By Joy Burwell. On Monday, June 7th Health 2.0 took over Washington DC and yesterday the excitement continued with a Disruptive Women in Health Care breakfast. The breakfast would not have been possible without the generous sponsorship of Manatt and the support of The Hill. A huge thank you to this morning’s engaging panelists: Fran McMahon, Publisher of The Hill; Indu Subaiya, Co-Founder Health 2.0; Julie Murchinson, Manatt Health Solutions; Alexandra Drane, Founder and President, Eliza; Marlene Beggelman, Founder, Enhanced Medical Decisions and Linda Von Schweber, Co-Founder Surveyor Health. Robin Strongin, Creator of the Disruptive Women in Health Care blog moderated the program. Below is a very brief summary of the discussions; video and photographs of the breakfast will be posted soon.

L to R: Julie Murchinson, Robin Strongin, Indu Subaiya, Fran McMahon

You may be asking what the term Health 2.0 means and luckily for you Indu Subaiya Co-Founder of Health 2.0 provided us with an answer. Health 2.0 applies the same social networks and user-generated focus as Web 2.0 (which has been around since 2003) to the world of health care. It began as a consumer-driven movement with providers becoming involved a bit later. More recently the concept has grown as a result of its partnership with health care reform. Another noteworthy aspect is its ability to foster data-driven decision-making. Currently, there are about 1000 companies actively engaged in Health 2.0.

Bottom Line: Health 2.0 gives you (the patient, caregiver, provider, payer) the tools to be able to get the information to make better decisions.

To better illustrate Health 2.0, the panelists discussed their companies’ developments. Dr. Marlene Beggelman founded Enhanced Medical Decisions which developed an online medical solution that uses “natural language” search technology, to enable users to quickly and easily find accurate information on drug interactions and reactions.. Linda Von Schweber the Co-Founder of Surveyor Health discussed their software’s ability to create an online medicine cabinet for consumers where they can learn the various side effects and interactions of the drugs they are taking. Eliza Founder and President Alexandra Drane detailed the personalized voice-based service they developed that helps consumers make better health care decisions. All of these technologies are innovative, put consumers in the driver’s seat and support efficient, safe and quality health care.

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By Becca Camp. I am a pre-med student. In the last year, I’ve had the unique opportunity to attend several conferences that shaped my sense of vocation. Perhaps most significant was Mayo Clinic’s TRANSFORM Symposium, hosted by their Center for Innovation; over the course of a weekend, my calling to study care delivery (how to get high-quality care to people who need it the most) was unearthed. Volunteering at TEDMED first left me feeling discouraged; surely there was no way I’d ever make the same impact as the Dean Kamens and Craig Venters of the world. Almost immediately, though, I found myself surrounded by attendees who looked at me plainly and asked, “Why not?” They had no doubt in their mind about my potential, and as the conference progressed, I was able to tamp down my own doubt. With my newfound determination in place, I went to DC10 Summit Series where I was introduced to the people of my own generation who have a concrete plan for changing the world. This year I’ve been able to meet invaluable mentors, and been exposed to incredible ideas.

These opportunities came about largely from my use of networking on blogs and Twitter. I continue to be surprised and delighted by the people who reach out when I talk about things that interest me, and who offer to get me more involved in the conversation at these conferences. Once there, I become the pupil of every person I meet. But naturally, I tend to be one of the only students, if not the sole representative, at every conference I attend. I’m surrounded by very few peers.

The result of these conferences was the discovery of my mission: effecting a paradigm shift in the culture of health in this country. It’s the vision that keeps me committed to writing, studying, and applying to medical school. But when I go back to class, and try to talk to my colleagues about what I’ve learned, I have trouble finding anyone interested in listening. It’s clear that the lack of a shared experience precludes shared enthusiasm. Inevitably, my professors are the only ones willing to engage in conversation about what drives me–and I go right back to being a solitary pupil. Broaching topics such as care delivery with my pre-med colleagues is often met with blank stares or flippant remarks about helping people being a means to a financial end. Additionally (and I hesitate to generalize), but in my experience, it seems that the women I encounter in my classes are difficult to engage about larger matters of vision. Older generations of feminists remember a time where young women were afraid to show their intelligence and competence in conversations that go beyond daily life and relationship issues. Could this still be going on?

Of course, the internet gives me the ability to connect with passionate women and men of all ages who are as eager as I am to teach and learn. However, the absence of face-to-face interaction nags at me–savvy as I may be at building relationships in my social networks online, those professional relationships become the most meaningful and permanent only after meeting in person. All this leaves me in a sort of liminal space, somewhere between the students I spend time with every day and the mentors who show me what is possible.

So here’s an open question for Disruptive Women: How does one go about establishing a peer group, one that gathers like-minded young people (women, in particular)? With or without access to the internet, during college as well as later in life, how did you find the people who engaged you?

By Rebecca Camp. AUSTIN, TX– Today’s SXSH conference (South By Social Health) saw many successful, multi-disciplinary approaches to weaving together new media and health care. I was bothered, however, by a theme that’s becoming increasingly common in the health care conversation: patients treated as consumers.

When a company follows capitalistic principles, the goal is to increase value by offering better services at a lower price. The company strives to improve their bottom line by offering more value than their competitor, in an effort to put their competitor out of business. Offering good customer service complements this strategy. In industries other than health care, the result is a benefit to the consumer: quality products and service at a lower price. Southwest Airlines, for example, employs a very effective social media presence. They respond to complaints tweeted by customers, which is has garnered the company praise in addition to a loyal customer base. But does this consumer-centered strategy translate to health care?

Mayo Clinic is held as a model for value in health care, but attributing their success to “consumerism” is off-base. The new media strategies being presented by health care institutions at SXSH essentially boiled down to damage control by tending to disgruntled Twitterers, and analysis of the types of complaints being registered. Though claiming to be influenced by social media mavens at Mayo’s Rochester flagship, the strategy is misguided and far removed. Mayo Clinic works because of a philosophy of care that puts the needs of the patients first—which does not equate to reactionary PR moves on social media sites. Absolutely nothing about their strategy distinguished it from other industries—and in the context of health care, replicating the strategy of Southwest Air and its ilk borders on insulting. Mayo Clinic avoids the noisy Twittersphere when addressing something as important as patient care; when a complaint is registered, that’s what their specialized center for patient service is for. Their Sharing Mayo Clinic blog allows a community of patients, staff, and families to form, which anticipates service problems before they even occur. This is the absolute obligation of companies in charge of delivering health care to a society.

My issue is also a philosophical one.

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The following guest post is by Jennifer Smock, who is a Graduate Student, Masters of Public Health, at Purdue University as well as Assistant Project Manager, Purdue Homeland Security Institute, and Project Manager, Purdue Emergency Preparedness Office.

For the first time in history, we are able to listen to public’s concerns… well pretty much about everything!

Why is this important?

Major corporations such as Dell, Comcast, Pepsi, IBM, and Microsoft, care greatly about what people are saying on social media sites about their products.  You may have noticed this change in such Microsoft commercials (“Windows 7 was MY idea”), or Best Buy commercials (asking questions to a stadium full of employees).  Both implying they are listening and interacting with people to better serve their needs.  As a result, they have built trust with their consumers and are profiting because of it.

Who uses Twitter anyway?

More and more people every day.  In the fall of 2009, it was found that one in five internet users use Twitter or another service to share updates or to see updates about others, which significantly increased from one in ten in April 2009 (Pew Internet, 2009).  There has been a recent Twitter explosion growing from 2 million Twitter accounts in December of 2008 to 17 million May 2009 resulting in 83% increase, and an astonishing 3,000% increase from a year ago! (ComScore, 2009)

Ok ok… What does this have to do with healthcare?

Before putting out health messages, wouldn’t it be great to better understand what the current barriers and benefits people are already talking about using these informal channels?  This could displace rumors and fine tune messages without the time and effort of focus groups.  For instance, there is a current distrust in the H1N1 vaccine as recognized by the news media:

“Of all the big questions facing our country, there’s one in particular that touches us in an immediate and personal way. It involves the H1N1 flu vaccine … and for many perplexed Americans, the question comes down to this: is the vaccine really a healthy choice? Despite what we’ve heard from public health authorities, some Americans have their doubts.”

-CBS NEWS

In response to the recent change in way clinicians, public health practitioners, and lay-people obtain information, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recently introduced utilizing social media outlets to help communicate to the public.  These public health messages promote the seasonal and pandemic flu shots as the best weapon an individual has against contracting the flu.  This integration might have came a little too late.  Recent polls have shown a low rate of compliance with obtaining a flu shot for themselves and for their children.  Even though there has been many public health messages communicating the importance of the flu shot this season, 66% of adults surveyed said they will not receive the H1N1 flu shot, and even though children have an increased risk for complications, 45% of parents said they are not planning to get their child vaccinated (ABC News & Washington Post, 2009).

Bottom Line

The CDC is currently urging those in the healthcare field to integrate social media outlets to communicate to the populations they serve.  Listening and interacting with people will help build trust in all health messages.

The health care industry has been a bit “late to the game” when it comes to social media. However, this week at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, approximately 100 health care communications professionals came together to explore strategies for catching up.

At an event hosted by Ragan Communications, speakers from Mayo Clinic , Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Operation Smile , Kaiser Permanente and others all came to share their experience jumping into the world. Each of us are exploring the opportunities that social media presents to us as communicators, while at the same time balancing the regulations within a fairly conservative industry. Concerns about protecting patient privacy and overcoming cultures that too often fear transparency were significant challenges for all.

It was great to hear from the organizations who are proactively exploring all that the Web 2.0 world has to offer. And I am glad I was able to share Kaiser Permanente’s journey with my friend and colleague, Dr. Ted Eytan by my side.

As Ted and I have shared here on Disruptive Women before, Kaiser Permanente was shocked into the world of social media. However, in the past couple of years, it has become central to all our public relations efforts. By coupling social media with other outreach strategies, we have built solid relationships with influentials throughout the industry who we often discover are speaking about us, without our involvement.

When we entered the social media space, we did so with the recognition that we had obligation to tell our story. What we didn’t understand at the time was that the more we told our story, the more others would come to understand it and begin to re-tell it for us. While it remains critical that we continue to proactively share our story, we now understand that the voices of those independent third-parties — our members, our employees, other influentials — re-telling it will always be more powerful.

Big news: The FDA is holding a public hearing to discuss online promotion of FDA-regulated medical products – including prescription drugs, prescription biologics, and medical devices. The hearing will be November 12 and 13, 2009 in Washington, DC (registration closes October 9 – see also registration instructions from Eye on FDA), but public comments can be submitted in writing or electronically now through February 28, 2010. View the docket details and full Federal Register notice.

A common reaction around the Web has been “Finally!” – with remarks like “This is NOT a Hoax!” and “Just in time for Web 3.0,” the FDA has set a date to start figuring out “how to deal with Web 2.0.” (NPR Health Blog).

But after the initial shock and sarcasm subsides, the potential significance of the FDA’s (albeit long overdue) move forward this week starts to sink in – this could result in the most significant set of regulations since the FDA’s guidelines for broadcast direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising in the late 1990s. We’re talking industry-changing stuff here – or rather, industries-changing, because you can be sure that pharmaceutical companies, physicians, consumers, Internet and social media companies, the advertising and public relations industries, and everyone whose revenue includes online advertising are all major stakeholders in this public policy debate.

So what has the FDA highlighted as the key elements for discussion of this issue? (List below drawn from the 9/21/2009 FR notice)

1. For what online communications are manufacturers, packers, or distributors accountable?
   • (paraphrased) What communications and discussions should be considered “by, or on behalf of” versus independent of influence from these companies – and when and how should companies “disclose their involvementor influence,” particularly “on third-party sites”? Should different types of online media platforms and different intended audiences of these platforms be considered differently when addressing these questions – if so, how?
2. How can manufacturers, packers, or distributors fulfill regulatory requirements… in their Internet and social media promotion, particularly when using tools that are associated with space limitations and tools that allow for real-time communications (e.g., microblogs, mobile technology)?
   • (paraphrased) How should product information be presented on these platforms so that users have appropriate access to both risks and benefits?
3. What parameters should apply to the posting of corrective information on Web sites controlled by third parties?
4. When is the use of links appropriate?
   • (paraphrased) Should there be rules about the use of “links to and from Web sites,” including links to or from unbranded websites to or from clearly branded company websites? And what research and data exists about the click-rates in different contexts of users seeking information about medical products?
5. Questions specific to Internet adverse event reporting
   • (paraphrased) How are companies that are obliged to report adverse effects of products using online media tools, if at all, to monitor information about adverse effects of their products? Should these companies be obliged to monitor and/or report information from online communications concerning adverse effects of their products?

We – and the FDA – want to know what you think. What are your gut reactions to all of this – do you find anything particularly worrying, are there any potential outcomes you’re especially hoping for?

If you submit any comments to the FDA – and we hope you will – come by and tell us about it in our comment section here (and we promise to do the same). More information about the public hearing and submitting comments is available here.

This month, Disruptive Women welcomes Andre Blackman, Health Communications Analyst at RTI International, a non profit research organization, as our July Man of the Month.

Andre Blackman has an extensive background associated with science, technology and public health, conducting research in institutions such as the Naval Research Lab, NASA and WESTAT. This merging of technology and health has proved helpful in his current work in Health Communications.

Andre is very passionate about the role of new media, mobile technology and other emerging technologies as it relates to health communications and public health in general. You can find his thoughts on the intersections of health and technology through his blog, Pulse + Signal and via Twitter.

The past few years have seen a significant increase in the use of emerging technologies to improve public health all around the world. From grassroots initiatives empowering citizens in low-resource areas to making sure consumers get the healthcare they need – changes are happening for the better. This article will aim to look at a specific area of the ‘citizen empowerment’ – the application of SMS (Short Messaging Service – or texting) and mobile phones in public health.

With the onset of social tools such as social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, etc.) and real time information hubs such as Twitter, we are exposed to numerous ways to stay connected to each other. Our mobile devices are equipped with applications that allow us to do a myriad of things – many of which focus on entertainment and productivity. Another very important part of our lives is maintaining good health and the mobile phone is making strides in that area. mHealth is the term that has been coined to describe the interaction of mobile technology with the improvement of health.

mHealth is exploding onto the scene as the next big technology boon for public health – the main reasons this is true are twofold: ease of implementation and relative low cost of operation/maintenance. This is especially true in the developing world and in low-resource areas where technology options are relatively sparse. The use of SMS has become a tremendously powerful way for health clinics in Africa to communicate with their community health workers who are traveling to villages to tend to patients. Imagine the ability to significantly reduce fuel consumption and get real time data on medical adherence in a world where it make take several weeks to get this information.

All of that from a technology that for many of us in the developed world may take for granted.

A few months ago I presented this information at the North Carolina Division of Public Health – here is the presentation that touches on the basics of mobile technology and how it can be applied to the public health landscape. It is by no means comprehensive but gives a good idea of where things are and thoughts on where things can go in the near future.

Private sector organizations such as Voxiva have been taking the lead on mobile initiatives, especially in health. Nonprofit organizations and local health departments have also been dipping their toes into the use of SMS technologies to get health information out to residents. The government has also become a supporter of mHealth initiatives and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to innovate in this area. Several weeks ago, I wrote about a hypothetical situation in which public health could benefit from a mobile application called The Extraordinaries, which uses the free time of consumers to volunteer their time for good.

From a recent article on mobile communications in health via Mobileactive.org:
“Mobile provides a fantastic channel for communication,” said Erin Edgerton, senior social media strategist at the CDC. “It’s always on, always with you and provides personal access to information.”

I heartily encourage you to begin exploring this venue of health communications and figure out how you or your organization can integrate strategy with mobile technology.

Additional Articles/Resources:

Mobile Active – a great starting point for learning about using mobile technology for social impact. Contact them with any questions

PopTech – Can Your Cell Phone Change Lives? My article on mHealth

Texting4Health – conference and newly published book

ISIS initiative – sexual health information/STD prevention through SMS technology

The following guest post is from Alison McCauley, Internet and Social Media Associate at Amplify Public Affairs.

The National Marrow Donor Program® (NMDP) recently stepped up its donor recruitment efforts with two key changes: (1) Renaming its donor registry, and (2) Expanding its online outreach efforts with social media tools.

The NMDP donor registry, newly renamed Be The Match (BeTheMatch.org), has a Facebook cause, a YouTube channel, a MySpace profile and group, and it has presences on BlackPlanet, Plaxo, and LinkedIn.

The Be The Match website is engaging, it encourages communication among site users, and it facilitates the organization of donor drives, fundraising, and other events.  It even has its own social network – LifeJourneys Transplant Community.  Members, called Champions, can create Tribute pages to share stories, honor or memorialize loved ones, recognize accomplishments or milestones, and raise funds for the Be The Match Foundation.

The marrow donor registry is in desperate need of more donors overall and greater diversity of donors. Finding a genetically compatible bone-marrow donor for a patient in need of a transplants is difficult under any circumstances.  For patients of mixed racial or ethnic backgrounds,the odds of finding a match are even slimmer.  One patient facing this obstacle is Natasha Collins, a 26-year-old medical student with recurrent leukemia.  When doctors said she needed a bone-marrow transplant, Natasha’s community at Yale reached out to communities online to raise awareness and recruit marrow donors, and the results so far are impressive and encouraging.

NMDP’s innovative approach “personalizes the transplant or donation experience and gives other families hope while inspiring people to support our life-saving work.”  It’s an inspirational example of how new media can be used to address communications needs – in this case, NMDP can more effectively communicate with and recruit members of key demographic groups to the marrow donor registry.   This improvement could help save thousands of lives, and even close the gap between white and minority patients’ odds of receiving needed transplants.

Learn more and join the marrow donor registry at BeTheMatch.org

Sources:

Leinwand, Josh “Community: Online Bone Marrow Drive” The Health Care Blog (April 30, 2009)
Landro, Laura “Building Diversity in Bone-Marrow Registries” WSJ.com‘s “The Informed Patient” column (May 27, 2009)
Claeys, Catherine “NMDP Renames Bone Marrow Registry to Be The Match” National Marrow Donor Program News Release (April 7, 2009)

The following is a two part post (both parts are included so please read all the way through) that calls attention to an exciting and important new effort to engage everyone in health reform. Do you have a “2 minute rant” you’d like to share with the administration? If so, read on…

Introducing h20tv!
Indu Subaiya, MD, MBA
Co-founder, Health 2.0

Blame it on election fever or my move to the filmmaking capital of the world, LA, but I was recently inspired, along with my amazing conference teammates, to create and launch h20tv, a video channel for Health 2.0. It has been apparent for a while now that we’re hearing a lot more from the community than just feedback on new technologies and we wanted a way to surface that.
While technology is still what we live and breathe most days, what’s been interesting is people’s responses to how technology is actually changing healthcare experiences or enabling new visions for change on many levels. Our work with the Center for Information Therapy on a joint conference and on the first h20tv video project has already surfaced many lively debates.

We’re now a few years into this Health 2.0 thing if you will and it’s not speculative anymore. There’ve been successes and failures, hard data and experiences we can all learn from. In the present context of healthcare reform, sure, the papers and blogs have been full of the punditry exchanging blows…we wanted to capture more of the dinner table conversations. Because there are some really good ideas out there and they’re not all from experts. And who is an expert in healthcare anyway? For more about that sidebar, see Great Debate #5 at the upcoming conference agenda.

So what do you get when you ask people what their 2 minute rants to the new administration would be about healthcare – not their long manifestos, just their biggest, burning issues? It’s fascinating to see what bubbles to the top. My Co-founder Matthew Holt talks about the need for a common social insurance pool, Dr. Thomas Barber of Kaiser Permanente tells us how web tools have decreased his office visits by more than 20%, Julie Murchinson of the Health 2.0 Accelerator talks about the promise of personalized health care, Robin Strongin of Amplify Public Affairs advocates for the consideration of broader life circumstances when providing healthcare including education, transportation etc. and healthcare consumer Julian Robinson describes how challenging it is to find a doctor in a new city… and that’s coming from a web-savvy 23 year old.

We want lots more voices. And we’ll string along select snippets for a little trailer to show at the upcoming conference. No this isn’t going to have perfect production quality – you’ll have to go to expensive agencies for scripted messages and bad background music for that. This is pure user-generated brainpower, the way we love it, straight up and unfiltered.

We don’t have a special in with the new administration, but we know we are part of a growing and diverse community of people who think and care deeply about improving the healthcare system. So we figure the word will eventually float over to the white house over these wild web airwaves. And now, here’s Julie to say more about this project in the context of the accelerator and what she’s seeing on the ground for health 2.0 companies trying to innovate and integrate with the healthcare system.

We the people want more out of health
Julie V. Murchinson, MBA
Managing Director, Manatt Health Solutions
Executive Director, Health 2.0 Accelerator

We are at a turning point in how we the people take part in our healthcare. Just as Facebook and Twitter have allowed people to connect and delve more deeply into each other’s everyday life, h20tv is amassing the power of the people to begin to weave together a story of what we want, our ideas about how to make it happen and, in some cases, desperate pleas to change the status quo. What is most interesting, however, is that many of the videos spell out a fairly simple desire – the personalization of health care – to allow citizens to play a larger role in their care and to have care more customized for each person. Sure, there are still several million Americans who aren’t yet racing to get a seat at their care-team table, but for those who are…why is it so hard to do something so seemingly simple?

Why can’t we jump on our iPhone to track our stomach pain until we realize that its getting increasingly worse, then be able to access some clinical information about treatment options that helps us find a clinician online we can consult with, who recommends a specialist close to work so we don’t have to take more time off, who sees us that day because health IT has improved his/her patient through-put, who sends an e-script to the pharmacy for pick-up on the way home, which launches a medication schedule with reminders to our iPhone to make sure we take our meds on time and appropriately, as well as a health management portal that recommends a dietary plan and begins to help us self-test different diet, exercise and other daily living practices that may impact our condition until we narrow down the flare-up association and circle back around with our clinician to validate our findings? Whew…deep breath. Should this really be that hard to do? And I didn’t even mention the correlation between our genetic make-up and our symptoms, and how that impacts clinician direction, medication and our self-discovery efforts. Now you’re talking!

So, why doesn’t that happen today? Umm…let’s see…how long do you have to read this blog? Or personal relationship with our own healthcare is an unfortunately complicated one. At the Health 2.0 Accelerator, a nonprofit organization working with Health 2.0 companies and traditional health care organizations, we are beginning to chip away at this ideal by driving integration of technology and the consumer experience. From our perspective, we see consumers starting to seek comprehensive solutions, rather than fragmented tools and services, from this emerging movement referred to as “Health 2.0.” Health 2.0 companies are seeking ways to expand their offerings to consumers rapidly and cost effectively, while fortifying or evolving their business models. “Traditional” healthcare organizations are starting to explore new capabilities for patients to generate, analyze and consumer health information.

The great ideas in these videos are finding realistic test beds to see what works and, most importantly, what we the people need, want and will use to begin to take part in our healthcare…just for us…in the same independent, personalized way we have begun to do so in so many other parts of our lives.

Medpedia launched recently. It’s a great idea, a ‘wiki-style’ source of authoritative health information. You can find it at www.medpedia.com.

It will distinguish itself by limiting contributors to those MDs, and PhDs credentialed to address the clinical topics.

So far, so good. What could be better? Three things.

- First, include contributions from “credentialed” patients and caregivers themselves – that is, those who have encountered the disease “up close and personal,” who have demonstrated that they understand it, have managed it and survived it – or not.

That important patient information could be in a separate segment, perhaps, or noted as such, but it should not be ignored. Patients and caregivers have important contributions to the overall understanding of the condition itself, as well as to the experience that other people will have. Credentialed clinicians might well know how to describe metastatic cancer or viral replication dynamics, but only a credentialed patient can offer insights into the interior state of the person who has that experience. Likewise for the caregiver who helps them.

Yes, it’s true that those patient insights can be found on other sites, but those sites may not be as accurate as Medpedia seeks. Lacking these patient insights Medpedia is replicating on the web what happens far too often in clinical settings – clinicians and patients talking different languages and “past” each other, rather than “with” each other.

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Ted Eytan, MD MS MPH

This month’s Man of the Month is Dr. Ted Eytan, who interviews Holly Potter, Kaiser Permanente’s VP for Public Relations, on the use of social media in health care below.

Ted Eytan currently works as a Medical Director for Delivery Systems Operations Improvement for The Permanente Federation, LLC. His experience is in working with large medical groups, patients, and technologists to bring health care consumers useful information and decision-making health tools, to ensure that patients have an active role in their own health care.

He attended medical school at the University of Arizona. He received his master’s of public health degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and his master’s of science, health services degree from the University of Washington. He completed his residency training at Group Health and his fellowship training in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Washington.

In my Man of the Month-ness (or as I’d like to say, my Honorary Woman-ness), I’d like to highlight the contribution of a leader in health care, in this case, Holly Potter, who is the vice president of Public Relations for Kaiser Permanente.

I met Holly several years ago through her work on KP HealthConnect, Kaiser Permanente’s national electronic health record and personal health record. More recently, Holly’s been a mentor to myself and others in understanding the use of social media in health care. One of the most important things she’s done as a leader is to start with the idea that there is a use for social media in health care, and it’s made a difference for many at Kaiser Permanente and beyond.

Read on, and thanks, Disruptive Women in Health Care, for the opportunity to bring these stories forward!

Holly Potter, vice president for Public Relations for Kaiser Permanente (on the right), with Anna-Lisa Silvestre, vice president for Online Services (on the left), at the United States Senate, April, 2008

Ted: “Holly, tell me about when you began your career with Kaiser Permanente. How did you choose KP and what was your first position?”

Holly: “After spending six years running HTPotter Communications, a small firm specializing in nonprofit and public health communications, I joined KP in late 2004. I was initially attracted to KP because I had a been a long-time, satisfied member. In addition, the launch of the Thrive advertising campaign just the year before, signalled to me that it could be an exciting place to do the kind of work I love. I was right.

I feel very fortunate that my first role at Kaiser Permanente was as the communications lead for the implementation of KP HealthConnect, our electronic health record system. In that role, I worked directly with the IT, clinical and operational leads to support end-user adoption and promote the rollout internally. I joined just as our eighth region was completing their first installation of KP HealthConnect and was with the project team up through the completion of our outpatient and online implementations.”

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