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Dan Bowman, in a recent article, quotes a family physician who feels social media has no place in healthcare. He asserts busy physicians don’t have time to add yet another technology to their already busy schedules. I see his point, but I have to challenge this.
Social media, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many other sites has drastically changed the way people (a.k.a patients) communicate with each other. Accountable care, population management, and chronic disease management activities are all about enhanced communication with patients. It would be borderline negligent to ignore social media as a vehicle to enhance this communication.
Patients have been trained from birth to delegate their healthcare decisions to their physicians. Most completely ignore healthcare issues and activities until they get too sick to overlook their healthcare trajectories. Reaching and training these patients before their disease becomes chronic is needed desperately to improve outcomes.
I can see a scenario where Facebook threads between the care team and the patient are used as reminders, updates, and information gathering tools for patient data. There is far less cost to train one or five care providers than to encourage hundreds of patients to learn a new system. Facebook is sticky. Today’s model is to build a patient portal site that requires patients to actively connect, sign-on, and interact. Most of them only do this when they have a specific need. Since they are already actively using Facebook, why not build sites that meet them on their own turf? This can still be done securely, easy to use, and relatively quickly.
Physicians have a great opportunity to market their services and reach their patients if they embrace Twitter. The key here is to build a following. Twitter is based on sending small sound bites to a group of followers. Followers are people who have chosen to listen to what the sender has to say. This is a marketer’s dream that the healthcare industry should consider embracing. Once a physician has built a group of followers, they should post links to wellness and diet tips, new practice offerings, and other general health improvement ideas. These posts will be immediately received by a list of patients who want to receive this kind of information.
Physicians who are too busy to learn about social media are missing a giant opportunity to educate and reach patients on their terms. The good news is some of this can be delegated. Hire an intern who already knows these tools and let them build an outreach. Assign this to a computer savvy administrator.
Social media has the potential to make a huge impact on healthcare. With some creative thinking, they not only mix, but can be a catalyst to drastically change patient motivation and interaction.
The Kinect enables activities that used to require a hand-held controller to be done simply by waving your arms, legs, and moving your body so the sensors detect changes. It uses multiple cameras and microphones and has proven to be highly accurate. Early Kinect games included martial arts, dancing, and interactive scenarios. Later Kinect-enabled applications include the ability for the operating room staff to page through policies and procedures using gestures without breaking the sterile field around the patient.
For decades, patients, and some nurses, have been trained to do what the doctor tells them. Don’t ask questions and take their meds on time. This model is very efficient for the physicians, but has not encouraged the majority of patients to take an active interest in their own health. It has trained them to give the responsibility to the experts and follow along passively.
In most clinic scenarios, the patient visits the physician when they are sick. They explain what is wrong and the physician makes a diagnosis, scribbles on a clipboard, and writes a prescription. The patient leaves the office, fills the prescription, and goes home to heal. Nowhere in this scenario does anyone encourage the patient to learn about their disease, download their results, or become more active in managing their health.
Tablets in 2012 will have sufficient pixels to display patient charts in high fidelity. Apple just announced a 2048×1536 resolution iPad. Samsung is announcing the same. Both of these devices provide higher resolution than today’s average desktop and laptop systems. The concern that data will be missed when using tablets is no longer a valid argument. These higher resolution devices will change the game in portable healthcare.
I call this “Fed Fatigue.” How much of this can the healthcare industry sustain? The payors are cutting reimbursements. Local physicians groups are deploying EHRs.