Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts

Sunday, February 1, 2015

Where People go to look for Medical Information on the WWW

Everyone is doing it. Patients do it, physicians do it, and family members do it.



For the current generation (Millenials, Gen-X) the use of the internet and familiarity with search is a sine-qua-non. They have used it in school, most likely beginning in elementary school. It has become an educational staple, much like learning your ABC and/or multiplication tables.

One of the key ingredients is to  know where to search for what. A simple Google search will result in thousands of results, which is not much help in the long run. Google's search engine optimization is not built for research. It is a marketing tool based on several algorithms to  analyze who watches what, and if they return.

The PEW Internet Project evaluated internet usage in depth, by illnesss, chronic disability, age, other demographics

Health Fact Sheet
A key ingredient is the ease of access to this information:
90% of U.S. adults own a cell phone; 58% of U.S. adults own a smartphone (January 2014 survey). For more, see: Mobile Technology Fact Sheet
87% of U.S. adults use the internet (January 2014 survey). For more, see: Internet User Demographics
Online health information:
72% of internet users say they looked online for health information within the past year.
77% of online health seekers say they began their last session at a search engine such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Another 13% say they began at a site that specializes in health information, like WebMD. Just 2% say they started their research at a more general site like Wikipedia and an additional 1% say they started at a social network site like Facebook.
The most commonly-researched topics are specific diseases or conditions; treatments or procedures; and doctors or other health professionals.
Half of online health information research is on behalf of someone else – information access by proxy.
26% of online health seekers say they have been asked to pay for access to something they wanted to see online (just 2% say they did so).
Clinicians remain a central resource:
When asked to think about the last time they had a serious health issue and to whom they turned for help, either online or offline:
  • 70% of U.S. adults got information, care, or support from a doctor or other health care professional.
  • 60% of adults got information or support from friends and family.
  • 24% of adults got information or support from others who have the same health condition.
People turn to different sources for different kinds of information:
When people have technical questions related to a health issue, professionals hold sway. When a situation involves more personal issues of how to cope with a health issue or get quick relief, then non-professionals are preferred:
Technology Revolution
Three major technology revolutions have occurred during the period the Pew Research Center has been studying digital technology – and yet more are on the horizon.

Broadband









Second, mobile connectivity through cell phones, 
and, smartphones and tablet computers, made any time-anywhere access to information a reality for the vast majority of Americans. Mobile devices have changed the way people think about how and when they can communicate and gather information by making just-in-time and real-time encounters possible. They have also affected the way people allocate their time and attention.
                                                               Social

Third, the rise of social media and social networking has affected the way that people think about their friends, acquaintances, and even strangers. People have always have social networks of family and friends that helped them. The new reality is that as people create social networks in technology spaces, those networks are often bigger and more diverse than in the past. Social media allow people to plug into those networks more readily and more broadly – making them persistent and pervasive in ways that were unimaginable in the past. One of the major impacts was that the traditional boundaries between private and public, between home and work, between being a consumer of information and producer of it were blurred.

Health Care Social Media is a in social media. The use of hashtags allows anyone to search on twitter for specific diseases, treatments, and more including twitter postings from scientific meetings, ie #AMA2015, or #AAFP2015. This allows any twitter user to receive tweets from the specific meeting, filtered out from the twitter stream.
This last category  has potential to be the most important. Facebook pages, Google plus pages offer a visible and easily accessed methodology to 'llke" "follow" or + topics of interest. Many of these sites come directly from a hospital and/or clinic. 
Static web pages are fixed in content. A web page coupled with an active daily or weekly social media posting using hashtags as a search modality gives both user and patient an active inter-action.
These formidable changes have not been limited to healthcare. Health professionals were lagging in interest possibly due to the issues of privacy and confidentiality.  HIPAA clearly defines the limits of information in regard to personal identification placed in a public space, accessible to anyone. 
Access to these high speed resoures remains limited however in many rural and some suburban areas due to the unavailability of modern broadband resources. The development of high speed 4G, and LTE cellular networks is also lacking in some areas. Profitability and a business model for those regions remains a paramount barrier.
Who is not using modern technology to access health information?


Monday, May 19, 2014

Health Affairs:FDA and Primary Care

Health Affairs briefing at the National Press Club in Washington, DC,

The clinical and economic virtues of provider consolidation have long been recognized by policy experts, but in recent years, research has shown that large provider organizations may use market power to obtain relatively high prices from payers without necessarily delivering superior quality. On May 19, Health Affairs will release a package of "Web First" papers examining questions regarding provider consolidation.

Follow live Tweets from the briefing at @HA_Events, and join in the conversation with #HA_ProviderConsolidation.  We invite you to a Health Affairs briefing at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, where the authors will present their findings and engage in a discussion with a panel of expert responders and the audience. The papers and the briefing are supported by a generous grant from The Commonwealth Fund.
WHEN:
Monday, May 19, 2014
9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
WHERE:
National Press Club
529 14th Street NW
Washington, DC
13th Floor (Metro Center)



Physicians and Pharma have long complained about the length of time for new drug approval by the FDA for clinical use.  Pharma is required to perform Clinical Trials, I, II, and III to test for toxicity, effectiveness, and possible side-effects. Various amounts are quoted for the process of approval.  These add significantly to the costs of biochemical and pharmacological production. Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation describes a new expedited drug development pathway designed to speed up the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) premarketing approval process for drugs and devices that treat serious or life-threatening conditions. Created under a 2012 law, the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (FDASIA), a drug may be designated a "breakthrough therapy" if it shows far more promise over comparable treatments already on the market. At that point, the FDA will initiate a special rapid approval process. The pharmaceutical industry has responded positively to this law, and as of last month the FDA has received 178 requests for this designation. The law, whose full impact will not be known for several years, carries significant implications for approaches to clinical development, patient access to new drugs, and the drug regulations process itself.


Josh Seidman discusses the implications of the social media response to the release of information on Medicare payment to specific physicians. This is the first time physician reimbursement amounts have been released to the public.


ABOUT HEALTH AFFAIRS:
Health Affairs, published by Project HOPE, is the leading journal of health policy. The peer-reviewed journal appears each month in print, with additional Web First papers published weekly at www.healthaffairs.org.

Laudable but excessive prevention and public health initiatives have been added to the work load of primary physicians who are already hard-pressed to comply with a multitude of bureaucratic requirements. These additonal requirements may have a negative effect on primary care duties.

Receive new Health Affairs article alerts in your choice of format:
  • E-mail alerts of new articles and tables of contents from Health Affairs.
  • RSS feed for new article headlines delivered to your Web site or reader.
  • Sunday UpDate: a weekly e-mail summary of what's new in Health Affairs.
  • Follow Health Affairs updates on Twitter.




Sunday, February 9, 2014

Is Sunday a Day of Rest for Social Media ?



Sunday may or may not be a day of rest in social media, depending upon your lifestyle. If you use Social Media for business it may give you time to prepare your social media stream for later in the week, scheduled by an increasing number of social media add ons, such as Hootsuite, Buffer, Hubspot and others.

Sunday may be a time to socialize about Friday and Saturday's movies, dinners, parties, weddings, and other events.
Social media has been accepted and internalized among young people. Everyone has it and is dong it. The line between social and business is evaporating, just as it has in real life.  More deals go down on the golf course, at the coffee shop, restaurants, and during times of transportation.  It's easy enough to bring along all your digital documents and share them on google + or just 'bluetooth' them across the desk or table. Google drive, dropbox, skydrive, amazon and others all provide shareable storage for free or little charge

Physicians can share medical consults and discuss difficult diagnostic challenges anywhere at the clinic, hospital, operating room or from the automobile (smart) that will be driving itself very soon. Powerpoint, Slideshare, Prezi, offer different and imaginative presentation modes. Since  Youtube was bought by Google the two share log ons and also integrate and synchronize via Google plus.  Google continues to add some private and secure modes for video conferences . They call it "Helpouts".  And for MDs it is  HIPAA compliant which allow patient - provider secure and confidential communications In additon to these open social platforms, there are physician specific sites, such as SERMO, and DOXIMITY





When it comes down to it, we are all connected socially.  Our responsibility remains to our patents, and no matter`how exciting the technology is, will it help you to deliver care, or is it just a  'toy" ?

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

ACA Enrollment Issue? If All Else Fails Try Social Media

From Fierce Health Payers



Many consumers can't get through to insurers due to long customer service wait times, so they're turning to social media--Twitter in particular--to express their complaints and criticisms. And insurers are listening, often responding directly to consumers with ways to immediately rectify the problems.



The Affordable Care Act has severely effected customer service for all companies participating in the affordable care act.  Frustration has mounted even for those not involved with health benefit exchanges or subsidized care. Anthem Blue Cross in California is experiencing the brunt of many tweets after it canceled individual plans and switched hundreds of its members into new plans and withdrew premiums from their bank accounts without their knowledge. In several situations, Anthem spokesperson Darrel Ng tweeted individually to people who complained about the withdrawals, asking for their contact information so he could resolve the problem, ProPublica reported.

Did you know that Anthem has been using social media for customer service and complaints for some time?

Ng told ProPublica that consumers now are interacting with companies, including Anthem, beyond the traditional phone call. "In response to this new demand, we created our customer service Twitter account @AskAnthem several years ago to assist members," he said. "As consumers themselves started proactively contacting our other Twitter accounts, we started directing these inquiries to customer service for assistance."

Aetna spokesperson Matt Wiggin said the insurer recognizes people are using other methods to communicate. "There have been some instances where call volumes have been heavy and if people have not been able to get through or been able to get the information we need, they've either reached out to us through social media or other means available," he told ProPublica.
California HealthCare Foundation has been tracking Twitter comments related to the reform law and its recentreport found less conversation about the law between December 2013 and Jan. 15, 2014, compared to several months ago when HealthCare.gov launched with glitches and enrollment errors.
Recognizing consumers take more frequently to Twitter, insurers Aetna and Cigna have been maintaining a strong social media presence to manage their brand while taking quick action to remedy any complaints aired publicly,FierceHealthPayer previously reported.

"Social media gives us a tremendous opportunity to learn what the community needs," Carissa O'Brien, Aetna's social media director, told KHN. And by using Twitter, Aetna can educate and inform their followers about health and wellness.
She and her team of six employees aim to respond within an hour of the roughly 250 Tweets each month dealing with claims and other services. But O'Brien recognizes that it's just the beginning. "If we're looking to focus a 100-plus-year-old company on social media, that's massive cultural change," she said.
Using Twitter also keeps the insurers accountable. "Social media acts as a public documentation of how you resolve the situation," Ini Augustine, a social media strategist and head of SocialWise Media Group, told KHN. "It's more than a marketing tool."

Insurers like Aetna, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield and Cigna have designated Twitter feeds, @aetnahelp   @askanthem and @cignaquestions, respectively, that focus solely on marketing and sharing health-related news.

            




Wednesday, January 15, 2014

When Sharing may not be Caring

It's basic, my dear Watson....as Sherlock Holmes would inform his sidekick whose name was  Wastson (not the cyber-edition from IBM.

As written by Tina Reed Johnson

When Sharing is *Not* Caring on Social Media!
You might think that photographers appreciate it when you share their images online.  Believe it or not, this isn’t always the case!  There are oftentimes conditions on image use, and you can get into trouble if you are not paying attention.  If you are using someone else’s image to spice up your post, you might want to think about it first.
But it’s so quick and easy to share social media images, and if it’s online it’s okay to use it right?  And especially if the photographer name is already on a photo then there shouldn’t be a problem.  Hold on there a minute!  
And it's safe to use your own images?  Right ?







It’s important to follow image use guidelines to avoid violating a copyright, and causing problems for yourself and your business. It can be expensive to pay for your mistakes. You may have to hire an attorney, repair damage to your online reputation, in addition to compensating an artist or photographer for image (mis)use.
The Basics on sharing images, art and more on Social Media

Just as in health care privacy and sharing are intertwined. HIPAA establishes strong guidelines (boundaries) and so to do copyright law.......