Author: Lee Aase

AED4EU and the Power of Twitter

Yesterday I posted a video in which Lucien Engelen (@zorg20) interviewed me about social media in healthcare, which he shot while I was his guest in the Netherlands earlier this month.

I interviewed Lucien that same day, asking him to tell the story about the mobile phone application for iPhone and Android that he had gotten developed and launched. It’s an augmented reality app that shows where the nearest automated external defibrillator (AED) is located, using the phone’s location awareness. In the case of someone experiencing cardiac arrest, the ideal would be for one person to administer CPR while another bystander uses a smart phone to locate an AED that could shock the heart back into normal rhythm.

AED4EU

I could talk more about the application, but Lucien demonstrates it briefly in this video. More importantly, he tells the story of how Twitter enabled him to find a programmer to get the project done, and how much time that saved in development.

Twitter is an amazing tool for finding information, but more importantly making connections with people. Three weeks from first Tweet to completed iPhone application is pretty amazing. In the way of the Web 1.0 world, Lucien’s analysts would have had to identify a list of companies with programming capability, build a list and then send candidate companies a request for proposals. In the Twitterverse, he could just tweet the question, directed to no one in particular, and the answer found him in less than 30 minutes.

That’s serious productivity ROI!

How about you? What’s your best story of how Twitter helped you find information quickly?

Update: Here is the AED4.EU site.

Global Conversations

A couple of interviews I’ve done relating to social media (and particularly in health care) have recently been published to the Web. The first was with Ryan Zuk of the Public Relations Society of America, for its PRSA Tactics monthly newspaper. I had seen the print version, but yesterday got a couple of tweets saying it was now on the PRSA Web site.

Here’s one of the questions with my answer…

What advice can you offer PR practitioners for maturing their social media strategies?

A key for social media success is not getting bogged down in analysis. This is an unprecedented time of opportunity. We have the ability to communicate directly with our target communities while balancing our work with mainstream media. So don’t think of social media as another thing to do, but instead as part of your balanced communications diet.

…you can read the rest here. (Studious SMUGgles will note the reference to the SMUG Social Media Pyramid in that last sentence.)

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to travel to the Netherlands for a couple of presentations and some workshops, and after I had extricated myself from the doghouse, Lucien Engelen (@Zorg20), who organized the events, interviewed me briefly with his Flip mino HD camera. He recently uploaded the interview to YouTube and embedded it on his blog. I’ve embedded it below:

The video has already led to some interesting commentary on Twitter, including @CiscoGIII saying “I think you look better on camera than in real life.” I guess that’s another reason to love the Flip!

What do you think? (I mean about the content of the interviews; no need to comment on my in-person vs. on-camera appearance.)

e-Patient Connections

Tomorrow I’m giving a presentation at the e-Patient Connections conference (#ePatCon) in Philadelphia, at the Park Hyatt Bellevue. It’s a really neat hotel, but the broadband “tubes” have a serious case of atherosclerosis.

Here are my slides.

e-Patient Connections from Lee Aase

I’m really looking forward to meeting a lot of people with whom I’ve only Tweeted previously. Just met @epatientdave in the lobby on the way up to my room. Will hopefully see @PhilBaumann, @MeredithGould and @DanaMLewis tonight too…and lots more tomorrow, including @SusannahFox.

“Men who can’t Pee” helps company that can’t spend

At Healthcamp Minnesota this morning we heard from John Reid, from a rural Minnesota company called AbbeyMoor Medical that has a stent aimed at the problem referenced in the title of this post. He described how using this video was really only his company’s only option for raising awareness, because they had no advertising or marketing budget. He showed how traffic to the company Web site went up significantly after this video was posted to YouTube:

John says he has now become a big believer in social media because it’s measurable and low-cost.

This is an interesting application of social media in healthcare, but from outside the hospital/provider community, and here’s a write-up about it on a Star Tribune blog.

5 Theses on Social Media in Healthcare

I’m honored to be kicking off Healthcamp Minnesota this morning with a keynote at 8:10 a.m. CDT. Here are my slides, and while you’ll see some familiar information if you’ve been a SMUGgle for some time, there are also some significant new elements, including the section that gives this post its title. I expect to be amplifying on that in future posts, but for now, here’s the deck for reference:

5 Theses for Social Media in Healthcare

View more presentations from Lee Aase.

I hope to see lots of Twin Cities Tweeps at the event, but for those who can’t make it, please follow the live video stream (available from the HealthcampMN site) and the #hcmn hashtag, and join the discussion.