A recent article about how Toyota is setting up a private social network for its customers stimulated my thinking about how this idea might apply to hospitals and their patients (see: Toyota Owners To Get a Private Social Network). Below is an excerpt from it:
Toyota has teamed up with Salesforce.com to create Toyota Friend, a private social network for owners of Toyota cars. The network will be accessible through PCs, tablets and smartphones, giving Toyota customers the ability to connect with their dealerships, cars and Toyota itself. For example, your car could send you an alert when its battery needs recharging, and you would be able to connect to your dealership to get maintenance tips and service information. Toyota Friend will primarily be a private network for Toyota car owners, but customers will be able to connect and expand the experience through public social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. The network will be powered by enterprise social network Salesforce.com’s Chatter and Toyota’s telematics platform. The first cars to be shipped with social networking capabilities will be Toyota’s first battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid cars, which are coming next year.
The idea of alerting Toyota owners to the need for car maintenance suggested to me that hospitals could copy this idea for their patients. Imagine a hospital social network that enabled patients to perform functions such as the following: (1) make physician appointments; (2) receive alerts about upcoming appointments; (3) access family inoculation records; (3) review lab test and radiology results; (4) access health education videos and pamphlets; (5) review billing records; (6) join, and interact anonymously, in on-line chat sessions with other patients about medical problems. These latter sessions could be moderated by healthcare professionals to ensure that they don't stray off topic or provide inappropriate advice. They would also be free of drug company influences as is the case currently with many disease-oriented web sites.
In my mind, such a resource would combine the best features of personal health records (PHRs) plus many of the most popular health-related web sites (see: Developing an Electronic Medical Record Ecosystem (Network); Some Hospitals Hold Hostage the Medical Records of Their Patients; Cancer Survivor Launches Cancer Commons Web Site Focusing on Melanoma). I have been disappointed by the relative lack of popularity of PHRs although they have been deployed by the most innovative health systems like Kaiser and the Cleveland Clinic (see: Personal health record). I suspect that some of the early hospital-sponsored PHR projects could naturally evolve into private social networks. This seems to me to be logical progression given the huge success of Facebook in the last two years. Many people have now grown accustomed to the social network model for daily interaction and access to information. Applying it to health education and healthcare delivery seems to me to be a logical next step (see: Why and How Hospitals Should Market Themselves to Consumers on the Web).
::Update on 5/25/2011 @ 9:30 a.m.
(see: Musings on PHRs & Consumer Engagement)
As we have stated many times before, consumers are not terribly interested in a digital file cabinet for their records. What they are interested in is what that data can do for them, particularly on the transaction side. In the “what’s in it for me” category, consumers seek convenience in all aspects of their lives. If they are presented with a system that not only grants them access to their records, but helps them schedule appts, directly communicate with their care team via email, do Rx refill requests, etc. then you’ll see some adoption.....But even then it may not see strong adoption if clinicians are not strong advocates of its use. In deference to the first comment above from the researcher, trust does matter and patients/ consumers do trust their doctors. If the doctor encourages use, adoption will follow. Unfortunately, sites like Google Health, HealthVault and Dossia as well as a slew of other independent PHR companies are one step removed from these types of transactions and their use is not actively encouraged by clinicians, leading to anemic adoption rates. And even within healthcare organizations, there is often not strong support among clinicians for patients to use the organization’s sponsored, tethered PHR.
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