Must Reads: Digital Innovation Opportunity in Health
In an era when health is supremely social, people are more open to information and engagement opportunities. As the health paradigm continues to expand beyond “health status” and toward “ability to act”, people are looking for advances in health technology and the advent of digital and social health platforms to help them find the connections and information to conquer seemly intractable problems – losing weight, managing diabetes, quitting smoking, and the like.
The ingredients to compel behavior change will be explored with the release of the Health Barometer data in a few weeks. In the meantime, here are some must reads and perspectives about how digital tools and technology can make a difference.
- Social Networking Sites and our Lives (Pew Research)
Questions have been raised about the social impact of widespread use of social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter. Do these technologies isolate people and truncate their relationships? Or are there benefits associated with being connected to others in this way?
- China’s New Pilot Program: Using Social Media to aid Health in Western China (AsiaHealthcareBlog.com)
Gansu province is piloting a new program that would put some 2500 medical professionals on China’s various micro-blogging services… Mobile technology can also support stressed healthcare systems by making it easier for isolated regions to access public health information or by helping a small number of medical professionals follow up with a greater number of patients.
- Social Gaming to Engage Patients and Improve Wellness (KevinMD.com)
Social connectivity to engage patients has the real potential to impact health through improvements in lifestyle, the main driver of wellness. This is in increasingly shorter supply as we collectively increase pounds, cholesterol, and blood pressure readings.
- Social Media Join the Toolkit for Hunters of Disease (New York Times)
Social media — Facebook, Google, Twitter, location-based services like Foursquare and more — are changing the way epidemiologists discover and track the spread of disease. At one time these guardians of public health swooped onto the scene of an outbreak armed with diagnostic kits and a code of silence.
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