Category: HCSM

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Community Management That Works: How to Build and Sustain a Thriving Online Health Community

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See on Scoop.it – Health Care Social Media Monitor

Community Management That Works: How to Build and Sustain a Thriving Online Health Community

Marie Ennis-O’Connor‘s insight:

ABSTRACT

Health care professionals, patients, caregivers, family, friends, and other supporters are increasingly joining online health communities to share information and find support. But social Web (Web 2.0) technology alone does not create a successful online community. Building and sustaining a successful community requires an enabler and strategic community management. Community management is more than moderation. The developmental life cycle of a community has four stages: inception, establishment, maturity, and mitosis. Each stage presents distinct characteristics and management needs. This paper describes the community management strategies, resources, and expertise needed to build and maintain a thriving online health community; introduces some of the challenges; and provides a guide for health organizations considering this undertaking. The paper draws on insights from an ongoing study and observation of online communities as well as experience managing and consulting a variety of online health communities. Discussion includes effective community building practices relevant to each stage, such as outreach and relationship building, data collection, content creation, and other proven techniques that ensure the survival and steady growth of an online health community.

 

See on www.jmir.org

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Why Online Patient Communities are Better than Real Life Support Groups

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David Lee Scher, MD's avatarThe Digital Health Corner

A support group  has many potential benefits, some of which include improving coping skills, reducing anxiety, depression, isolation, ignorance about the condition and others.  Online patient communities (OPCs) are a recent phenomenon.  Some are open (with respect to type of member or fee) and some are more focused and closed.  Irrespective of the type, OPCs have blossomed. It is a major indication of social media’s penetration into healthcare (or vice versa) and why physicians need to establish a presence in social media.  While there are still reasons why support groups are popular, OPCs have definite advantages. I will highlight a few of them.

1.    Many patients and caregivers cannot physically attend a support group. In the early phase of a support group of patients with implantable defibrillators I led for over 20 years, I was informed of scheduling conflicts and transportation difficulties (some patients coming from distances…

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Hashtags for Twitter Cancer Communities

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Taking hashtags to the next level. Wonderful article.

pfanderson's avatarEmerging Technologies Librarian

Top ten hashtags associated with #cancer

Librarians have been geeking out, or grossing out, over hashtags since they first appeared. Some of the conversation has been about concerns over ‘allowing’ the public to define their own metadata, while much of it has been the flip side of trying to engage the public in generating metadata for library online collections, and thus enriching access and awareness for those collections.

Naturally, the general public simply move forward with creating new hashtags for their own purposes, largely unaware of the conversations and concerns of professionals in the area of metadata. This is as it should be. The idea of a Folksonomy, a.k.a. folk taxonomy, as originated by Thomas Vanderwal centers around the social aspect — real people, real folk, coming up with language that means something to them to describe content that matters to them with ideas that matter to them. Meaning.

I could go on about this for…

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Posted in HCSM

Hashtags for Twitter cancer communities

Posted on by Editor

See on Scoop.it – Health Care Social Media Monitor

Librarians have been geeking out, or grossing out, over hashtags since they first appeared. Some of the conversation has been about concerns over ‘allowing’ the public to define their own metadata, while much of it has been the flip side of trying to engage the public in generating metadata for library online collections, and thus enriching access and awareness for those collections.

 

Naturally, the general public simply move forward with creating new hashtags for their own purposes, largely unaware of the conversations and concerns of professionals in the area of metadata. This is as it should be.

 

The idea of a Folksonomy, a.k.a. folk taxonomy, as originated by Thomas Vanderwal centers around the social aspect — real people, real folk, coming up with language that means something to them to describe content that matters to them with ideas that matter to them. Meaning.

I could go on about this for a long time, but today I need to focus on a particular aspect of this dynamic — a shift from folk+taxonomy to folk+ontology. Folkology? Folk ontology? Folktology? A little bit of digging leads me tofolktology (non-scholarly) or tagontology (scholarly) as preferred terms for this, both of which are used roughly the same amount.

 

In social media, one of the greatest strengths has been the power to create community where none existed before, to connect and empower those who may otherwise be isolated. The most prominent examples of this in healthcare have been the emerging communities around chronic conditions (such as diabetes), marginalized communities (such as facial difference and transgendered), and conditions that create isolation as part of the lifestyle or treatment of the condition (such as mobility disorders, many types of cancer, and any condition expected to be fatal).

See on etechlib.wordpress.com

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Five Reasons Why Physicians Should be in Social Media

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David Lee Scher, MD's avatarThe Digital Health Corner

In November, 2011 the AMA published a report on Professionalism in the use of Social Media.  A brief summary of the paper  was published in June, 2010.  The issues addressed by the AMA are reasonable and practical in my view.  There have been some excellent pieces written about the ‘ethical’ issues seen by others about physicians being on social media as well as reasons that physicians themselves give for not wanting to participate. The issue has also generated some excellent thought-provoking discussion in the Digital Health Linkedin group.    As an active participant is social media, I realize its value to patients, caregivers and providers. There have been many other articles and posts about physicians and social media.  I just thought it was time for me to put my perspective out there. I would like to touch on five reasons I believe that physicians should embrace social media.

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5 Ways Hospitals Can Use Social Media

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See on Scoop.it – Health Care Social Media Monitor

Using social media may be a fairly new concept to hospitals and health organizations – hospitals, for the most part, are three to four years behind the general public – but the return on investment can be incredible, said Lee Aase. “If you keep your investment really small, you keep your ROI really high,” said Aase.

See on www.healthcarefinancenews.com