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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