When healthcare reform became law, HR and benefits professionals I spoke with had two reactions: surprise and annoyance. Surprise, because they thought reform was dead; annoyed, because the law was full of provisions that didn’t make sense to them. But it was partly their own fault.
Blogs and other social media were buzzing with healthcare reform talk for more than a year, and were more influential than ever. But HR and benefits professionals –- experts in the topic –- were mostly on the sidelines. They didn’t shape the debate, didn’t point out when people didn’t know what they were talking about, didn’t talk about how what was proposed would affect what they did for a living.
Don’t take my word for it. A study last year on social media use by HR professionals revealed some striking results:
Only 13 percent use RSS feeds, tags and bookmarks
Only 5 percent post original content to blogs and website
Only 4 percent post ratings and reviews or comments on blogs and online forums
Reform shows there are real consequences to this failure to participate in social media. If you’re not part of the conversation, you’re marginalizing yourself, losing influence within your organization and the world.
So let this be a wake-up call: Get involved in social media. Easy to say, but how do you get started? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*
Check out this darkly humorous advertising campaign from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. How do you convince men to go to the doctor and get the preventive healthcare that’s known to save lives? You make it all about television. Men + HD TV = “Yes.” This video is funny on so many levels.
Better Health’s Dr. Val Jones recently expert-moderated TogoRun’s Digital Capital Week event entitled “Public Health: What’s Digital Got to Do With It?” featuring panelists Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Maya Linson of the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems, and Erin Enke of TogoRun. A capacity crowd in attendance at the Pew Research Center and another group following on Twitter sparked a vibrant online discussion of how health institutions are using social media and how digital innovation is improving public health:
Hospitals are using twitter and billboards to broadcast emergency department waiting room times. This is not without risk, as billboards may not clarify the triage process, where seriously-ill patients will be seen right away.
Recent articles from NEJM and JAMA articles on medical students and social media.
A lot of the developments in openness in peer review and the world of grant funding are chronicled at Nature’s Peer-to-Peer blog. Bora Zivkovic has been and active an articulate defender of open publications as well.
My good friends, Tom H Van De Belt and Lucien JLPG Engelen from the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, just published a great systematic review in the Journal of Medical Internet Research about the definitions of medicine 2.0 and health 2.0 It was time to collect all the available data about these terms. An excerpt from the abstract:
Objective: The objective was to identify unique definitions of Health 2.0/Medicine 2.0 and recurrent topics within the definitions.
Methods: A systematic literature review of electronic databases (PubMed, Scopus, CINAHL) and gray literature on the Internet using the search engines Google, Bing, and Yahoo was performed to find unique definitions of Health 2.0/Medicine 2.0.
Results: We found a total of 1937 articles, 533 in scientific databases and 1404 in the gray literature. We selected 46 unique definitions for further analysis and identified 7 main topics.
Conclusions: Health 2.0/Medicine 2.0 are still developing areas. Many articles concerning this subject were found, primarily on the Internet. However, there is still no general consensus regarding the definition of Health 2.0/Medicine 2.0.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
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