Initial coverage has focused almost exclusively on medications made by company’s whose share price might be affected by the news, leaving literally hundreds of pieces of research unexamined. It’s possible that some of it will receive attention over the next two weeks or during the meeting itself, but the odds are many won’t get examined by anyone outside of the research community.

As part of a humble effort to keep at least a handful of interesting pieces of research from being overlooked, here are my top four ASCO abstracts — mostly focusing on communication — that hasn’t received the attention they deserve:

How do we get a screening message across?

A French survey of 1,600 subjects found that the biggest sources of information about cancer screening were radio and television (61 percent), followed by general practitioners (52 percent). The Internet came in at 18 percent, though — no surprise — those under 50 were more likely to get their info online. But trust — on a scale of 1 to 10 — was low for traditional media, which scored a 5.7, and even lower for the Internet (4.6). Topping the list, trust-wise? Docs, with a score of 8.2. What does that mean for communicators? Even in this always-on era, it makes sense to take to the air.  [Cancer screening: Source of information and level of trust.]

Do patients really understand the health information they’re provided?

Loyola researchers took a look at 62 websites about prostate cancer, which accounted for 95 percent of all searches for common prostate cancer-related search terms. They found the language on the websites was universally complex. The average site was written at an 11th grade reading level. A grand total of 3 sites — 4.8 percent — were written below a high school reading level. It’s well worth the effort for communicators to consider running patient ed materials through readability instruments to make sure information is going over the heads of the intended audience. [Readability of websites containing information about prostate cancer treatment options.]

How do patients figure out how long they will live?

Cancer prognosis estimates very wildly between oncologists and patients. About half of all patients are more optimistic than their doctors (the other half have similar views). But what’s interesting is where patients get their information: 44 percent say they get it from their docs, 18 percent say they get it from “themselves,” 6 percent say their estimates are based on “hope.” Also noteworthy: though only 8 percent of patients base their prognosis on the Internet, 86 percent went online for information about their cancers. [Comparing prognosis estimates of patients with cancer and their oncologists.]

Is knowledge power? Maybe not.

One of the great studies that Sampson flagged was research out of Virginia Commonwealth University that found that the more a women knew about breast cancer, the more likely she was to overestimate her risk of the disease. On average, women believed their risk of breast cancer to be 24 percent higher than it actually is. This raises an interesting paradox (and a challenge for communicators): the three decades of intense education on breast cancer has had an impact, but risk remains a concept that hasn’t been adequately emphasized. [Risk perception and knowledge of breast and colon cancers in a diverse population.]

The other, and this is less something we can control is the number of people looking to break into this business for companies or agencies. Unfortunately, the social media space is moving at a pace that far outstrips the availability of quality talent. I don’t mean to be unfair about this, but the number of people who have executed social media campaigns for the Fortune 500 is small. It isn’t a matter of setting up a Facebook page or managing a Twitter account. The best social media professionals are part marketer, part behavioral psychologist, part businessman/woman and part number cruncher. Ah numbers. You knew I was getting there eventually, right?

If the talent gap in social media is huge, the analytics talent gap in those spaces is equally as big. Whenever you tweet, like, comment or click you are creating a data point for someone to analyze. It is not that simple, though. Analyzing those top-level metrics is only one part of the equation. Can you take those metrics and turn them into a communications or business insight? Many people know how to collect data and put it into a presentation. Fewer people know how to collect the data, put it into a presentation that highlights insights that improve the business or a communications program.

This is not going to be a trend that slows down, by the way. I am seeing a greater number of agencies and companies looking to hire directors and vice presidents in the hopes of raising their respective games in this space. Will it work? I suppose only time will tell, but hiring a leader of analytics DEFINITELY makes sense. Unfortunately, as someone who has been looking to fill these roles at three agencies I can tell you that they do not grow on trees. Most of us have various backgrounds that do not necessarily scream “analytics.”

How do we make sure that we have a greater talent pool to pick from? Well, colleges and universities are starting to do that for us by creating analytics programs, but there is still more the existing community can do to combat the problem. Some of those things include:

• Understanding what goes into a proper analytics job description. Knowledge of social monitoring tools is important, but not nearly the only thing we should be looking at to evaluate candidates. The ability to navigate Microsoft Excel, using web-based tools like Google Insights and optimizing presentations are also important.
• Have an open mind. There are not a lot of people who have extensive experience in social analytics. Sometimes you have to step outside of your hiring comfort zone to hire the right person.
• Some skills DO NOT show up on a resume or LinkedIn profile. Are you naturally inquisitive? If the answer is yes, and I can snuff that out in an interview (you would be surprised) you have a big leg up in the process. When was the last time you saw “naturally inquisitive” on a resume? I know I haven’t. This speaks a little bit to bullet #2, but the skills of an analyst don’t easily translate to the traditional resume or LinkedIn profile.
• Evangelizing on behalf of the space. If you feel comfortable blogging or speaking on the topic of analytics and are currently employed by a company or agency, do it! Potential employees need to hear from people already in the space more often than they do. Those of us already doing the work are extremely passionate about it. That passion translates. Trust me.

The talent gap in social analytics isn’t going to close overnight. Neither will the talent gap that my friend Jim Storer talked about within the community/social strategist ranks. There are some tangible things we can start to do, though, to close that gap. Some of those things I have highlighted above. Others will come over time as the existing talent pool gains more experience. The situation isn’t dire yet, but it will be if we don’t start addressing the problem now. What do you think? For those of you in a hiring position, are Jim and I crazy?

#MDigitalLife is a WCG program designed to learn from and to showcase physicians who are blazing new trails in the digital world – changing the way that medicine is practiced and better health is realized.  You can find previous posts here.

“I feel like blogging is my duty.”

Caitlin Giesler, MD

Dr. Caitlin Giesler, FACC Cardiologist at Seton Heart Institute in Austin, Texas, started blogging a few short months ago as a compliment to an already existing web site.  Adding the blog allowed Giesler to frequently update information on guidelines, news and diagnoses that patients in Austin and the surrounding areas could search for and find online.

“I wanted to share my knowledge as a physician with an interest in women and heart disease and present it with a regional focus,” says Giesler.  “Blogging has allowed me a lot of freedom to share my ideas and other experts’ ideas with the goal of offering preventative guidelines.”

Giesler’s passion for cardiology and preventing heart disease goes back to her family.  While attending med school, her father died of a heart attack.  She and her family had always been aware that heart disease was part of the family medical history, but she now had an urgent desire to understand her own risks. When she started searching, Giesler found the dearth of information on women and heart disease alarming.

“My experience in med school and my father’s death led me to advocate prevention and awareness,” says Giesler.  “Primary care physicians are often too busy to discuss prevention with their patients, so if I’m not going to do it, who is?”

For many doctors, blogging has become a scalable way to build a digital presence that’s relatively easy and inexpensive to launch and maintain – and an effective way to deliver their message and their passions in healthcare.  Due to the nature of blogs’ dynamic content, they tend to index high on Google searches – enabling the physician’s audience to find their quality content more easily.

For Giesler, her goal in blogging is to provide realistic guidelines that most of us can incorporate into every day life.  Since she started the blog in November 2011, Giesler has posted about heart palpitations, statins, pregnancy and heart disease, as well as nutrition.

“The blog allows me to share advice I give to my own patients,” she explains.  “It’s also a creative outlet for me that has spawned new interests in nutrition.”

For Giesler, blogging has become an enjoyable experience for her and her patients, who can refer to her blog outside of the examining room.  Giesler also uses her blog as a tool for primary care physicians who can read up on women and heart disease and possibly make better care decisions and referrals for their female patients.

“The more I get out there and talk to women’s groups and even men about heart disease in women, the more I really enjoy reaching out,” she “heart”-fully exclaims. “And the blog compliments all of that.”

One current reality, in her opinion, does cloud her blog’s impact among her elderly patients.  Many of them are not using online resources to gather information on heart disease, and many of them are seeing Dr. Giesler when it may be too late for prevention.

“Maybe in 10 or 20 years, younger people who’ve read the blog can incorporate these ideas on prevention to make a huge impact on their health.”

It seems plausible that  Dr. Giesler’s newfound passion for blogging – teaching all of us about the dangers of heart disease in women – will have an impact in the Austin community and beyond.

Historical Perspective

Fifty years ago, life was relatively simple for marketers. They had to worry about billboards, newspapers and magazines, direct mail, radio spots, brochures, and maybe TV ads. The late nineties introduced new marketing vehicles like websites, online banners, e-mail, search engine marketing, and instant messaging. Fast forward 15 years to 2012 and now CMOs not only have to worry about everything the last five generations of marketers had to worry about but throw in twenty plus new channels including podcasts, blogs, online video, location-based applications, and new social networks, the latter of which easily account for north of a billion users.

With so many new marketing outlets to worry about, how can one possibly keep up? For starters, it’s helpful to steer clear of shiny object syndrome or the desire to chase the new app/network that all the cool kids in the blogosphere are ranting about. That doesn’t mean that marketers shouldn’t pay attention to what’s new and test and learn to ensure they are ready when the next Google, Facebook or Twitter comes along (hint: Pinterest had 104.4 million visits in March). However, it does mean that some discipline should be applied and in particular, observing these five rules when it comes to determining where time, effort, and dollars should be spent.

Five Rules for evaluating new online opportunities:

1. Does new channel X align with your companies goals? Does it align with your key performance indicators? Will it help you and your team come bonus time? If the answer to these is no, you might want to think long and hard about whether you allocate resources to it.
2. Are your customers using it? Will they be? If so, does it replace another activity? E.g. reading blogs versus reading magazines?
3. Is there critical mass? Will there be? If the answer is, “maybe,” it might be a good idea to look at how they integrate with bigger social networks like Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Photo sharing sites like Instagram and Pinterest have benefited greatly from their wide and deep integration into bigger social networks; especially with Facebook, which boasts more than 900 million members.
4. Never EVER fall into the “my CEO wants it so I’m going to do it” trap. While the CEO’s opinion is arguably one of the most important (if not THE most important) in the company, that doesn’t mean that it’s always right. In fact, when it comes to new social and digital channels, there is a good chance that the CEO’s interest in a new social network may have come from a Wall Street Journal article she or he just read or maybe a trend she has noticed with her kid’s friends. There may be some “there” there but if her latest interest doesn’t align with that of the company’s, find a way to walk away.
5. Can you measure it? Don’t minimize the importance of this and how it ties back to rule number one. This doesn’t mean that everything you measure has to have hard ROI attached to it but it should mean that you can tell if you’re moving the needle and ultimately, if the time and effort you are investing is paying off.

Everything in moderation, including moderation

Now that you know the five rules, be prepared to ignore the five rules. Well, not really. But it is key to remember that sometimes it does pay to follow a hunch. The way I’ve learned to look at opportunity is as part of a risk portfolio. With everything you do from a marketing standpoint, there should be a balance. That means taking bigger risks with bigger payoffs but mitigating those with smaller risks likely to deliver equally big payoffs. While, as the saying goes, “nobody gets fired for hiring IBM,” the owners of Instagram never would have made $1 billion by selling to Facebook had they not taken some early risks (like launching on iPhone only).

So what are your rules? Please share them in the comments for others to benefit.

Ben Huh of ICanHasCheezburger fame is set to launch a new site called Circa that he says will revolutionize the way news is produced and consumed.

If we have to re-look at how people’s behaviors are changing, there are enormous opportunities for companies like us to recreate media in a native format for the Internet.

Huh says that the next generation of killer news sources will be “like teenagers.” Except that, when you look at actual teenagers, a strange pattern is beginning to appear. Rather than being digital-only creatures, a lot young people are actually reading newspapers. Not the shiny, digital versions, but the old-school kind that stains your fingertips and carries that wonderful scent that reminds you that you’re dealing with something from the physical world that was lovingly crafted by professionals.

NPR’s Katy Pape got into some recent data and found that while Millennials aren’t heavy newspaper readers, more than three-quarters of them get stained fingers every month, even if it’s infrequent. A quarter read at least every other day. And it’s this quarter of readers that is important: they are twice as likely to be “influentials”: the kind of people who are attending public meetings and running for office.

Earlier this month, I was fortunate to attend a dinner party that included a teenager, the bright child of two bright parents, and someone far more engaged in the world than I ever was at that age. The guests started discussing the merits of iPads and Kindles and such, and I asked the teen if she ever read anything on paper. “Of course,” she said: books. And the local paper.

So while the digital revolutionaries are trying to figure out how the lessons of FAILblog’s success can be applied to get people to care about whether or not austerity policies in Europe are effective, it turns out that there is a group of news professionals that is already effectively reaching a massive audience of young people ready and willing to change the world.

That group? Newspaper editors, who have quietly maintained their hold on the single most important audience in the country. And all without a single, silly cat caption.

As I was thinking about this phrase during a run the other day, I realized that this lesson — why fear fear — was a powerful one. It’s not always easy to keep our fear at bay but by letting it get the best of us, we play “tight” as they saying goes in sports. Instead of demonstrating our best selves, we get conservative, start second guessing and generally tend to trip over ourselves. A classic example of this would be highly paid baseball player, Alex Rodriguez, who is a hitting and fielding machine for the Yankees during the regular season but when it comes time for the post season, hits a good .024 points lower (.301 versus .277).

One of the things I hear most from people who either haven’t engaged in social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Pinterest) is that they don’t know what to write. Or they are afraid that people won’t find what they have to say interesting. Either way, their fear of doing something wrong can impact their ability to go with the flow and just be themselves. This fear holds them back and prevents them from engaging with the people they want to connect with. Of course businesses are no different when it comes to social.

Many times companies get excited about launching a Facebook page or a Youtube channel. They spend months working with their agency or internal marketing/IT department to design everything perfectly. They decide who is going to update the channel and if they are worth their salt, what a rough editorial calendar will look like. And then — wait for it — they freeze up. Afraid that they might say something that the legal department might not like or something a competitor might latch onto, they slow down their posting to a snail’s pace. Or worse yet, they resort to generic posts once or twice a week that become increasingly promotional. Those one or two initial blog posts or over produced videos languish, destined to be passed over for fresher more exciting content published by lessor creators.

There is obviously a reason we experience fear. But more often than not, it’s what holds us back. Whether you are a politician, an athlete or someone on  social media team at a company, once in a while it might be helpful to take a step back and remind ourselves that the only thing to fear, is fear itself.

#MDigitalLife is a WCG program designed to learn from and to showcase physicians who are blazing new trails in the digital world – changing the way that medicine is practiced and better health is realized.  You can find previous posts here.

“If you try to conduct online research without your doctor’s help, it can lead you to some pretty scary places.  Your doctor can help you to be more targeted and objective about what you seek, and provide more context around what you find.”

Linda A. Pourmassina, MD

“I know I shouldn’t have, but I looked up on my symptoms on WebMD …”  “I read on the web somewhere that …”

Linda Pourmassina, an Internal Medicine practitioner practicing at Seattle’s Polyclinic, hears these sentence fragments every day.  She’s progressive enough in her practice that she encourages her patients in their online research … but she also provides some cautions to them as well.  “When you’re feeling sick – experiencing symptoms – it’s perfectly normal to want to find out, proactively, what’s happening to you. But what you may not know as a patient is that you’re unintentionally putting your own biases and filters – or lack thereof – into your research,” she says.

“What is it about our stories that make them so much more impactful or appealing than medical knowledge or scientific data? This seems to be irrespective of demographic, as I observe in my practice … It can be mind-boggling and frustrating from a data-driven perspective. All this effort towards public and individual education for the empowerment and engagement of patients seemingly gets thwarted by simple, yet impactful, stories by people who have never even taken a biology class.”

Linda Pourmassina, MD – Excerpted from “The Power of the Story (or The Inadequacy of Stats and Data)“, published October 31, 2011 on Pulsus

There’s no question that doctors who are comfortable online themselves find it easier to help patients feel comfortable too.  It was no surprise to Dr. Pourmassina that her patients were conducting online research – but what was more surprising was how much trouble they had finding information that was actually helpful to them.  “Sometimes it can be hard for the layman to distinguish between credible, objective information sources and someone who’s just trying to sell something.”  Those concerns eventually became significant enough that she built a presentation on “Finding Credible Information Online” – and delivered it to a group of King County employees as a part of the “Healthy Incentives” series of lunch-and-learns.  As a result of her experience, she’s begun to assemble a catalog of credible online health resources – such as the NIH’s DASH Eating Plan.

Dr. Pourmassina’s experience with social media started relatively recently – about 18 months ago.  And it wasn’t because she was bored.  She was seeing patients constantly, dealing with a long commute and a generally hectic life.  “I found myself needing to reflect on what I was doing and how I felt about it.  Without that, I think that the risk of physician burnout can get pretty high.  I was in a place where I found myself wanting to rediscover the beauty of medicine.”  For Dr. Pourmassina, someone who’d always enjoyed writing, creating a blog  - essentially an online journal with an audience of one – was a natural.  Thus, Pulsus was born in 2010.  And it’s no accident that her first post, “The Vanishing Oath,” was shared as Dr. Pourmassina’s review and analysis of Dr. Ryan Flesher‘s 2009 documentary film of the same name

“… any health care reform movement would be remiss if it did not take into account what is going on in the minds and hearts of these individuals on the front line. Bureaucracy and the ‘business of medicine’ have resulted in a silent departure of physicians from clinical work.”

Linda Pourmassina, MD – excerpted from “The Vanishing Oath.”  Published November 10, 2010 on Pulsus

When asked about Pulsus’ audience, It’s clear that she’s still the primary audience … she writes about things that are meaningful and fulfilling to her; and feels that if they’re interesting to others as well, so be it.  But the subject of her writing is broad: There’s material there for physicians, patients, and really anyone who’s interested in the physicians’ unique perspective on healthcare.  Twitter was another matter altogether.  At first, Dr. Pourmassina couldn’t possibly imagine what value would justify spending any of her precious time there. Against her better judgment, she started an account (@LindaP_MD) and started following a few doctors – Kevin Pho, Bryan Vartabedian and Wendy Sue Swanson notably among them.  It wound up being hugely influential – and encouraging – for her.

“I found that there were so many people out there who were experiencing and thinking the same things I was.  For me, Twitter’s become a community that allows its members to draw insights, inspiration and encouragement from one another.  It’s opened so many refreshing new doors for me.”

Linda Pourmassina, MD

When Dr. Pourmassina joined the Polyclinic in 2011, she wasn’t sure how her new colleagues would respond to her social media activities – if they even noticed them.  She’s been pleasantly surprised at the support she’s gotten … it was clear to the staff that her activities would only benefit the practice.  And while she hasn’t specifically tracked where her new patients are coming from, they’re definitely coming.  In fact, she’s had to be really disciplined with her writing and networking due to the patient volume she’s built in just over a year.  Justifying the time isn’t difficult, though.  “I’ve gotten used to knowing the latest news and trends first – and having the benefit of my peers’ reactions to them as well.  I’m almost never left with ‘that blank look’ that so many doctors experience when their patients ask them about the latest trends.”

Dr. Pourmassina’s digital interactions have taught her something else, too, that she wants especially to share with aspiring physicians, med students and residents.  And it’s that “MD” is not the end … it’s really the beginning.  For most of the last 100 years, people have decided when they’re 18 or 19 that they want to be doctors – and that was essentially their last career decision.  But it’s not like that now … even though it typically takes 11 years to get from pre-med to their own practice.

“If one looks simply at the changes in one-to-one provision of healthcare and the doctor-patient interaction (including EMR adoption, shorter appointments, patient portals, concept of e-patients, generational changes in expectations, creation of midlevel providers, rise in urgent care facilities, and healthcare social media), one realizes – like the old Oldsmobile commercials – that this is not your father’s medical system anymore.”

Linda Pourmassina, MD – Excerpted from “Where Do You See Yourself in Eleven Years?” Published on March 7, 2012 on Pulsus

When you’re trendspotting and networking on the web, it makes it a lot easier to be aware of the changes that are coming down the pike – and to position them as opportunities in your own career.  It’s going to be fun to see where they take Dr. Pourmassina.

To meet Linda Pourmassina online, you can connect with her:

On her blog, Pulsus

On Twitter, @LindaP_MD

On Facebook

On Google+

… and a very small and targeted selection from Dr. Pourmassina’s recommended reading and connection list:

Wendy Sue Swanson – @SeattleMamaDoc

Kevin Pho – @KevinMD

Bryan Vartabedian – @Doctor_V

Jordan Grumet – @JordanGrumet

Greg Smith – @GregSmithMD

#MDigitalLife is a WCG program designed to learn from and to showcase physicians who are blazing new trails in the digital world – changing the way that medicine is practiced and better health is realized.  You can find previous posts here.

“[Social Media] is overwhelmingly where patients and caregivers are.  Physicians can’t look for excuses not to be there; they’ve got to find a way to meet their patients where they are.”

- Dr. Anas Younes, Oncologist, Lymphoma Expert and Professor of Medicine at MD Anderson Cancer Center

Doctor Anas Younes is an oncologist at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center – one of the most respected medical facilities in the world.  As such, exploring the limits of new cancer treatments is perhaps the most important part of his job.  For that reason, he tends to be involved in a lot of clinical trials … and the greatest challenge for most clinical trials is to find and engage the patients who’ll join the trials.  So Dr. Younes isn’t using social media to scratch a literary itch, or because he’s keen to be on the cutting edge of communications.  He’s using social media because that’s where the patients are – and he needs to reach as many as possible, as quickly as possible.

Doctor Younes’ use of the social web started 3 years ago when, as is not unusual, he was frustrated with the process of getting patients into clinical trials using traditional methods like flyers and mass emails.  He recognized that he was getting so many flyers himself that he barely had time to look at them all anymore, and saw that more and more spam filters were weeding out his emails.  He eventually tired of such low-tech methods, and began to focus his attention on a medium that he hoped would yield better results, faster.

“My audience in social media isn’t just other oncologists – I’m now able to reach patients and their caregivers directly in ways that I never could before.”  According to Dr. Younes, an average of only 3% of eligible patients participate in clinical trials – even though they may have tremendous benefits – because they simply aren’t aware of them.  Now, through the strategic use of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in particular, he’s able to reach more doctors AND more patients.

And it’s been working.  Not only are his patients glad to be able to stay connected with him online (“They’re proud that their doctor is out there and visible”), more and more patients are finding HIM through those channels.  He admits that he doesn’t have time to interact with patients as frequently as he’d like online – but he does stay quite engaged.  One of the things he feels has really helped is that MD Anderson has begun to embrace and encourage social media in a big way.  While he is primarily self-trained, MDA is now helping him and other doctors to make the best use of their social channels – how and who to follow, what and when to retweet, whom to engage, etc.  “MD Anderson saw the value right away – and they’ve begun to actively enable us as doctors to be engaged online.”  According to Megan Maisel of the MDA communications team, their success in engaging through social media comes as a result of the passion of their physicians, like Dr. Younes, as well as the leadership team. “Our provost and executive vice president, Dr. Raymond DuBois, is particularly active on Twitter and he sets an example for others at MD Anderson to follow,” she says.

When I asked about his interaction with other doctors, Dr. Younes shared a couple of surprising revelations.  “Twitter can be really distracting,” he said. “It’s not very intuitive for everyone, and it takes every person a little bit of time to find their comfort zone with using it.  But once you do, there’s no better way to stay connected.”  In our social media echo chamber, it’s nice to see someone calling a spade a spade – and recognizing that getting started in twitter isn’t easy.

Dr. Younes has come to understand that, “what defines you on Twitter is who you follow.  There are a lot of good things out there IF you follow the right people … and look for the right things.”  But it it still takes up massive amounts of time, right?

“Trying to keep up with the latest health information using Google or PubMed takes massive amounts of time.  I’ve found that I actually SAVE time by using twitter, because my network brings me the most important and up-to-date information without my having to look for it.”

Dr. Anas Younes, MD – the MD Anderson Cancer Center

Dr. Younes’ twitter network includes science and medicine writers like Sally Church and Matthew Herper, who do an amazing job of covering the pipeline of cancer treatments;  MD Anderson’s Provost Raymond Dubois; Robert Miller from Johns Hopkins; ASCO’s Michael Fisch; Steven Tucker, a UCLA-trained oncologist now practicing in Singapore – and of course, many others.   He also tends to follow more institutions than individuals, which syncs well with his goal of getting instant access to the best information and thinking.

When I asked Dr. Younes about what advice he’d have for other doctors to get online, he highlighted something important that he’s learned about the social media space.  “No matter what your focus is, you can’t just talk about the same thing all the time.  You have to vary your content and keep it interesting … and only tweet about your core efforts on an intermediate basis.  It makes you more credible as an information source.”

To see how Dr. Younes has tackled social media, you can find him on:

Facebook

Twitter (@DrAnasYounes)

YouTube (MD Anderson)

LinkedIn

To begin, John Mandrola‘s piece, “Six Reasons Why (I) Doctors Blog…” is a great, easily digestible primer for physicians who are asking themselves the big “WHY” – and was followed up nicely by Ves Dimov in “Reasons Why Doctors Blog.”

Well-known author, chef and physician John La Puma has a great take on the importance of doctor-generated social media on patients’ wellness (as opposed to “sick care”).  His piece, “Physicians Innovative Use of Digital and Social Media,” nicely illustrates that different angle.

Seattle’s Linda Pourmassina has written a great post, “MDs: Advice for the Next Generation,” for future doctors that includes some great advice about how to think about their social networks both on- and offline.

I like that fact that more and more doctors are taking advantage of different types of digital media to communicate. Neelesh Bhandari, in his post “3 Reasons Why Healthcare Professionals Cannot Afford To Give #hcsm a Miss,” incorporates a nice embedded slideshare presentation.

Mark Morgan, a family physician for the Indian Health Service in Arizona, has been crowdsourcing physicians’ resources on SoapNote for over three years.  His recent article, “Sharing clinical efficiencies online,” is a great introduction to his method.

Dave Chase has done a lot of good writing about the changing role of doctors.  In his Forbes piece, ‘”Primary Care Spring” unleashed by IBM,’ he argues that an IBM study on Patient Centered Medical Homes is inspiring revolutionary thinking about primary care.  I’m not so sure about the role that IBM has played in the movement, but I like the concept. Check out Jay W. Lee’s initial #FMRevolution post from back in March; this movement seems to be picking up steam by adding high-profile docs like Mike Sevilla to its revolutionary “membership.”

Speaking of Mike Sevilla, he recently gave a talk at the Northest Ohio Medical University.  In that “NEOMED Social Media Talk“ he’s distilled the five essential social media tips for physician leaders.

Kate Crawshaw’s recent post, “Better ways to engage nurses online,” gives a nice look at how another incredibly important player in the continuum of care can be more effectively integrated.

Marie Ennis O’Connor has gone straight to the heart of the reason many doctors are considering the use of social and digital media in, “Using Social Media to Market and Brand Your Medical Practice.”

It’s always good to recognize a contrarian voice.  Dike Drummond (TheHappyMD.com) makes the bold declaration that “Healthcare Social Media is a Waste of Time for Most Doctors.” This is worth a read for everyone as a sanity check; if you’re going to use social media, at least make sure you know why – and the reason shouldn’t be “because everyone else seems to be.”  I happen to disagree with the much of the premise, but then again, I’m one of the “social media consultants” that Dr. Drummond is talking about!

Ted Eytan has long been among the most passionate and prolific advocates of digital communications in medicine.  In his piece, “Giving the voiceless a voice using social media, family violence prevention, and a walk with Brigid McCaw, MD” he touches an important subject: The fact that social media is enabling new voices to emerge in the healthcare system … voices that include both patients and doctors.

There are two doctors I know who have taken their social media thinking to an entirely different level, and are literally training other physicians on the day-to-day tactics associated with various types of social media activity.  The first, Howard Luks, recently posted a piece oriented to his own specialty; “What is the Future of Social Media for Orthopedic Surgeons?” The second, Bertalan Mesko, has introduced a series of self-study courses designed for doctors who are preparing to engage in social media: “Digital Literacy in Medical Education: Please Spread the Word!”

It’s physician thought leaders (like many of those profiled here) who are leading the way for others. Bryan Vartabedian (in my opinion, the most advanced thinker on the role of social media in medicine), published a great piece on the future thought leading MDs, “Physician Thought Leaders in the Digital Age.”

I hope that the work by these brilliant folks has inspired you as much as it has me – I must say that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my hosting role this week!  Thanks to all those who submitted their work – and stay tuned for the next edition! HealthCare SocialMedia Review has information about the next edition’s host and instructions on how to submit your posts for review in future editions.

Over the course of 2012, I will likely speak at over 10 events across the country. When I am speaking at events I often have very little time to pay attention to the other speakers. I try my best to focus on speakers before and after my talk, but it is hard. Before my talks I am focused on the key talking points I want to convey, and after my brain has shut down after being “on” for an hour in front of a few hundred people. If you speak at a lot of events, I am sure you can come here and confirm that feeling.

Last week I had an opportunity to attend an event in Knoxville, Tennessee called Social Slam. I wasn’t speaking, but I had heard enough good things about this event from people I trusted that I looked into it. With the good fortune of a few open days on the calendar I booked my ticket to Knoxville. This was the first time I was attending an event and not speaking in quite a long time so I was looking forward to soaking up the content. Let me tell you right now the content did NOT disappoint. A few things I am taking away:

• Tom Webster makes volumes of social data approachable – Tom and I come at analytics problems from two different backgrounds, but I think we eventually come to the same conclusions. That said, Tom is much better than I am at making data approachable. I have seen him speak on a few occasions, and yes, Tom speaks at quite a few events, but I don’t think I noticed just how approachable he makes this subject until I had an opportunity to truly listen.
• 50 huge ideas in 50 minutes – There is very little variety in session formats these days. Either we have a solo speaker, a keynote or a panel. At Social Slam Mark Schaefer put together easily the most innovative conference session I had seen in a few years. The 50 huge ideas in 50 minutes concept was five speakers each with 10 minutes providing big ideas on their area of expertise. For example, Stephanie Wonderlin gave 10 fantastic ideas to make video marketing more approachable. During the same session, Stanford Smith gave some great ideas for how to improve your blog. Bottom line was that these sessions were great for the audience and the speakers. A number of people came up to each of the speakers afterwards asking for additional advice. As a speaker, there’s nothing better than getting follow-up questions after your talk.
• Breakout sessions appealed to all audiences – Right after lunch, there were three different panel sessions all focusing on varying levels of expertise. In one session, D.J. Waldow, Stanford Smith, Stephanie Wonderlin and Marcus Sheridan provided useful tips for getting started in social media. In another Sam Fiorella, Eric Pratum and Sean McGinnis dove into the interplay between social and search. Finally, Jay Baer, Amy Kenly, Clinton Bonner and Gary Schirr talked about using social media to drive product innovation. Any conference organizer will tell you just how difficult it is to appeal to the varying skill levels of an audience. These three sessions did just that. There was literally something for everyone.

Before I go any further, I wanted to give kudos to Mark Schaefer, the volunteers and all of the speakers for putting on a spectacular event. Social Slam opened my eyes to the value of conference content again. As a result of this experience I know I will be looking for more opportunities to attend events and not speak. This field is too new for us to stop learning and only speak. I would encourage you to do the same by finding the Social Slam equivalent in your area.

First, the work that’s been done by her Patient Solutions team in Sanofi’s US Diabetes franchise (WCG Client) is truly remarkable.  More on that in a moment.  The second is that they were able to build a highly visible innovation challenge, in partnership with Todd Park and the Department of Health and Human Services.  In six weeks.

The idea behind the first Data Design Diabetes Challenge, now in its second year, was born at SxSW in 2011.  The program was formally launched in June of that year at the Health Data Initiative Forum.  I’ve known global corporations that couldn’t get a twitter account started in six weeks time – much less an innovation competition that had over 100 entries, and is now supported by its own blog, twitter account and facebook page. AND, if you really want to know more, you can sign up to watch Demo Day live on May 16th.

According to Michele, the main enabler of their success was that there was an incredibly focused cross-functional team behind her, including all of the right players from their legal, regulatory and compliance teams.  The winner of that competition, ginger.io, is now being considered as a potential partner while other entrants have successfully started their own businesses.  The 2012 competition is now in full swing – you can learn more about it on the Data Design Diabetes web site. Or,

As you know, we always close these LiveFromStubbs conversations with a conversation about music and barbecue.  Michele’s shouldn’t be missed.  TEASER: Michele’s story involves Katy Perry and a law enforcement officer.  But you have to watch the video to fid out the rest.

I’m honored to have been asked to be a “sherpa” for the fledgling HCSMR – and this post represents my call for submissions for next week’s carnival!

My topic for the week centers on physicians’ innovative use of digital and social media - whether it’s to build their practice, educate their patients, communicate with their peers or something else altogether, posts by and about these doctors are welcome.  SO …

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If you’ve got a post you’d like to submit about doctors using social and digital media, all you have to do is complete this form (http://bit.ly/HCSMR3Form) by 11:59 PM on Monday, April 30th (although earlier is MUCH better!).  If you’d like to submit your post via email, just follow these guidelines.  See you on the 2nd!!

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My post will appear right here on WCG’s Common Sense blog on Wednesday, May 2.

In coming weeks, look forward to HCSMR carnivals hosted by luminaries like Anne Marie Cunningham, David Williams, Nick Dawson, John Sharp, Mark Scrimshire, Fard Johnmar, Jamie Rauscher, Jennifer Dyer Barbara Ficarra, Lee Aase and Pat Salber)

That’s code for “reporters will now be editing each other’s work,” which is one of those things that makes sense if you don’t think about it. But those people who have had their bacon saved (repeatedly) by the copy desk know that good reporters don’t necessarily make good copy editors. And though the editors of the Denver Post hope it’s not the case, there’s a good chance that dismissing copy editors will harm the quality of the final product.

How could the final product be hurt? Ask Elizabeth Flock, a blogger for the Washington Post, who resigned last week after two errors came to light. Flock wrote the Post’s breaking-news blog, which called for a tremendous amount of re-writing of the content of others, all so that washingtonpost.com readers wouldn’t have to leave the paper’s site to get their fix of the stuff that was absolutely fresh. Flock’s task was daunting: she shoveled out thousands of words for the site every day. And in that mad rush, she made two mistakes: she amplified a story about Mitt Romney that — while buzzing online — was not true. And she failed to properly attribute one story. For that, she fell on her sword.

Flock did have editors looking over her shoulder, but it’s not hard to argue that better, tougher copy editing might have saved Flock’s job, and, perhaps, some small part of the Post’s reputation.

And it’s not just journalism where copy editing failures can lead to disease. Jim Edwards from Business Insider flagged a whopper of a typo in a Google ad campaign (Google Chome, anyone?).

The easy solution is to suggest that, perhaps, we need more editors across the communication continuum, and that would clearly be a good start. But the problem may actually start further upstream. In a multi-media world, fewer and fewer individuals see the mechanics of writing as the core skill set upon which their success depends. I am increasingly working with undergraduate communications students who are absolute wizards with today’s media tools: they have excellent graphic design skills. They can shoot and edit video with a professional’s precision. They understand the mechanics of tagging and posting and the new media ecosystem.

But there is hugely less interest in writing copy — not short stuff, not long stuff, not the stuff in between — than when I was studying the media forms back in the dark ages. That’s not surprising. And, in a YouTube age, it’s not automatically bad to see more communicators specializing in media that have become increasingly important. But the subtle shift away from the written word carries dangers that can’t always be identified immediately. It’s a lesson that the Washington Post and Google learned the hard way. And it’s one that the Denver Post may learn, soon enough.

* This post produced without the assistance of copy editors. So if you find typos or leaps in logic, you know why.

#MDigitalLife is a WCG program designed to learn from and to showcase physicians who are blazing new trails in the digital world – changing the way that medicine is practiced and better health is realized.  You can find previous posts here.

“Physicians have a moral obligation to create and disseminate accurate health information, using the language of their patients, in the places their patients go to look for it.”

Dr. Farris Timimi, MD – The Mayo Clinic

When Farris Timimi began his first cardiology practice nearly 15 years ago, he started with a recognition that looks prescient. He established a Cardiology clinic for underinsured and uninsured patients.  As a requirement for funding, half the board was made up of patients and family members.  During those critical conversations, he learned rapidly that health care literacy reflected more than language barriers; indeed, it reflected cultural perspectives that had an enormous impact on their ability to understand their condition and treatment options and impacted their ability to partner with their providers in achieving good health outcomes.  So in order to ensure that he communicated to them in a way that they’d respond to, he used a Patient-Family Advisory Council (PFAC) to help him relate to his patients most effectively.

Before you start wondering why more doctors don’t think this way, it’s important to understand some of the challenges that those doctors are up against.  Doctors are obligated to treat their patients according to continually-updated best-practice guidance.  For heart failure alone (Dr. Timimi’s area of deepest expertise), there are over 400 such guidelines to be aware of.  But the other key obligation is for physicians to treat the patient, not the condition.  And that means that those 400 guidelines also need to take into consideration who that patient is: her race, language skills, educational level, home environment, financial stability, and her psychological readiness for change.

To the layperson (like me), that sounds overwhelming.  But Dr. Timimi, rather than throwing in the towel, actually feels optimistic about the future of medicine.  One of the sources of that optimism is that 15 years later, Dr. Timimi still believes deeply in the concept of the PFAC.  But now, he’s begun to think of new applications for the concept, and now sees social media as a channel for allowing a PFAC to scale in ways that have never before been possible.

To me, that’s a fascinating enough concept … but it actually doesn’t end there.

“The benefit to social media engagement isn’t just about the doctor gaining a better understanding of the patient’s needs.  It’s also about enabling an emotionally engaged patient to become truly invested in his care … a factor that has proven to be important in getting the most out of his treatment.”

– Dr. Farris Timimi

Framed in that way, it’s not hard to understand why Dr. Timimi feels so strongly that doctors need to be ready to engage in social media.  “When we leave our patients to their own devices in terms of researching health issues, he says, “we cede the moral high ground to anybody out there who has a point of view – valid or not.”  He cited an example from his own life as the caregiver for a pediatric patient – in other words, a parent.  As the father of young children, Dr. Timimi found that he was spending a huge chunk of his kids’ vaccination appointment talking to the pediatrician about vaccine hesitancy.  That kind of conversation might not have been necessary had doctors fought fire with fire – and shared accurate content about vaccinations to contradict all the noise surrounding the inaccurate content created by those with a large social media presence.

The way forward is clear to Dr. Timimi.  Practitioners – all of them – have to put good content in the hands of a willing consumer who’s looking for that content.  Celebrities are now viewed as proprietary holders of credibility as health care providers have not strategically populated digital footprints.  Dr. Timimi has found that he’s getting an increasing number of queries from his patients about online resources: Q&As, videos, blogs – and often communities – that they can use to augment and own their treatment regimen.  For that reason, Dr. Timimi keeps a mental library of online resources to which he can refer all of his patients.

And while creating any good content is better than creating none, he doesn’t believe that doctors or other HCPs need to shoot blindly.  “It’s possible to generate insights about what kind of media is most likely to resonate with each patient.”  For example, he notes that mobile resources can be really effective for socioeconomically challenged patients – and that ensuring content is mobile-optimized is critically important.  And that makes sense; recent data tells us that poorer demographic groups actually index higher for the use of smartphones and mobile web sites – and even for social media tools like Twitter.

Dr. Timimi also underscored the importance of ensuring that we make good health information available to those who are truly at the greatest risk, including the disabled and those who don’t have access to a smartphone or broadband internet.  For that reason, it’s critical to ensure that we support local community access advocates, such as community centers, churches and public libraries are able to provide access to good content for those who have never been online, who may not have access at home, or have limited access available only at work.

The Mayo Clinic has taken advanced approach to using social media, and have started to survey their PFACs across 25 different departments to ascertain patients’ preferred online media and content consumption.  Mayo also provides Dr. Timimi a great platform for his own communications; he blogs regularly on the Clinic’s blog – but he’s also developed a robust twitter presence, Mayo’s facebook page, and has even begun to use Pinterest (the first MD I’ve spoken to who’s doing so professionally).

When I asked about why he felt that Pinterest was of interest as a communication channel, he noted that the site skews pretty heavily towards women (the primary consumers of healthcare for their families) and that the average time-on-site is 90 minutes per month.  He also feels that the visual-heavy medium is really effective for building deeper understanding around health issues ranging from healthy cooking to how to install your infant car seat properly.

Doctor Timimi is on the vanguard of a new breed of “digital doctor” – and wants to be able to encourage his colleagues who are just getting started.  He recently filmed a video about using social media that’s generated a lot of interest – he says that it’s encouraged a lot of doctors to approach him with advice … advice that he’s more than willing to dispense.  To keep abreast of Dr. Timimi’s online activities, you can find him online here:

The Mayo Clinic Blog

Twitter

The Mayo Clinic’s Facebook Page

Pinterest

That is a lot of build up for me not to say what I am sure you have already guessed – I am joining Bob Pearson, Aaron Strout and Spike Jones in the WCG book club. What makes this even more exciting is that I am doing it with my good friend Ken Burbary. There are few people I respect more within the digital analytics, social media and digital marketing worlds than Ken, so when this opportunity arose he was my first call. What are we going to be writing about you might be asking? Well, digital analytics, of course! The title of the book is still being finalized, but the premise of the book is that companies are faced with a mountain of digital data that is largely underutilized.. Similarly, those same companies struggle to find and utilize tools that help them gather and analyze data. Those are just two of the items we will be tackling in this book. Some of the other issues we will address include:

• Measuring social media – We will be covering multiple digital analytics topics, but would be remiss if we didn’t tackle this 800lb gorilla in the room. Ken and I approach analytics from different backgrounds (but similar perspectives) so you should expect to see very practical social media measurement advice in this book. How do we create integrated measurement plans? What are some metrics companies can use to measure success on paid, earned and owned channels? Is there more to the world of measurement than ROI? These are just some of the social media questions the book will answer.
• Elevating listening within the organization – The first time Ken and I collaborated was back in October 2009 when we introduced the Social Analytics Lifecycle. The premise then was that listening data has utility beyond public relations and marketing, and I think I can safely speak for Ken when I say we still feel the same way now. That being said, the number of organizations capitalizing on listening data in this way is minimal. This book will give you some tips and tricks to elevate listening within your organization.
• Understanding, measuring and defining influence – This isn’t a book on influence, but to not tackle some of the tools, processes and algorithms available on the market would be a missed opportunity in our opinion. There is a lot of misunderstanding about this topic and our hope is that we can turn the boat around.
• Paid media analytics – The book is far from written, but there’s a very good chance that we will be preaching INTEGRATION throughout. While the world has been hyper-focused on social data (rightfully so in a lot of respects), we have missed an opportunity to bring in paid data to make the social story stronger. This is one of the many reasons I’m excited to be partnering with Ken on this book as he has spent the last several years focused on this topic.

That is just a quick sneak preview. We will be covering these topics and more in great depth in the book. For those of you wondering when it is going to be released, it is tentatively scheduled to be released in early January of 2013. Both Ken and I are very pleased to be working with Pearson on this title, especially after they successfully launched Jason Falls’ book several months ago.

I would be remiss if I left off perhaps the most important aspect of this book. Ken and I have decided to follow the lead of Michael Brito and donate the proceeds of the book to charity. Ken’s charity is the Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome Association, and mine is Superhero Kids. I’ll let Ken talk about RSDSA, but Superhero Kids is a local Austin organization whose mission is to provide funding for the Children’s Blood and Cancer Center of Central Texas to enhance the quality of life for patients and their families during treatment. I can’t imagine a more deserving local charity that assists kids with cancer.

There are too many people to thank for pushing me toward this pursuit. Needless to say if you are one of them, you’ll be hearing from me throughout this process with a word of thanks. We’re looking forward to this book, and hope you are looking forward to reading it.

In most areas of life, people opt for the sure bet. Approach someone on the street and tell them you’ll hand them $150 — or let them flip a coin, double-or-nothing — and they’ll take the $150. But when it comes to cancer care, a survey of cancer patients found that 77 percent would take the 50/50 gamble on getting three extra years of survival, according to research in the latest edition of the journal Health Affairs.

While the paper delves into detail on why, exactly, we seem more likely to take what the authors call a “hopeful gamble” (patients with short life expectancy may feel that they have less to lose), the results are important to health communicators for another reason: it gives insight into the way that patients themselves want to choose treatments, and how patients view statistical descriptions of a drug’s effectiveness.

In the hypothetical presented in the Health Affairs paper, both of the fictional drugs had exactly the same median overall survival: 18 months. From a strictly statistical point of view (and from the point of view of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration), the two medications are identical, despite the fact that deaths are clustered in two vastly different ways. But just because they are indistinguishable to the statistician does mean that a patient would see no difference. Indeed, patients in the study said that not only did they prefer taking the hopeful gamble, a quarter of the breast cancer patients surveyed said they’d be willing to pay an extra $90,000 for the opportunity to flip the coin. The value of the gamble far outstrips that of the safe bet, for the patient anyway.

It’s a reminder that though it’s important to talk about median survival, which remains the gold standard for regulators, we do patients a service when communication about a drug’s efficacy includes other metrics, such as the percentage of patients alive after a given number of years, that might help quantify how much hope is built into those survival statistics. With that need for additional information comes addition responsibilities — patients examining a hopeful gamble need to understand the consequences when the gamble doesn’t pay off — but it’s clear from the Health Affairs paper that patients value that information. Our job, as communicators, is to make sure they get it.

It works for almost every industry. A lot of people think Coke tastes great. Why else drink it? Exxon refines crude oil into gasoline. It makes your car run. Sell. Repeat.

But when it comes to healthcare and its delivery, the system isn’t working nearly as well as it could, the products offered don’t provide the results you deserve, and customers – patients – don’t always receive the benefits they should. This was a theme that really stuck for me as I listened to some extremely smart and accomplished people speak this week at TEDMED.

Despite this inconsistent, often frustrating system, there’s a lot of hope and progress being made to fix it, with evidence-based medicine, the effective use of data and mutual accountability leading the way at putting patients first.

Here’s a look at what leaders of the CDC and FDA, the executive health editor at Reuters, President Obama’s chief technology officer and a cancer theoretician and mathematician had to say about improving patient health. See what I mean about extremely smart and accomplished people?

Dr. Thomas Frieden (Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
In the early 90s, tuberculosis ran rampant in New York City, spreading through hospitals, homeless shelters and resisting multi-drug treatment. It was so bad, Dr. Frieden said, that physicians didn’t want to complete their residencies in New York for fear of contracting tuberculosis themselves.

Dr. Frieden had initial success in bringing tuberculosis under control. But at a chance meeting with a physician who had contracted tuberculosis in a concentration camp during World War II, Dr. Frieden was asked an amazingly simple question that proved transformative: “How many patients did you cure?” Dr. Frieden, “terribly ashamed”, didn’t know the answer.

He began a process called cohort reviews. Traveling to every part of the city, his team reviewed patients one by one until they knew exactly how many had been cured. “Data and information isn’t just statistics, it’s what is locally relevant,” Dr. Frieden said. And if the data isn’t being used with the intention of making patients the VIPs, it’s not being used well. “If you’re not measuring with brutal honesty, you won’t succeed.”

There was one other point from Dr. Frieden’s presentation that’s worth noting. Advertising and media outreach works: Last month, the CDC launched a hard-hitting campaign, Tips from Former Smokers, on what tobacco really does to people. The reason? Media campaigns are “an evidence-based strategy to educate the public regarding the harms of tobacco use.” Did the evidence hold up? You bet. Dr. Frieden says calls to quit lines doubled in the first month.

Dr. Ivan Oransky, Executive Editor of Reuters Health
Dr. Oransky used a simple, and timely, story to demonstrate the situation Americans face with their healthcare. Billy Beane, of Moneyball fame, was himself, albeit shortly, a major league baseball player. Scouts all thought he’d succeed but their predictions were wrong. The healthcare system, Dr. Oransky argues, is as bad at predicting what will happen to people as scouts were at predicting that Billy Beane wouldn’t make it as a ball player. For the healthcare system to work, and work well, its delivery and service must improve. A system where patients feel they’ve received bad care unless they’ve been diagnosed or prescribed medicine doesn’t create good service. Dr. Oransky said:
“We have a system where if you build it, they will come. Billy Beane learned that it wasn’t swinging for the fences, it was watching for the guys who like to walk. We need to figure out, is that a good pitch or should we let it go by and not swing at everything?”

Todd Park, U.S. Chief Technology Officer
Dr. Park didn’t have any gizmos or gadgets. He was just a self-described “fanboy” who said something pretty remarkable is happening in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s not the chili.

By most measures, Cincinnati was average when it came to healthcare delivery. The city decided it wasn’t content with average. So a few years ago, stakeholders representing many constituencies got together regularly to understand health status in their community and the performance of the healthcare delivery system. They started small, with flu coverage, at which they were, again, “resoundingly average.”

To fix it, first these stakeholders developed a set of common performance metrics and an ongoing measurement system to help achieve goals. Second, they realigned how healthcare is paid for. Insurers and providers wanted to pay for value. Doctors were offered extra incentives and other resources to help them coordinate care more proactively and accelerated deployment of electronic health records and educated clinicians on how to use these new tools. Finally, they put patients at the center. They published a website that gave them much better information on flu. Treatment improved. It’s also working for diabetes, where between 2010-2011, the cohort of patients receiving perfect diabetes care improved greatly.

Dr. Jacob Scott, radiation oncologist and cancer theoretician, Moffit Cancer Center
Dr. Scott thinks of himself as a long-range scout searching the world of biology he’s seen and what is limiting our success in healthcare. If that sounds different than many doctors you know, it’s because Dr. Scott has had a unique experience. He studied physics, served in the U.S. Navy on a nuclear submarine and while studying medicine, decided he should also study mathematics at Oxford University.

Much of what limits success in healthcare, Dr. Scott argues, is medical school. When he arrived, medical school was “like a backstage pass to everything cool about being a human being.” However, medical school, which Dr. Scott says rewards medical students based only on GPA and MCAT scores, is not doing enough to encourage creative thinking and unique partnerships that can look at healthcare’s biggest problems, especially in oncology. Instead, medical school needs to remind students that it’s not the information they leave medical school with, but the ability to face problems critically and step out of their comfort zone, that will make the biggest difference in medicine.

Dr. Peggy Hamburg, Commissioner, U.S. FDA, and Larry Brilliant, president and CEO, Skoll Global Threats Fund
Mr. Brilliant interviewed Dr. Hamburg on a range of issues that are front and center in healthcare right now. Here are some excerpts from the conversation:

Balancing the need for innovation with regulation and safety: Dr. Hamburg said that smart regulation matters if you want to translate science and technology into the products people need. Smart regulation improves the quality and utility of a product while ensuring there’s trust and confidence in it from patients and physicians. She added that a lot of people at the FDA don’t understand the process of innovation and running a business. By reaching out and talking to CEOs and entrepreneurs, the FDA has learned a lot.

On speeding the approval of drugs and devices: Drugs and devices are very different, Dr. Hamburg said. On the drug side, the FDA leads the world in terms of first to market on a majority of drugs and in the time of that review process. Devices are more complicated. FDA is faster the majority of the time compared to European colleagues but slower for pre-market approvals.

The impact of globalization on drug safety: As drug development has moved offshore, so have safety trials, and the challenges of globalization are immense, Dr. Hamburg said. Of the drugs taken in the U.S.,
40 percent are manufactured in another country and 80 percent of the ingredients are manufactured elsewhere. That’s just on drug side.

On drug shortages: Dr. Hamburg said this is a problem that’s increased in recent years in a way that worries all of us. The biggest shortage has been with sterile injectable drugs, many of which are generics or older drugs. They are hard to make and the manufacturing equipment is old. Economic forces are also at play. The FDA is working to learn about shortages much, much earlier, she said, and collaborates with manufacturers to make sure the drug remains available. It also means identifying other manufacturers who can scale up to meet a shortage and those who could make the drug but aren’t, or go overseas and work for an equivalent drug that isn’t approved but could.

We didn’t have a good name for that process, but it was similar to the effort now known as “curation”: the collection, organization and re-broadcast of the ideas of others. In 2012, curation is a key part of the information-processing cycle as we come to terms with the fact that there will be more devices connected to the Internet by the middle of the decade than there are people in the world. All of those devices are spitting out gobs of information, and sifting through that information has become a calling unto itself.

My colleague Aaron Strout outlined why curation is so important to companies last year, and there seems to be little chance that trend will diminish (a fact that the rise of Pinterest demonstrates).

As a result of the growing need for — and market for — curation, there have been increasing efforts to develop rules for making sure that the process of curation is ethical. The most recent is the “Curator’s Code,” a thoughtful way for bloggers and others to signal both the source of a story (in Twitter parlance, the “via”) as well as the person who brought it to the attention of the curator (the “hat tip”). The ethics is straightforward: as we collect and re-broadcast information, understanding where the information came from (and how it traveled) is critical in establishing credibility.

But for all of the attention the Curator’s Code has received — it was a SXSW highlight and was featured in the New York Times, among others — it set an unfortunately low bar for curation. Proper attribution is a noble goal, but it doesn’t solve one of the fundamental issues of content sharing in the brave new social world: it actually increases the volume of information we’re exposed to, because yesterday’s hot story on Mashable isn’t being published just by Mashable. It’s being RTed and Facebooked and G+ed by thousands and thousands of people, often with no additional context.

Which brings me back to that first job, curating for hours before the sun even rose. The fundamental rule that guided me then — add something of value — seems every bit as important as the “Curator’s Code” in ensuring that the benefits of curation (organizing information, broadening the reach of information) don’t degrade into just more noise.

Yes, WCG is happy to announce that we have added another big brain/seasoned veteran to the team in one Mr. Rob Cronin. Specifically, Rob is joining the WCG team to lead a specialized practice of two intersecting fields: healthcare and technology. As advancements continue in both areas, the tools change and the landscape transforms. Rob will be working with clients to tell the story of how their organizations and communities are enabling change throughout the nation’s healthcare system.

It is clear that this is an area that deserves focus and expertise. To that end, Rob brings 20 years of communication experience with him and a shared understanding of what is great work and what constitues great communication consulting – what it looks like today and where we expect it to head. As a former client, Rob believes in, and has put into action, analytics as a foundation for how to communicate and engage.

Asked to describe himself in three words, Rob listed off creative, driven and jocular. When I asked him to elaborate a bit, Rob explained that even at the beginning of his career he felt “the tension of wanting to run both the account and to be the creative. Communications offered the best of both.” He continued,”I’ve always been driven to deliver results and to serve clients.” So how does jocular fit in? While Rob takes his work seriously, he employs humor to make sure that isn’t confused with taking himself too seriously.

Rob continually assesses the evolution of healthcare technology, especially in the next 3 -5 years, and what that will mean. “To date, most of the attention has been focused  getting providers to adopt technology and digitizing medical information. That is a critical step, but it is only step one.  This next step is a critical part of the federal program that offers financial incentives to providers that make ‘meaningful use’ of electronic health records. This needs to include the federal program that offers financial incentives to providers that make  ‘meaningful use’ of electronic health records. There are many obstacles to overcome here, but progress is happening and this will be a big story in the next two years.”

Prior to joining WCG, Rob headed up corporate communications at Surescripts, the nation’s largest health information network. While there, he built relationships and created communications programs, including The National Progress Report on E-Prescribing and The Safe-Rx Awards, that helped define the market for e-prescribing and turn Surescripts into a leading brand in health IT. Before his time at Surescripts, Rob grew up on the agency side with stints at Dudnyk, TSI Communications, Weber Shandwick and Outcast.

Please help us in welcoming Rob to the team.

What’s truly unique about the format is that each speaker, rather than the traditional 45-90 minute keynote, gets a maximum of 18 minutes to get their point across and their audience engaged.  And while many presenters do use visual aids in some form, it’s considered poor form to use the typical bullet-pointed powerpoint slides (which is a delight to those of us who are allergic to bullets).

The TED phenomenon has become so pervasive that there are now similarly themed TEDx conferences around the country, and national conferences that delve into specific topic areas like TEDMed – an annual health-focused conference held in rotating locations, running in 2012 in Washington DC from April 10-13.  And while TEDTalks videos have been watched over 500 million times online, TEDMed is doing something new this year … making the conference available – live – to thousands of people who weren’t able to come to DC.  TEDMed Live is being simulcasted to hundreds of locations around the world – and participants can generally sign up for individual sessions in their home location for no charge.  Follow the TEDMedLive link and then select “Participating Locations” on the lefthand menu to find a location near you.

For those of us lucky enough to live in Austin, our own local TEDx chapter (TEDx Austin) is hosting TEDMed Live in association with St. David’s Medical Center.  This year’s conference will feature speakers such as:

Katie Couric – Co-founder of Stand Up to Cancer and Special Correspondent, ABC News

Todd Park – Chief Technology Officer, The White House

Billie Jean King – Tennis legend and champion for social justice

Leslie Saxon – Founder, USC Center for Body Computing

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey – CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

John Hoffman – VP, HBO Documentary Films; Producer of The Weight of the Nation

Cookie Monster – Omm Nom Nom Nom, Sesame Street

Looks like a great series of sessions – especially if you get to see them live, for free, and for people in your own community who care about health.  Give it a look!  If you’re in Austin, you can register for each session here; in other locations, refer to the TEDMed Live directory of participating institutions.

The muted reaction to these fairly big corporate messes raises an intriguing possibility: In a socially-networked world where investors, customers and employees are judge, jury and news editors, companies may be able to survive foul-ups better than in the old days of “traditional” news and corporate spin.

What the analysis conveniently forgets is that reputations aren’t forged overnight. One viral airline video, no matter how terrible, isn’t likely to prompt people to cancel bookings. (Especially at an airline such as JetBlue, which has invested a tremendous amount in building a customer-first image.) It’s the second, and the third, and the fourth videos that start to chip away at a corporation’s long-term image. The WSJ piece acknowledges as much, but not until  the very last sentence.

But the real long-term impact of minor scandals isn’t best measured by short-term actions of consumers, but how a company gets branded by journalists over the long term. Every beat reporter knows the stereotypes of the companies they cover, and those stereotypes — over time — color coverage. It’s the reason that Apple products are assumed to be innovative, regardless of the reality. It’s the reason why American carmakers are only now reversing quality perceptions forged decades ago.  Those are the obvious examples, but the same thinking influences how almost every company gets covered, in at least a subtle way.

As a reporter who covered the pharmaceutical industry 10 years ago, I’m amazed at the way long-held narratives still creep into coverage. The halo of a sound R&D arm can blunt even a string of clinical failures, and perceptions about strategies from long-departed executives are still provide the basis for today’s storylines. These perceptions are too strong to be uprooted by a single, runaway Internet meme.

That doesn’t mean that PR folks can rest easy. There’s no doubt that corporate stereotypes held by journalists are now impacted by chatter on social networks, where errors that were one small and private — a misunderstanding of an embargo, a disgruntled customer — get broadcast to a larger, more influential group. Indeed, there are far more ways now for journalists to compare vital online tempests to their existing perceptions.

Rather than worrying about handling one single issue well to preserve or build a reputation with both media and journalists, smart companies now have to worry about handling hundreds or thousands of issues consistently and thoughtfully, to prevent long-term damage. Yes, BATS Global Markets, JetBlue and Global Payments may have all sustained only a small wound. But add that wound to another and another and another. It doesn’t take long to get to the proverbial death by a thousand cuts.

My wife and I have decided that the answer, for the foreseeable future, is no. There were arguments for (from him) and against (from us), but ultimately the decision is ours. Since we do our best to reason with our children, I knew I had to come armed with a good argument for our position. For the sake of others on the fence when it comes to social media usage for children, I figured I’d share some of the research and counsel in this post.

The simplest and most direct case against this is Facebook’s terms of use. They clearly state that you should not create a Facebook profile if you are under 13. However, a recent study from New York University showed that 55% of parents of 12-year-olds say their child has a Facebook account. What’s more, 76% of those parents said that they helped create the account for their children. So is this age restriction an arbitrary, self-imposed rule from Facebook? No. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) dictates that online services employ the 13-and-over age restriction. As simple as that argument is, that’s the one that seemed to resonate most with our son. He simply didn’t want to break the rules.

The next argument we considered was one of safety. Allowing social media access to those too young to properly deal with it opens them to possible exposure to any number of dangers: pornography, profanity, violence, and – most disturbing – cyber-bullying. The tragic deaths of Megan Meier and Ryan Halligan have taught us that bullying takes on a more dangerous and public tone when it happens online. In fact, this was the subject of this episode of Glee.

The final argument is one that is least tangible or evident. It’s the future. These children who create and use Facebook accounts are leaving a digital footprint of their lives – the good, the bad, and the ugly. This footprint will most likely be checked by prospective colleges and later, employers. A quarter of U.S. colleges and half of corporate HR departments currently do this, and that practice will only increase. With all due respect to my 12-year-old, he and his friends can be idiots (no offense to actual idiots), and that idiocy will be laid out like a résumé from hell a decade from now.

All this adds up to him waiting for – and griping about – a Facebook account that must wait for now. And I suppose I should present his counter-argument … that timeless classic, “But all my friends have it.”

#MDigitalLife is a WCG program designed to learn from and to showcase physicians who are blazing new trails in the digital world – changing the way that medicine is practiced and better health is realized.  You can find previous posts here.

“If we teach student doctors with books and lectures, they’re more likely to treat their patients by reading and talking at them. If we instead train medical students using more interactive methods, they’re more likely to engage their patients in a way that’s more meaningful over the long term – by using multimedia, online tools and mobile applications.”

Aaron Stupple, 4th Year Medical student at SUNY Upstate Medical School

Aaron Stupple – a former high school science teacher – is on a committee that’s tasked with updating his medical school’s curriculum.  As strange as that sounded to me, according to Aaron it’s not uncommon to involve students in that ongoing process.  But what may be more unusual is how Aaron would like to upgrade that curriculum.

The first part of Aaron’s vision for recreating – err, I mean updating – the classes doctors take is to broaden the traditional focus.  “It’s well known that practice management is rarely taught in medical school.” Beyond that, “We often talk about when a patient needs follow-up, for example, but we never learn methods to actually get that patient to come back.” “‘How to manage your [practice's] office’ is not part of today’s curriculum,” says Aaron. But those are important realities in the life of a doctor today.  Additionally, students rarely learn the details of reimbursement, even though they are central to developments in policy and innovations like prescribing medical apps. Citing an article on KevinMD about prescription apps, Aaron noted the system of reimbursements was mentioned last – almost as a footnote. But accommodating traditional payment schemes is actually a huge obstacle to the broader adoption of new technologies and processes. “When today’s medical education actually does focus on the healthcare system, it is entirely based on the current economic ecosystem.”  Nobody is talking about what happens when and if Accountable Care Organizations (https://www.cms.gov/ACO/) become the norm, or weighing the pros and cons of alternative payment schemes like Direct Primary Care (http://www.dpcare.org).

But it isn’t just the content that Aaron thinks needs to be updated … it’s also important to re-think the ways that doctors learn. Aaron shared with me a construct that, for him, begins to describe some of the things that med schools could do to deeply enhance future physicians’ learning experience – and the kind of counsel that they’ll be able to give to their patients in the future.  This architecture for change has three major components:

SHARING – Networking students with each other and the wider community.  Today, med students are lone wolves.  There’s little opportunity to work meaningfully together.  Med Schools would do well to create platforms for students to learn in community … what we in the corporate world might think of as an advanced, social-enabled intranet.  In fact, what Chris Porter (a teaching surgeon) is doing at OnSurg.com might serve as an effective model for this component of Aaron’s vision.  Practically speaking, this isn’t about students creating content – it’s more about interacting with each other around existing content, and then augmenting it with explorations of their passion. In this way, topics like policy and social justice, global health and special populations, and cutting edge developments can become a central feature for interested students.

TEACHING – Teaching needs to involve more than a textbook, a lecture hall and a pedagogue. Today’s medical school, according to Aaron, is half vocational and half didactics – yet there’s very little connection between the clinic and the lecture hall.  Being able to bring them together – adding a more visceral experience to the lecture, and more detailed content onto the hospital floors- is Aaron’s “Holy Grail.”  “I can imagine a really simple way to do this … it’d involve hooking up the teacher and learner with the tools they already have in their pockets.  We could connect clinicians who come in and lecture on a simple microblogging platform like Yammer or Twitter – and all of a sudden, we’d have bridged those two disconnected worlds.

Medical school is one of the most stratified, siloed and hierarchical environments you can imagine – and it means that we miss enormous opportunities to mentor future doctors in hugely impactful ways.” When everybody’s connected, this can change. In addition to benefiting the med students, Aaron believes that there are clear benefits for the med school as well.  Once their students leave, they are gone – and they belong to someone else.  They lose most of the value of the relationships built with medical school faculty and classmates.  Newsletters and email are the order of the day, but are so clunky.  Social media tools, on the other hand, are easy and omnipresent.  If med schools were more active in promoting simple digital communication, it would promote a longer-term association between the school and its students, more support from alumni, as well as promoting lifelong learning.

CLINICAL CARE – The way that doctors actually deliver the best care to their patients is changing.  There are all kinds of tools that help to deliver not only the best diagnosis, but a clearer way of communicating a treatment path to different patients.  Aaron believes that the first tools to be introduced need to be mobile- or tablet-based apps – specifically point-of-care apps.  “When you’re trying to figure a person’s risk of a blood clot, they can use an app to do that.  The right app can help you to articulate not only the risk of high cholesterol in a 35 year old vs. a 65 year old, but also can help to learn new ways to make that distinction.  Using apps and other interactive media as a teaching tool changes the format in the classroom and exponentially sparks different kinds of learning.

“I’m convinced that digital health tools will play a major role in delivering healthcare in the future … and med schools can have a ‘ground zero’ role in introducing those tools into the system.”

Aaron Stupple

Imagine how hard it must be for a practicing clinician to “play around” with new tools.  In Aaron’s reckoning, it’s not that doctors don’t want to change the way they do things – it’s that they just don’t have the leeway to experiment in their daily practice.  Yet we know that a key in modern innovation is the ability to hypothesize, prototype, test, and tweak – particularly in community with others.  This has the potential to make med schools a “dream lab” for health technology companies and other innovators.  Now imagine being able to put a potentially revolutionary new device prototype into the hands of a few super-smart people to play around with and see how things might work, all under the guidance and positive criticism of teaching faculty.

“You don’t need mega-scientists at Johns Hopkins to play around with apps, devices, and blogs.  ANY medical student could potentially be an important part of the development process for new products, tools, and processes.”  And while most of us grew up believing that necessity was the mother of invention, Aaron believes (and I agree) that many of the most groundbreaking innovations – especially in healthcare – weren’t made because people were asking for them.  Aaron quotes Jared Diamond regularly – “invention is the mother of necessity.”

When I asked Aaron about the ethics of companies letting medical schools play around with their inventions, his response was a good one.  “Don’t get me wrong.  There are many issues that need to be carefully thought through.  One of them is the ownership of intellectual property when med students are performing, essentially, a co-creation role with a company [and potentially their own medical school].  Another is the associated group of ethical questions.  But when you think about it, could medical schools be a more ideal test bed?  They’re by their nature academic centers that are highly visible and dependent on a reputation of credibility and integrity.  I don’t think it will be that hard to accommodate the ethical considerations.”  Additionally, Aaron pointed out that the most likely candidates for this kind of testing aren’t going to be physiological agents like medicines, but tools to enhance diagnosis and patient behavior change.  And the risks are inherently lower there all the way around.

“No idea is 100% wrong … forget the binary decisions.  To move a discussion forward, let’s focus on what can we all reasonably agree on.”

Aaron Stupple

These are big changes that Aaron’s talking about – so big that he knows he can’t begin to tackle them all by himself.  And that’s what makes the community of physicians, medical students, and others in the health ecosystem so valuable.  When Aaron started med school, he didn’t have any digital presence beyond a personal facebook page.  But he had an instructor, Robert West (a PhD in biochemistry and another passionate advocate for the advancement of medical education), who launched an ambitious elective course called Personalized Medicine 101.  Dr. West introduced twitter as a connectivity tool in the context of promoting deeper learning.  He encouraged Aaron to get “out there” on twitter, so he gave it a shot.  Soon, Kent Bottles encouraged him to start a blog to help him express his thinking in logical ways, and MDigitalLife alumnus Bryan Vartabedian who convinced him that his writing was not only worth reading – but was worth investing his precious time in. Though Aaron admits that “I couldn’t believe that I had anything valuable to say in the beginning,” he was shocked and pleased at the response he got through both channels.  They’ve helped him to connect with hundreds of people with whom to share and learn.

“When you write about what you’re experiencing in med school, it actually forces more rigorous thinking and learning.”

Aaron’s writing has proven to be interesting enough that he’s attracted a broad audience of healthcare folks – though he feels that he’s writing to medical students and “idealistic clinicians” – the people that are interested in trying new ways to be more effective doctors.  And one of the reasons he’s so focused on that audience is that he sees lots of people “encouraging med students to get involved in social media, but there isn’t really anyone that is helping them to figure out what is appropriate and what isn’t in terms of interacting with patients online.”  For doctors in the facebook generation, this kind of interaction can take some getting used to.  Probably a lot like getting used to the fact that your decisions have the potential for life and death.

As a result, Aaron drafted a social media policy for Upstate.  While it hasn’t been implemented yet, just being able to engage the university in that kind of discussion has been pretty gratifying for him.  Because even though he’s developed a nice online following, he describes his fellow students’ reactions to his work as “bemused.”  “They mostly think it’s dumb,” he says,”I recently gave a presentation on using social media to a group of med students, and they were absolutely NOT into it.”

That’s a problem for lots of doctors today – which doesn’t surprise me.  That it’s a fact for med students as well DOES surprise me.  Aaron takes consolation in the fact that he’s got great role models like Dr. V, Dr. Bottles, and others, but he has also managed to connect to other med students who are operating in the same vacuum.  Aaron specifically mentioned two folks whom I’m following online – Michael Moore and Danielle Jones.  All three are doing brilliant work, and I’m looking forward to seeing them lead a whole new group of doctors into the future.

Be sure to connect with Aaron:

On Twitter: http://twitter.com/astupple

On his blog, Adjacent Possible Medicine: http://adjacentpossiblemed.blogspot.com/

and on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/aaron-stupple/18/558/6bb

The WCG analytics team has grown tremendously over the last three years. When I joined the team in January of 2010 we were in a small office outside of downtown and there were only a handful of us doing analytics work for clients. Now, the team brings a wealth of experience beyond social analytics. We have a strong, and diverse team now with skills in web analytics, search, and traditional market research. These new team members have come in and built on our strong footprint in social analytics.

These two days in Austin have left me super-charged to be back at a firm that places such a high value on analytics. WCG is unique because everyone has bought into the idea that analytics is at the foundation of everything we do. It’s one of the reasons I was excited to rejoin the firm back in January. Want the rest? Well, here you go…

1. Executive leadership has a deeply rooted belief in the power of analytics – Jim Weiss, Bob Pearson, Tony Esposito, Diane Weiser, Paulo Simas, Gail Cohen, Jennifer Gottlieb, Leslie Wheeler, Craig Alperowitz and a host of others at the senior leadership level believe analytics is at the foundation of everything we do. They’ve invested time and energy in helping to build analytics models that benefit clients, and also position the firm as an innovative thought leader in a very crowded space. For someone who works in analytics and had their value challenged frequently, having senior leadership approval is a comforting thing.
2. Jim Weiss and Bob Pearson – I know I mentioned Jim and Bob above, but I want to call them out separately for taking a chance on me – twice! I asked to come back to a place that I left, and they welcomed me back with open arms They have also given me a simple mission: “Help us do great work for our clients and continue to innovate.” How can you not be charged up by something like that?
3. The best analytics team in the business – As I mentioned above, the team has grown and added some incredibly strong people like Tim Marklein, Seth Duncan and Amy Jackson. If you don’t know them, you should. Keep watching for what the analytics team develops. Shock and awe doesn’t even begin to describe it.
4. Brian Reid – There are not many people in communications whose opinion on the media I trust more than Brian’s. It could be because he was a writer at the Washington Post, but more likely it is his intense curiosity to understand the evolving digital landscape. I have had some great discussions about the topic of online influence with people who you might know better than Brian, but I’ll tell you that few (if any) will make you rethink your stance on the topic more than him.
5. Everyone who has welcomed me back or believed I could make a difference when coming back – Again, it could be seen as cliché to say that it feels like I never left, but it’s true. It really feels like I never left. This group of people is literally too long to list, and I’d be afraid of leaving someone off. If I haven’t thanked you in person yet, rest assured that I will at some point soon.

So there you have it… I could literally list 60 reasons why I am happy to be back at WCG, but that would make for the longest blog post in history. It’s great being in a place where I feel like I belong. Lets keep doing great work for clients, and making some serious thought leadership waves. It is time to GO. AHEAD.

How do you think social media benefits patients online?

Type 1 diabetes is 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Social media helps fill in the gaps between the information you get from your doctor during your brief visits and the actual application of that information in your health management. The community provides the emotional support that helps you deal with the day-to-day. There is empowerment in that support.

How do people with diabetes use various online channels in different ways to find support and information?

What works for one person doesn’t work for everyone. Like each person with diabetes manages their condition differently, so do they manage their social media lives differently. The ability to choose what works for you is the best part about social media. Some people just lurk anonymously, while others share everything that is on their minds. Some people seek and provide information through blogs, but doing so requires a much bigger time commitment than Twitter, for example. Many people like watching videos because they can put a face to the information, which feels more personal. Actually seeing the other person’s face helps them to remember that other “real people” are living with this disease, as well, and there’s a lot of support found in knowing you aren’t alone.

As someone who has been in the space for a long time and is well-connected, how do you think healthcare companies interact effectively with the diabetes community?

Here are a few points healthcare companies could benefit from:

1. Develop Relationships within the Community: Developing an understanding of the online diabetes community through observation is a “good company strategy,” but it is important for companies to actually reach out to members of the community to develop actual relationships with them. Rather than simply studying community members to learn about them as patients, companies need to take an interest in patients as real people with names, lives, emotions … the whole person.
2. Be Consistent: Having the same person or people within a company consistently engaging with me allows me to begin to trust those individuals and, as a result, the company. Earning trust is important when discussing something as personal and intimate as your health.
3. Develop a Partnership: When a company builds real relationships with established and trusted members of a community, they also gain varying levels of understanding. Through these relationships, companies are better able to understand the various and daily hurdles patients negotiate every day, and increase their rapport. The more you put real people in front of the patient population, the more they may identify with what the company’s trying to say to them.

What is the one thing you think is most important to know regarding the online diabetes community?

It is really important to recognize the psychosocial aspect of diabetes. Diabetes is a unique disease in that it often comes with “a side of blame.” People often blame patients for having the disease, saying that they got diabetes because they did not take care of themselves.  Or that a high blood sugar number before breakfast is because “they did something wrong,” when so many times those numbers are the result of diabetes just being … diabetes.  Patients need to realize their self-worth isn’t defined by their numbers. They need to work toward good health but realize that having consistently high or low readings doesn’t mean they are bad people – it just means they need to try something new in efforts to reign things in. Acknowledging the emotional aspect of this disease isn’t enabling a patient to ignore their disease, or absolving them of any responsibility, but instead to empower them to keep trying and keep working towards the best health they can, despite the daily challenges of life with a chronic illness.

Sparling will be keynoting the Type1Now Conference 2012 on March 31 in Austin, Texas.

To learn more about Kerri Sparling, you can connect with her on these channels:

Blog: Six Until Me

Facebook: sixuntilme

Twitter: @sixuntilme

YouTube: sixuntilme

dLife: Kerri Morrone

But the reasons for alarmism are actually fading, and the smart money should actually be on the emergence of local papers as huge winners. The Pew report underscores some of this. To say that most local papers are woefully behind the curve in online advertising is a massive understatement. More than a decade after Google changed how we think about context-driven online advertising, most newspaper efforts are focused on banner ads and online classifieds, which make up 76 percent of digital revenue. That means there are a lot of opportunities that are as-yet unexplored.

Targeted strategies, in particular, weren’t considered by a majority of papers, and mobile might be the most under-used strategy of all. Mobile ads made up 1 percent of digital revenue. Yet there is no doubt that mobile is one of the driving forces in personal communications, and the importance of getting local information on the go is unlikely to fade as devices become more powerful and location-aware technologies become ubiquitous.

Not only have newspapers been slow to develop these new revenue channels, they’ve been loathe to invest in selling them, too: there are triple the number of traditional advertising sales reps than digital reps. And while that’s not indefensible in a world where print revenue still brings in big (if declining) bucks, it shows there is additional room to grow.

And the audience for online local news is there. A must-read first-person account in the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review from a former editor at one of AOL’s hyper-local Patch site says that the reception to his reporting was so good that he quickly exceeded his ambitious unique visitor goals, with “unique visitor” numbers that totaled more than half of his turf’s population.

All told, this suggests we’re at a critical point in the monetization of local digital news: there is an clearly audience for local content, and there are a myriad of local advertising strategies and technologies that have been both under-explored and under-sold. Yes, exploiting this reality isn’t simple and will likely take both technological know-how and money, but it’s also clear that most local papers haven’t come anywhere close to maximizing the opportunity that’s now in front of them.

For years, it has been fashionable to dismiss the local paper as a relic of a bygone, non-connected era, destroyed by the storm of modern media. But as mobile makes “local” more crucial, it’s clear that the dark cloud has a silver lining.

#MDigitalLife is a WCG program designed to learn from and to showcase physicians who are blazing new trails in the digital world – changing the way that medicine is practiced and better health is realized.  You can find previous posts here.

“The content that organizations like the AAP put out is terrific … but it’s intended for an incredibly broad public audience; most of it doesn’t really address the specific issues that my patients are facing.  I see it is as my responsibility to address that content gap.”

Natasha Burgert, MD – Pediatric Associates of Kansas City

When Natasha Burgert came out of her pediatric residency and started practicing, she found that she was facing competition from a source that she hadn’t anticipated: Google.  As a new physician, meeting new patients for the first time, she was finding that they were coming in to see her having already reached conclusions about their diagnosis and treatment without consulting her at all.

Patients independently navigating online information was causing some of Natasha’s patients to make misguided decisions, and it was not her goal to practice one-way medicine for her entire career. She really wanted to partner with her patient families. “The internet has enabled patients to become partners in care in ways that they’ve never been able to imagine before.  That’s a good thing.  The problem is that for every piece of quality health information online, there are 10 that are questionable at best.”

It didn’t take her long to start trying to take matters into her own hands.  She was already using Facebook on a personal level, and wanted to find a way to interact with her patients online, but out of the eye of the general public.  She started a private page, and began sharing relevant health content with a small group of patients.  “I didn’t just want to just hand people a treatment plan and move on,” she says, ”I wanted to work WITH my patients to create and execute a plan for long-term health.”

Natasha doesn’t ever practice medicine in social networks; that is, she’s not giving medical advice to patients.  What she does is to create, curate and share content that is meaningful for her patients generally – and then can interact with them around that content rather than on their personal situations.  When a patient needs to talk about their specific needs, the conversation comes offline immediately and into an appointment, phone call or email.

What that approach has done is manifold; first (and most important) is that it’s enabled an entirely different kind of dialog with her patients when they do come to the office.

“Investing time in relevant and complete posts actually saves me time in the long run. Questions I am repeatedly asked,  like “How do I start solid foods?“, can be answered quickly and completely by directing them to my site. This saves face-to-face clinic time for more specific concerns for their child.”

Natasha Burgert, MD – From How social media has changed my medical practice on KevinMD

According to Natasha, it also allows her to build trust with her patients much more quickly than if their first meeting was completely “cold.”  I was curious about whether that kind of patient trust came because a) She produces up-to-date, relevant,  insightful medical content; or b) Her patients start to know her as a person.

“It starts with the content – that’s the table stakes, as it were.  I need to cross the ‘quality gateway’ with my content.  Patients are really smart, and if I’m not giving them credible, usable, up-to-date content, they’re not going to be interested in going any further.  But once I have, they also start to get to know me as a human being.”

As it turns out, that kind of trust-building is particularly important in pediatrics. “Not only am I likely to be treating my patients for 18 years, there are vital decisions that have to be made in the first 3 visits – such as breastfeeding and immunizations.  If my patients don’t come in with a high level of trust, there’s a chance that they’re not going rely on me to guide them to the best choice for their family.”

In addition to her own blog and twitter account, Natasha is also the online “community manager” for her practice (13 pediatricians in 2 offices in KC – Pediatric Associates of Kansas City) – which consists of a facebook page and a twitter account.  And that leads to the other interesting outcome of her activity online – a more active practice.  “We average one new patient a week who’s come in because they’ve been reading our blog, watching our facebook page or following our twitter account.”  In this day and age of diminishing primary care, it’s impossible to overvalue the importance of new patients – especially those who are coming through an (essentially) free channel.

But it isn’t just that new patients are coming in.  They’re the kind of new patients who are a good fit for the practice – the kind of patients who are prepared to be a partner in care. Natasha told me a story about a expectant father who has a specific expertise in infant car seats.  She had just blogged about car seats within the last few weeks, as it turns out.  “He told me that of all the local sources he’d seen online, I was the only one who actually got it right.”  That’s the kind of parent that absolutely insists on his doctor having the best, most up-to-date information before he was even stepping through the office door. And that’s true for most of Natasha’s patients.

Natasha’s exams look a little different than the typical pediatrician’s visit.  All of the exam rooms in her office have a whiteboard behind the door. She keeps the boards fully stocked with hand-curated bit.ly links and QR codes – so that her patients have some great health content to keep them company in the event that they have to wait.  She also keeps her laptop or ipad with her at all times, because “prescribing” online content is incredibly important to her.  Sometimes she’ll watch a video together with her patients right in the exam room; often she’ll write down (or even text!) a URL to them so an important message can be revisited once they leave her office.

When I asked Natasha what advice she’d give to future doctors about how to prepare for the world after residency, she had an immediate answer – in part because her practice allows residents from the nearby children’s hospital to come and spend a month at a time in the office.

“My advice to residents and med students and residents is that they need to recognize that Google is going to be a constant consultant.  For conditions and treatments that are going to be common in their practice, they need to google those things regularly and get really, really familiar with the search results that are returned.  That way, they’ll understand the framework that their patients are likely to come in with.”  If physicians find consistently incorrect information that is prevalent, they can get EXTREMELY familiar with the very best content to contradict it. “I always know the specific page on the specific site that I can share with my patients to address their most pressing needs.”

When I asked Natasha about other doctors whom she likes to follow online, her voice lit up with enthusiasm.  “It’s a silly thing, really … when you leave your residency and put those two little letters behind your name, it opens up a world of possibilities to you.”  The doctors she follows have followed those possibilities in very different ways – all of them equally valuable, interesting and inspiring.

A sample from the Natasha Burgert reading list:

• Wendy Sue Swanson – @SeattleMamaDoc.  Brilliant writer, speaker and teacher.
• Claire McCarthy – @DrClaire.  Wonderful doc from Boston Children’s; terrific, honest voice.
• Mark Ryan – @RichmondDoc.  Wonderful focus on advocacy for underserved populations.
• Denise Somsac – @Dr_SOM.  Uses her own family experiences to exemplify clinical issues in an especially impactful way.
• Danielle Jones – @daniellenjones.  A med student who writes passionately and entertainingly about her experiences.

Beyond the names – from big-time celebrities to doctors and registered dietitians – it’s fascinating to see how this group illustrates the integration of online and offline influence. Taking “influence” as a measurement of their ability to drive share of conversation about nutrition, these individuals have complimented their publishing/television properties, grassroots campaigns and individual patient interaction, with strong digital engagement.

As social media, digital activation and engagement become recurring buzzwords impacting business decisions, it’s worth noting that influence does not exist solely in the vacuum of online. As we see in the list below, the ability to inspire, foster and engage in meaningful conversations is only enhanced when the online and offline worlds collide.

To learn more about these individuals driving conversation about nutrition, check out the interactive infographic on Sharecare:

#1 Andrew Weil, MD http://www.drweil.com/

• Twitter: @DrWeil
• Facebook: drweil
• YouTube: drweil

#2 Jamie Oliver http://jamieoliver.com/

• Twitter: @jamieoliver
• Facebook: jamieoliver
• YouTube: jamieoliver

#3 Nanci Hellmich http://yourlife.usatoday.com/

• Twitter: @USATODAYdiet
• Facebook: Nanci-Helmich

#4 Tara Parker-Pope, Well – New York Times

• Twitter: @taraparkerpope
• Facebook: Tara-Parker-Pope-New-York-Times

#5 Mitzi Dulan, RD http://nutritionexpert.com/blog/

• Twitter: @NutritionExpert
• Facebook: nutritionexpert
• YouTube: TheNutritionExpert

#6 Nicole German, RD http://www.diet-blog.com/

• Twitter: @ChickNik
• Facebook: NicolesNutrition

#7 Lisa Lillien http://www.hungry-girl.com/

• Twitter: @HungryGirl
• Facebook: HungryGirl
• YouTube: HungryGirlTV

#8 Rebecca Scritchfield, RD http://rebeccascritchfield.wordpress.com/

• Twitter: @ScritchfieldRD
• Facebook: Rebecca Scritchfield, Facebook

#9 Michael Pollan http://michaelpollan.com/

• Twitter: @MichaelPollan
• Facebook: Michael-Pollan

#10 William Davis, MD http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/

• Twitter: @WilliamDavisMD
• Facebook: Wheat Belly
• YouTube: WheatBelly

Disclaimer: WCG works with a number of healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, including some that may provide information, programs or treatments around nutrition. These clients have not participated in the SharecareNow 10 analysis. Sharecare is a client of WCG.