Social Networking Software for the Healthcare Industry

Sometimes my predictions about the success of some types of software goes awry. For example, I believed a couple of years ago that instant messaging might gain popularity as a rapid communication tool within the corporate world. It turned out that I was wrong about this, probably because most there is little need in the workplace for a new tool to communicate with colleagues with urgency or keep them up-to-date. Email, the telephone, and face-time are sufficient for this purpose. Nicholas Carr of RoughType recently opined about the likelihood of social networking software like Facebook taking hold within corporations (see: My (Work) Space). Below is an excerpt from his blog note:

If you scratch the surface of any business, you’ll find two very different organizations. There’s the formal organization - the one that can be represented by the boxes of an org chart. And then there’s the informal organization, the one shaped by the day-to-day interactions of employees – conversations in hallways or in airport lounges, exchanges of messages through email and voicemail, glances and whispers in meetings....Most corporate IT systems, unfortunately, are geared to the needs of the formal organization and ignore the informal one. Designed through elaborate, top-down processes, these so-called enterprise applications usually end up as rigid, cumbersome systems that are disconnected from the everyday jobs of workers. The informal organization is served, instead, by simpler, personal software programs like email, PowerPoint, and Excel. As a result, most of the really useful information that flows through a company never gets captured in corporate databases or broadly shared by employees. It ends up scattered across scores of individual hard drives....Just imagine what will happen when the informal organization suddenly becomes as visible as the formal one. I suspect that some people at the top of the org chart will be less than pleased.

Normally I agree with most of Nicholas Carr's views but here I need to part company with him about this matter and particularly with respect to the healthcare industry. I don't think that social networking software will ever take hold as a means of communication in this business sector. The reason that there will never be a Medical Facebook, in my opinion, is that most healthcare professionals don't have the time or inclination to learn yet another application or create personal pages that detail what they are up to in their professional lives.

However, Nicholas has a very good point with his reference to the formal versus the informal network in organizations and the fact that critical business and clinical information may be captured (and lost) in short-lived or inaccessible PowerPoint, Word, or Excel files. For me, the solution to this problem is obvious and I believe that help is on the way. It's only a matter of tweaking software that is already being developed and gaining in popularity. I believe that all of these PC applications will ultimately move to the web, a process initiated by Google and grudgingly imitated by Microsoft which was very happy with its monopoly. As soon as most of our spread sheets, conference presentations, and document files are available on the web, they become easily and instantly sharable and exchangeable with the colleagues or our choice.

All that will be needed to reach this goal is to develop a relatively simple and overarching application that enables us to select a circle of colleagues with whom we want to share information and indicate which files we want to share and with whom. Perhaps this new tool will be an extension of our current email system -- we will merely notify members of our close circle of work colleagues which of our files they might want to take a look at and why. All of this discussion, of course, has no relevancy for clinical information which is already captured by systems such as the LIS or EMR.