Posts Tagged ‘e-Patients’

Anthony
LaFauce

Digital is More than Social

Friday, October 7th, 2011

ExpertsHere’s the setting: I’m at an impromptu networking event with some of the regulars and we’re all talking shop. Most of us are Digital PR folks, some program managers, some PR professionals, some video guys. In walks a new guy, whose sunglasses I’m sure cost more than my car, who immediately introduces himself and starts talking about what he does.

He’s a Senior Digital Whatever at Whatever Firm, a smaller shop around town I wasn’t too familiar with. All of us begin talking digital media–different tools, things we have seen work before and things that we know will fail. New Guy keeps coming back to social media, which is obviously an important part of digital media. But he fails to add any value to our conversation when we get to things like video editing, writing PHP and using mobile.

The group was fine with New Guy until, maybe after one too many Cosmos, he declared that all of those “old forms of digital” are worthless and the only thing that matters is social media. (more…)

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Kaitlin
Doody

IHSMS: The right formula for successful healthcare communications

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

The evolution of Health 2.0 in our data-driven world calls for a shift in the way health organizations locate and communicate with their target audiences. While health challenges abound in local communities and on a global scale, so does the potential within the communication tools and technology that we hold.

Spectrum’s team of health communicators from across the globe will converge in Washington, D.C. on May 18th from 9-10:30 a.m. ET to present data and reveal insight from a global listening program. The listening program was conducted in 11 countries to assess the impact and conversation around malaria. During tomorrow’s event, the International Healthcare Social Media Summit team will discuss the implications for the data found, as well as offer insight into strategies for using digital tools to benefit national and international healthcare organizations today. For more information about the summit and to register, please visit the event page. You can also view live-streaming of the summit or follow the conversation on Twitter: #ihsms.

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Molly
Hippolitus

Weekly Digital News: Catering to the e-Patient

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

E-Patients, the  growing group of individuals using the internet to find health info, are the fire in the belly of the e-Health movement. They are online, they are collaborative, and they are tired of the one-way communication that happens in the doctor’s office.

According to a video shown at Reshape09, a Health 2.0 conference held this month in the Netherlands:

- 84% of individuals do a Google search before visiting the doctor.

- Patients only remember about 50 to 60% of what’s been said during a ten minute doctor consultation.

- 76% of individuals trust their family’s and friends’ advice more than ads and articles.

It’s  clear from statistics like these that there is an enormous push of e-patients “taking back” what is rightfully theirs – personal health information. But who’s catering to this ever-expanding group?

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Molly
Hippolitus

Weekly Digital News: Out With the Old, In With the New

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

In digital health care, there already exists audiences for related products and services.  If you don’t believe me, try this out, Google “Type 2 Diabetes” – and see  how many returns pop up on the results page. People are a communal kind, we seek advice, guidance, and direction from others who have gone through similar situations.  E-patient, or not, individuals are using the internet to search for information regarding their chronic condition, disease, or illness – whether for a specific pharmaceutical drug or simply support.  The PEW Internet Project  finds that 83% of the online population are networked individuals using the internet to find health information.  What does this mean for health care and drug marketing?

Out with the old, in with the new. (more…)

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Molly
Hippolitus

Weekly Digital News: e-Force

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

A new trend is bubbling up on the internet. More and more individuals are returning home from their doctor appointments, and turning to the web for a second opinion.  Fortunately, there exist countless Web sites devoted to providing health information for these individuals… unfortunately, the information is vast, general, and terribly non-person specific.

This growing group of  “e-patients” are individuals “who are equipped, enabled, empowered and engaged in their health and health care decisions,” according to e-patients.net.  They pour over the Google search results page in hopes of finding tailored, data-driven health information in real-time.

Spectrum’s VP of Digital Strategy, Kevin Walsh, attended the Health 2.0 conference held last week in San Francisco where user-generated health care was one of the main topics of discussion.  Many of the products and services introduced at the conference had a lot to do with this new group of e-patients using the internet to find data to aid in managing personal health decisions.

Steve Lohr, of The New York Times, recently wrote about a new start-up company introduced at Health 2.0 that sets out to aid e-patients in wading through the “vast trove of generalized health information” found online.  Lohr explains:

 ”The ideal, health experts say, would be to combine personal data with health information to deliver tailored health plans for individuals. That is what Mr. Bosworth and his San Francisco- based company, Keas (pronounced KEE-ahs) Inc., mean to do.”

The Keas system is still in beta, and not an end-all-be-all of online health consumerism, it is, however, an initiative  to supplement the lull in person-specific health information found on the Web.  The system’s  goal is to help e-patients take control of their health, to “own” their medical information, so to speak.

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