Bio Co-Founder and Chairman of Catch.com, developer of mobile applications for turning your ideas into action. Founder & former CEO of Health Hero Network (now Bosch Healthcare).
Earlier this week, my company announced Share To Win, an experiment in crowdsourcing philanthropy. It’s not the usual campaign of trying to raise money from a lot of people in small increments over a social network. We are doing it the other way around: We committed to donate $10,000, and we will allocate the money to five charitable organizations serving unmet needs in health, education and the environment. We are using social networks like Twitter and Facebook to help identify the recipients of those funds, and then we will write checks at the end of September.
As active developers and users of social media technologies, we can’t imagine how anyone with an idea that depends on the ongoing support of a community of people giving money, time and energy can survive without them. In fact, we don’t believe a cause will be sustainable for long in the modern world without a keen grasp of social media and an ability to use social networking tools to identify and recruit new supporters and to keep them engaged and informed. Social media channels are how ideas spread. Word of mouth facilitated by social media – the viral channel – is the only cost-effective channel to spread ideas.
There is a catch to social media for causes, however. You need two key ingredients for success: A story worth spreading, and a core group of people active in social media who care enough about your story to get the ball rolling. Share To Win was designed to identify and reward causes with these ingredients. (more…)
Last week, a healthcare executive asked me “What is social media”? I point out that it was a healthcare executive because many people in the $2.6 trillion US healthcare field are having intense debates right now about how to make better use of information technology and possibly how to use Web 2.0 technologies to support patients, accelerate research, and improve care. Most people in the healthcare field, however, know they are coming from behind and they are not sure where to start.
Nevertheless, I was taken aback by the question. Working one block from Twitter in the South Park area of San Francisco, I had taken it for granted that social media has become part of everyday life. When I tried to describe the idea that sharing more of yourself on the web can make life richer and more interesting, the good doctor looked at me with confusion and maybe a tinge of disgust. Sharing in healthcare is not social, and to a lot of healthcare people, “social media” sounds more like a communicable disease than a great new idea or solution.
Sharing in healthcare has always been, and probably for most of us should remain, an intensely personal and private act. It is not surprising that social media and healthcare haven’t come together, at least not under the auspices of major health care institutions. Despite some forward thinking efforts of a few pioneers like Mayo Clinic, which recently even sponsored a “Tweetcamp”, most of the use of social media in health has come from grass roots efforts as people find information and support from other people who share similar needs, experiences and circumstances.
Sharing through social media is an act of faith that the benefits of being “out there” with your ideas and content will outweigh the risks to your privacy and personal space. Millions of people have already gotten over than hurdle and have determined that social media makes life richer and more interesting. Social media is about people having a conversation online. For many, this already includes health. (more…)
This presentation accompanied a talk I gave recently to a group of health care executives at an ABL Roundtable event in San Francisco. I was asked to discuss the meaning, importance and potential application of social media in health care.
Social media is often defined as “people having a conversation online.” In contrast to mass media produced by a few, social media is generated by grass roots efforts of millions of people. It has become the largest and most interesting use of the web.
Despite the fact that health care is one of the most information intensive fields, the health care industry notoriously lags behind every other industry in its adaptation of information technology. To get our initial bearings, we decided to kick off the discussion by asking the audience to describe their own personal use of social media.
Social Media is a Conversation: Visualization of Interactions on Facebook
In The Lord of the Rings, a palantír stone was like a crystal ball. When you looked into the stone, you could see what was happening near other palantíri around the world. If you could learn to manipulate the stones, you could gain great power by using the stones not only to see the physical world, but also to peer into the history, the thoughts, and the intentions of other people around the world.
Palantír is an apt name for a new project from Facebook that might allow us for the first time to glimpse the world from Facebook’s point of view. Palantír is a visualization of the data flowing through and collected by Facebook: Conversations, comments, photos, friend requests, pokes, status updates, and more.
Biochemist Gregory Petsko gave a talk at TED forecasting how an aging population will lead to an epidemic of neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. As advancing science cures or reduces the mortality of other diseases, the last to go is the brain. More people than ever are living long enough to face cognitive decline. Is that really such bad news?
As the focus of medicine shifts to the brain, we will see new advances and discoveries in brain science. We have already learned that the brain is plastic and can continue to grow and develop even into old age—if we keep challenging ourselves to learn new things. Petsko ends his talk with what we can do about neurological disease: “use it or lose it.” An entire industry of brain fitness and brain training is emerging because baby boomers don’t want to lose their minds.
Every song ever written started with a first experimental musical note of the composer. In the same way, every essay, every letter, every book, every blog post, started with that first mental note of the author. Most of the time, our ideas and experiences float away and we forget them. Sometimes, we jot a thought down, remember it, and it leads to new experiences. Sometimes an idea, an experience, a name and phone number, or a note-to-self remembered rather than forgotten, makes the difference in the direction of our lives.
Taking notes can translate a fleeting conception in our brain into action, and that action usually involves sharing our experience or idea with someone else. As we carry more and more powerful technology around with us every moment of the day, might it be possible that we can start to translate more of our otherwise forgotten notes-to-self and fleeting experiences into shared experiences? Into the start of conversations that make our lives richer?
In 1995, Bill Gates concluded his book The Road Ahead with a prescient but disquieting idea: Carrying around mobile technology connected to networks would lead to the fully “documented life”:
“Your wallet PC will be able to keep audio, time, location, and eventually even video records of everything that happens to you. It will be able to record every word you say and every word said to you, as well as your body temperature, your blood pressure, the barometric pressure, and a variety of other data about you and your surroundings.… It will be able to track your interactions with the network—all of the commands you issue, the messages you send, the people you call or who call you.”
