than 1 million followers, and Twitter is now the #1 driver of traffic to Livestrong.com, which has seen visitorship grow by 294 times over the past 2 years (per Compete.com).
Other highlights from SXSH:
- Humana's Greg Matthews described the evolution of Humana's Horsepower Challenge, where pedometers worn by students power an online game. In the Louisville, KY, pilot, game participants saw their activity levels increase by 13% and "exercise communities" emerged as children worked together to raise their scores
- Fabio Gratton of Ignite Health shared the evolution of a pharma marketing community at FDASM.com, including a host of tools he used to enable collaboration and aggregate content
- Yours truly, along with HealthEd's George Fencl, discussed the importance of health literacy on the Web. We shared a Fry analysis of common health sites, conducted by our own Christine Sokoloski, which found articles from Google Health, Wikipedia, and WebMD to be written at a level that's too high for most Americans to read
- User experience experts Will Evans and Amy Cueva asserted, "Stakeholders lie!" They explained that communities are most effective not when influenced by self-reported research, but when driven by direct patient observation and usability studies
- David Hill from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) excited SXSH with a prototype pill identifier called Pillbox. (Not what you'd expect from your average government librarian.) The tool puts thousands of pill photographs into the public domain, where NLM hopes private industry will monetize this data through social communities and apps
The day's key takeaway: Social innovation is happening all over healthcare, which is beginning to find its way around challenges and offer solutions that can positively impact health outcomes. It's a long road ahead that will demand more innovators willing to push the pedal to the metal. From where I sit, this is going to be quite a ride.
Jeff Greene
Director of Strategic Services
HealthEd
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