See on Scoop.it – Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer
The New York Times calls Eric Topol “a Naderesque crusader against drugs he deems dangerous, as well as their makers.” He is recently the author of “The Creative Destruction of Medicine.”
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Savvy, influential patients have pharmas attention and are growing relationships with industry. How firms have just begun to tap the potential of this emerging segment
[Excerpt]
While many pharma and device firms remain on the sidelines, understandably so, the lure of gaining a rapport with patients on social networks is reason enough for some to venture forth, despite the unknowns.
Over the past year or so, the role of patients as an influence and information channel for pharma has blossomed. Experts on the trend say it’s comparable to the rise of key opinion leaders (KOLs) in the physician world—doctors, typically from academic medicine, who reach out to other physicians likely to prescribe a product.
Two main groups of patient advocates have experience with products. The first receives training from boutique agencies like HealthTalker and Snow Companies, which specialize in word-of-mouth communications and use the real-life stories of patients to deliver marketing messages.
The second and perhaps most visible segment of patient advocates are those, like Hernandez and Sparling in the diabetes realm or Dave deBronkart (aka e-Patient Dave) in cancer, who are especially adept at creating content.
The foremost bloggers have become, effectively, small communications firms unto themselves, says Jack Barrette, founder and CEO of Wego Health, an online patient network that also acts as a liaison between its “health activists” and pharma to create educational programs.
“[The high-profile advocates and bloggers] want to communicate very valuable content and have created an agency structure—they’re professionals, in a good way, and have managed to carve out areas where they can be seen as agency-like,” Barrette says.
Beyond that top layer is a group who also blog but don’t necessarily support themselves through their advocacy. It’s that group, which Barrette calls the health activist middle class, that companies are now learning from: “They’re so powerful because their numbers are so vast, and they’re trusted because they’re not semi-professionals.”
There’s a third tier online, “who don’t even consider themselves patients,” observes Wendy Blackburn, EVP, Intouch Solutions. Around a third of US adults use social media as a health resource, according to a 2012 survey of 1,060 US adults by PricewaterhouseCoopers, and most probably fall into this third group.
“It’s someone who maybe just got diagnosed and doesn’t even realize there’s this discussion we’re having about pharma and social media,” says Blackburn. “They just go online for information.”
Participation is not without its pitfalls. For instance, sources say patient-generated content is vulnerable to the same creative restrictions as most healthcare marketing.
Marketers playing in social media also need to stay vigilant and ride the waves of the shifting digital landscape, such as when Facebook abruptly changed course in 2011 and forced pharma pages to open their walls to user comments, prompting several drugmakers to shutter theirs rather than commit to 24/7 monitoring of posts.
“If pharma can drive patients to accurate information, it furthers the goal of optimizing treatment experience and promoting adherence,” says Tara Rice, manager of health education for the agency HealthEd. Rice points to a 2012 Wolters Kluwer survey that found 65% of people who turn to the internet with medical questions say they trust the information they find, “which is scary, because there’s a lot of inaccurate information online.”
Nevertheless, patient advocates and some pharma and device companies seem to be finding ways to work together.
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Medicine 2.0 ’13, aka the 6th World Congress on Social Media, Mobile Apps, and Internet/Web2.0 in Health and Medicine, this year hosted in London, will once again be very international and contain a unique mix of traditional academic/research, practice and business presentations, keynote presentations, and panel discussions to discuss emerging technologies in health and medicine, with an emphasis on Internet-based, social media, and mobile technologies.
We strive for an interdisciplinary mix of presenters from different countries and disciplines (e.g. health care, social sciences, computer science, engineering, or business) and with a different angle (research, practice, and business)
See on www.medicine20congress.com
Check out this exclusive interview by Michael Weiss with Dr Kevin Pho, founder of KevinMD.com on the topic of the increased role of Health Care Social Media in the Practice of Medicine.
Speaking about the interview on his blog, Professional Patient Perspectives, Michael writes:
I think you will enjoy Dr. Pho’s informative and thoughtful answers as we talked about everything from Rating Physicians on-line to integrating mobile health & Smartphones into the traditional medical examination room to the present/future effects of ObamaCare on Healthcare and discussed the prospects of using technology like Skype for Video Medical Exams and chronic illness Follow-ups.
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Correlates of Health-Related Social Media Use Among Adults
ABSTRACT
Background: Sixty percent of Internet users report using the Internet to look for health information. Social media sites are emerging as a potential source for online health information. However, little is known about how people use social media for such purposes.
Objectives: The purpose of this study was two-fold: (1) to establish the frequency of various types of online health-seeking behaviors, and (2) to identify correlates of 2 health-related online activities, social networking sites (SNS) for health-related activities and consulting online user-generated content for answers about health care providers, health facilities, or medical treatment.
Methods: The study consisted of a telephone survey of 1745 adults who reported going online to look for health-related information. Four subscales were created to measure use of online resources for (1) using SNS for health-related activities; (2) consulting online rankings and reviews of doctors, hospitals or medical facilities, and drugs or medical treatments; (3) posting a review online of doctors, hospitals or medical facilities, and drugs or medical treatments, and (4) posting a comment or question about health or medical issues on various social media. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed.
Results: Respondents consulted online rankings or reviews (41.15%), used SNS for health (31.58%), posted reviews (9.91%), and posted a comment, question, or information (15.19%). Respondents with a chronic disease were nearly twice as likely to consult online rankings (odds ratio [OR] 2.09, 95% CI 1.66-2.63, P<.001). Lower odds of consulting online reviews were associated with less formal education (OR 0.49, 95% CI 0.37-0.65, P<.001) and being male (OR 0.71, 95% CI 0.57-0.87, P<.001). Respondents with higher incomes were 1.5 times as likely to consult online rankings or reviews (OR 1.49, 95% CI 0.10-2.24, P=.05), than respondents with a regular provider (OR 2.05, 95% CI 1.52-2.78, P<.001), or living in an urban/suburban location (OR 1.61, 95% CI 1.17-2.22, P<.001). Older respondents were less likely to use SNS for health-related activities (OR 0.96, 95% CI 0.95-0.97, P<.001), as were males (OR 0.70, 95% CI 0.56-0.87, P<.001), whereas respondents with a regular provider had nearly twice the likelihood of using SNS for health-related activities (OR 1.89, 95% CI 1.43-2.52, P<.001).
Conclusions: People are using social media for seeking health information. However, individuals are more likely to consume information than they are to contribute to the dialog. The inherent value of “social” in social media is not being captured with online health information seeking. People with a regular health care provider, chronic disease, and those in younger age groups are more likely to consult online rankings and reviews and use SNS for health-related activities.
(J Med Internet Res 2013;15(1):e21)
doi:10.2196/jmir.2297
KEYWORDS
social media; Internet; health information; consumer
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Twitter data can be a useful tool to predict the effects of lifestyle factors on health, researchers at the University of Rochester in New York report.
Researchers have used Twitter to model how factors like social status, exposure to pollution, interpersonal interaction and others influence health, a university release said Friday.
"If you want to know, down to the individual level, how many people are sick in a population, you would have to survey the population, which is costly and time-consuming," postdoctoral researcher Adam Sadilek said. "Twitter and the technology we have developed allow us to do this passively, quickly and inexpensively; we can listen in to what people are saying and mine this data to make predictions."
Many tweets are geo-tagged, he said, which means they carry GPS information showing exactly where the user was when he or she tweeted.
In a test using tweets collected in New York City over a period of a month, researchers looked at factors like how often a person takes the subway, goes to the gym or a particular restaurant, their proximity to a pollution source and their online social status, and then analyzed whether these had a positive, negative or neutral impact on the users’ health based on what users said in tweets.
The researchers used their studies to develop a web application called GermTracker that color-codes Twitter users (from red to green) according to their health and, using the GPS data encoded in the tweets, place them on a map, which allows anyone using the application to see their distribution.
"This app can be used by people to make personal decisions about their health. For example, they might want to avoid a subway station if it’s full of sick people," Sadilek said. "It could also be used in conjunction with other methods by governments or local authorities to try to understand outbursts of the flu."
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Your Content Buffet
As you prepare your content for the healthcare market, you are doing more th…
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Social networks devoted to specific health conditions offer the potential to improve participants’ treatment and adherence to their health regimen, according to two recent studies.
The Veterans Health Administration and University of California-Berkeley have been studying how epilepsy patients use PatientsLikeMe, a network of patients with chronic illnesses. On the site, patient records are de-identified and available to every participant, including researchers and companies focused on improving products, services, and care. Patients using the site can see what works–and what doesn’t–for others in the same boat, according to a blog post at Health Affairs.
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I am looking forward to this conference in June – check out this special offer if you want to come join me!
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Health Care Social Media 