Strategic Application of Social Media in Health Care

Today I had the opportunity to present at the 2012 Health Care Social Media Summit sponsored by the Texas Hospital Association, and I’m currently enjoying Ed Bennett’s presentation on employee access to social media.

I had uploaded my slides to Slideshare.net, but for some reason they aren’t loading correctly. I will update this when I can. Meanwhile you can see some of my other slides here.

Although I have to head home early, I look forward to following the discussion on Twitter using the #HCSMTX tag.

Update (8/10/12): The slides from yesterday’s presentation are now available on Slideshare, and embedded below:

Best wishes to the THA gang as you start the second day of your Summit!

A Revolutionary Opportunity

I received a call last November from a writer with Minnesota Monthly, the magazine Minnesota Public Radio sends to its donors, saying that its editors had been brainstorming an article idea for February’s issue and wanted to include me. The feature was to include a dozen Minnesotans they called “The Revolutionaries” and would involve a professional photo shoot, which they scheduled for December.

The February issue was sent to subscribers and available on newsstands in mid-January, but the articles weren’t online until last week. Here’s the lead-in to the “Revolutionary” profiles in the article, entitled “The Revolutionaries: 12 Minnesotans who are changing the way we think about the world—and its future.

It’s never been harder to think big. From an economy that keeps many of us clinging to crummy jobs to small-minded partisan bickering that puts innovative projects on hold, looking beyond ourselves and this moment can be mind-bendingly hard.

Nonetheless, there are still dreamers out there—and more important, dreamers who take action. We rounded up 12 Minnesotans who are tackling projects that have the potential not just to change their industry, but to change the state, the country, and the world.

Check out the whole article, and you’ll see the photo I’ve adapted for my Twitter avatar.

An Aase State of Mind

That’s the headline from this story in today’s Austin Daily Herald about basketball in my hometown, and about our family’s history (and hopefully future) of participating in Minnesota’s state high school basketball tournament. Here’s an excerpt:

Austin center Joe Aase knows all about his dad Lee’s history on the basketball court.

He knows he went to the state basketball tournament in 1981 with the Packers and he knows he played in the title game.

Joe also knows about his sister Rebekah. He knows she played in the state basketball tournament in 2008 because he was there.

Now Joe’s hoping he finally gets his chance to play in the state tournament as the Packers (12-4 overall, 9-2 Big Nine) are currently sitting atop the Section 1A standings and are just a half game behind Owatonna in the Big Nine.

Read the whole story here.

As a dad, it was a great blessing to be able to watch Rebekah and her team get to the state tournament in 2008 (I wrote about it here), and now Joe and my nephew Tom (who also is a junior starter on the boys’ team) are part of a team that is poised to make a tournament run. It’s particularly neat for my dad and mom, who also still live in Austin, to be able to watch both grandsons play, and also to get to go to Rebekah’s games as she is now playing at the local community college.

As a volunteer with the team’s booster club, I’m applying the SMUG philosophy, using social media tools to track (and promote) the team’s progress through a blog (the Packer Fast Break Club site), a YouTube channel and a Twitter account. I’m using a Flip camera (on a tripod) to capture game highlights to post to YouTube.

Since I already had the Flip, the total cost for all of it is about $20 a year for the PackerFastBreakClub.com domain and mapping it from WordPress.com.

How are you using your SMUG lessons to provide low-cost, high impact support for community or volunteer programs?

 

 

My ABC National Radio Appearance

Instead of the American Broadcasting Company, it’s the Australian Broadcasting Company, and from an interview I did while in Sydney last week for the HARC Forum. The interview was for The Health Report, with Dr. Norman Swan.

We had a lively conversation, and I enjoyed getting to speak with Dr. Swan about our Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media.

The program aired Monday morning in Australia.

Listen to the program or download it. And follow Dr. Swan on Twitter.

Let me know what you think.

 

Studying a Rare Disease with Dr. Tweet

In the last few months I have had an exciting opportunity to be part of a Mayo Clinic project using social networking tools to assist in the study of a rare disease, and last week we reached a milestone with publication of a study in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

One of our key team members is Dr. Marysia Tweet, so it’s almost poetic that we’re working with Dr. Tweet to use social media in medical research. You can’t make that up!

At any rate, the paper on our pilot study of SCAD (spontaneous coronary artery dissection) is published this month in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, as reported in the Wall Street Journal and described in this Mayo Clinic news release.

The really exciting part of this story is how the research was initiated by patients, and this Mayo Clinic Medical Edge story tells how it happened:

We’re continuing to use our social media tools to help with the ongoing research into SCAD, as the Mayo Clinic research team led by Dr. Sharonne Hayes is creating a virtual registry to study SCAD. This SCAD research post on our News Blog provides the information physicians and patients need to take the first steps to be included in the study.

The pilot study showed that this kind of virtual registry is feasible; 18 women signed up for the pilot within a week, and the initial 12-person study included participants from New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada as well as the United States. Dr. Hayes discusses the rationale for and the implications of the study:

Finally, here are some additional sound bites about the pilot study and its implications, from Dr. Hayes, Dr. Tweet and yours truly:

Our Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media mission is to go beyond the public relations and marketing uses for social media and find ways to apply these revolutionary tools in education, research, clinical practice and in the administration of health care organizations. I was really excited to have the chance to be involved in this first publication, and that we are having an ongoing role in facilitating this patient-initiated research into a rare disease.