Today’s on Get Social Health we’re talking about a project called My MG Sole. It's new collective art project designed specifically for people with Myasthenia Gravis, a rare autoimmune condition. The goal of the project is to help people in the MG community defy social distancing by uniting as a community online. In this time of intense social distancing, the separation of those with chronic illnesses, like MG, from their family, friends and community - who understand what they may be experiencing - can feel more like extreme social isolation. 

The project is sponsored by Argenx, (Are Gen X) a Boston based biotechnology company developing treatments for severe autoimmune diseases. With me here today are

Annalise Hammerlund, an Expressive Arts Therapist and Mental Health Counselor from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Also joining the podcast is Susan Woolner. She is the Neuroscience Patient and Caregiver Support and Community Manager for Mercy Health Hauenstein Neurosciences

For all my Digital Health listeners, I wanted to share this interview with Jen Goldsack of the DiMe Society from the "People Always, Patients Sometimes" podcast. This podcast is a production of Spencer Health Solutions (full disclosure: my day-job!). Our podcast focuses on the innovators, thought leaders and patient influencers who are demanding change now in clinical trials

The Digital Medicine Society is a group of individuals who are committed to innovating and transforming how digital apps, medical devices, software and processes can positively impact healthcare and clinical trials. Since Jen handles all my questions so well, it didn't make sense to repeat the same interview for Get Social Health.

Here is the interview and transcript from my interview with Jen Goldsack about the DiMe Society on the "People Always, Patients Sometimes" podcast.

The DiMe Society – Jen Goldsack

Health literacy is a relatively new term that is getting a lot of attention, but what does it mean? Does it have to do with reading ability or reading comprehension? Is it the responsibility of the healthcare provider or the patient? October is Health Literacy Month, so we're going to learn more about the meaning of health literacy from Lori Hall, director of global health literacy for Eli Lilly on Get Social Health.

On the start of Lori's career:
"In my career in nursing, I started out in the newborn intensive care unit. It was a wonderful opportunity to make a difference every day for patients and parents have these tiny little newborns. Although I didn't know about health literacy or health education then, I think it really had a strong presence even in the mid-eighties when I started my career. And that's been a common thread throughout the roles that I've had in healthcare. I look back at that common thread often now and recognize how I've been able to pull something from each of those experiences. That served me really well today in my role as the advisor of global health literacy."

More information:

Health Literacy - Extruded Cornstarch Emulsifier?

Health Literacy - Medical Information

Health Literacy Month

Lilly Trials - Word of the Day

Roundtable on Health Literacy

Contact Lori

LinkedIn

ePatient Dave - Part I

I'm honored to have Dave deBronkart on the podcast today. He is the original "e-Patient" and has a lot of stories and interesting projects to share with us today. As a matter of fact, so many interesting projects that we're going to break this into a two-part discussion, so join me for our conversation with e-Patient Dave on Get Social Health.

Podcast Transcript

Announcer:                      00:22                   Welcome to Get Social Health, a conversation about social media and how it's being used to help hospitals, social practices, healthcare practitioners and patients connect and engage via social media. Get Social Health, brings you conversations with professionals actively working in the field and provides real-life examples of healthcare social media in action. Here is your host, Janet Kennedy.

Janet:                                00:48                   Welcome to the Get Social Health podcast. What an honor for me to have Dave deBronkart on the show today. He and I met through the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network and have run into each other a few times at healthcare conferences. It is such an honor to have him here. He's known on the Internet as ePatient Dave. He's the author of the highly rated "Let patients help patients" engagement handbook and he's one of the world's leading advocates for patient engagement. After beating stage four kidney cancer in 2007 he became a blogger, health policy advisor and international keynote speaker. Dave, welcome to the podcast.

Dave:                                 01:25                   It's an honor to be here. That's what healthcare needs, so I'm really glad I'm quite, you do a good professional job of it.

Janet:                                01:33                   Thank you so much Dave, and I'm really thrilled to have you here. If anything, to give you an hour to sit down in a chair and just have a conversation because when I looked at your website and all your speaking engagements coming up, I was absolutely blown away with how active you are. You are talking to a lot of people these days.

Dave:                                 01:52                   Well, do you know I can't sit home and be an evangelist. You've got to carry it out into the field. And as it happens, through one of the strange quirks of the universe, when I accidentally found myself, it was actually 10 years ago this month, that I found myself on the front page of the Boston Globe because of a blog post I'd written. People started asking me to give speeches on the topic and I had learned how to do that when I worked in marketing. The last thing I ever would have expected coming out of cancer is that it would turn me into an international keynote speaker.

Janet:                                02:26                   I love that. I love that you felt that this is a mission worth all of your time, that you really wanted to commit to that. I know that we're going to gloss over your early story because I think a lot of people know who you are, but what you represent an almost more than any other patients we've spoken with is that you're a mature individual and you have a length of view that is longer than many of my guests. A lot of ePatients who are involved and engage these days tend to be in there like twenties and because they have always felt that social and digital was a way to tell their stories. You and I represent more of the boomer generation.

Dave:                                 03:07                   Uh, we're not so forthcoming.

Janet:                                03:09                   I'd love to get your perspective on this 2009 - 10 years ago when people first started you to speak as an engaged patient and an empowered patient. What's happened since 2009 to today?

Dave:                                 03:23                   Well, you know, I've just been reflecting on this because 12 years I got the diagnosis to nearly died, but God cured within a year. That was 2007 in some speeches. Now I customize every speech for the audience, depending on what they're up to. Sometimes the best message is if you live long enough, things really change. And what's important about that is people tend to achieve a certain level of seniority or accomplishment in their profession, whatever it may be. And they feel like, dude, I got this, I'm good at this. And then 10 years go by and all of a sudden what was important before isn't important anymore. And you've got youngsters nipping at your heels and you got to think it all out again. So consider in the middle of my treatment, Apple introduced a product called the iPhone. You know, and you think that the world might have changed a bit since then.

Dave:                                 04:20                   So, well, and that's a, you know, apps and everything. And this is why in my career in business, I was involved in quality improvement projects, countless meetings over the years with different companies about rethinking how we go about doing things, what are our customer's priorities and so on. So I naturally, when people started asking me to talk about how care, particularly patient engagement, I looked at it through that Lens. So what has changed in 10 years, 12 years and years since the front page article is, I've learned a lot more about what's changed in the industry as a whole. A lot of people have been trying to do patient engagement, patient empowerment, and a whole lot of people have been pushing back. But it turns out that a lot of big reason for that, you can't do patient empowerment and engagement with any sort of completeness unless the patient has access to the medical records. And there has been feeble lip service in the past because the technology didn't support it. But you know, the biggest change in what it looks like if you look out to the horizon is the technology is coming along and the culture is finally coming along 10 years later to make it possible for us to get all of our information.

Janet:                                05:50                   And that is really the foundation of helping patients knowing and participate in their health journeys, right? They have to have access to what the doctors are saying about them and what the doctors are cataloging about them, correct?

Dave:                                 06:04                   Well, in general, yes. Now, not everybody one flat. All right. Because the whole principle of patients that are care is that people are different and you can't treat everybody the same. It's, I've found it's useful to point out to people, especially if it's an audience that is in the younger parents category. Like my daughter is, I have a five-year-old granddaughter, excuse me, 5.8 years old.

Dave:                                 06:32                   Her mother is a science teacher, she is 5.8 years old. Anyway, people who are recent parents, no, you can't treat all little kids the same. Some of them wanted to take things slow and easy, somewhat excitement and so on. Some patients during my illness, the nurse practitioner over men, that's just my case said that she used to work in pediatric oncology and sometimes the patient couldn't articulate what was important to them. First of all, not everybody cares about seeing what's in their health records. My parents are polar opposites on that. My father just said let them do their job. It's my mom is just on top of everything checking to make sure they've got her allergies and medications right and everything. My point is it is perverse. Take, keep people like patient in the dark about something and then go around saying they wouldn't understand. They don't know anything about this.

Dave:                                 07:33                   You see my point? It's exactly, there's so many parallels between the ePatient movement than the women's movement. When I was a little kid, people were always making jokes on TV about women drivers. Well, women were not experienced drivers in the early 1950s generally, you know, the remedy was not to keep people in the dark. The remedy was to get them involved and make them experience. And that's my point with patient access to the medical record. It's really is unfair. It's an unfair burden to expect the providers to be on top of everything because there's so much stuff in a chart, it really is much better to let patients help.

Janet:                                08:18                   So are you saying that, and I agree with you totally, I love your analogy too. Hey, nobody's going to get to be a better driver unless they get to drive. No one is going to appreciate their health records unless they see their health records. But are you saying that this is literally just having access to the EHR, whether you choose to engage with the electronic health record or not, is the point or is there a deeper level of information you think that patients need?

Dave:                                 08:42                   That's an excellent question. I have a lot of conversations on this subject and that's a razor-sharp question. My goal is not to make people do anything a particular way. It's to help healthcare achieve its potential. I am deeply grateful to the highly skilled, trained, educated doctors, nurses, assistants, everyone who took good care of me when I was dying and in my business troubleshooting mindset. When I hear all the stories about medical errors or somebody didn't know about a side effect or just there are so many ways that the flood of information out there might not get to the point of need at the moment of need and what I want. First, we troubleshoot. We say, wow, there is too much information for anybody to know everything, so now what can we do? Some people say, well, it's the doctor's job to know everything.

Dave:                                 09:50                   Well, well, I know you and I were immersed in this, but the general public has not had this OMG moment of realization yet. It's funny if the ePatient expects the doctor to know everything, it's a recipe for mischief. The same is true if the doctor expects to be treated like they know everything, you know? And that's so this is why this is a culture change, you know, in the women's movement. Well, what it taught to change mindsets and we thought we had it solved, but oh boy seems that it's an ongoing project. What it took to change mindsets was not just changing men's minds, but women's minds. Also long ago, early in my career, I had a woman who worked for me, literally said she couldn't do something. She said I'm just a girl. Like you see, you are a level three employee, which is a high level in a technical profession. Yeah. So it is a culture change.

Janet:                                10:53                   All right, so what are the things you talk about as, as a goal or a priority on a professional side is that you really want social change and I think that's really the point that you were just making. But how do you envision social change helping healthcare and making healthcare easier for patients?

Dave:                                 11:14                   Well, you know, just this morning, a patient blogger named Aaron Gilmer, Gilmer health law is her Twitter handle, posted something magnificent. One of the best achievements, I think in patient engagement with empowerment that I've ever seen. She has, an extreme mix of psychological and trauma and medical conditions and so on. She created two documents that are now in her chart that express what heart concerns are about being taken care of, how past traumas affect various things, what they should know, what she does in order to deal with it. And here's how I express my worry if I've been triggered. And so on. The first hospitals she gave it to, they looked at it and canceled her surgery. They basically said, get outta here. And she didn't bring it up again. She has a great blog post about it. We can link to it in the show notes.

Dave:                                 12:18                   She didn't bring it up again. And then several years later, just recently she got additional care that happened to be in part of the same system. They ran across this and they said, thank you so much. And they have been using what she had expressed. They've been using those methods of talking with her and are you okay with this? And so on. See that's social change. In the old view, the doctor knows everything and those what you're supposed to get economically. This can be a major issue because in US healthcare, so much of what care providers are allowed to do is tied to reimbursement issues and there can be financial pressures. It really takes commitment as a caring profession to overcome that and in the new view, it really is important what matters to the individual patient and people are committed to care as a separate issue from the science that's being administered to the sick person.

Janet:                                13:27                   Alright Dave, I'm having an epiphany here and I don't know why this never occurred to me. Although I will say I have the benefit of being a generally healthy person. I've never really had any serious health issues and a visit to the doctor will solve my problem. So I'm very, very fortunate in that regard. However, it never occurred to me that as a patient do I even have the right to add things to my own file and why we should allow patients to submit a patient statement. That kind of sets it up, especially if you're going from physician to physician, you'd have a complicated thing. Wouldn't you rather be able to say, here's my - just what Aaron Gilmer did - here's my story, here's my whatever. So that as you get from a specialist, to specialist, to specialist, they actually read just a paragraph about who you are as a person, not who you are as a series of medical diagnoses.

Dave:                                 14:16                   Absolutely. And I imagine that in your work, I mean will you manage client relationships and your business? You need to understand what's important for them, right? You walk in, if you get on a first phone call with everyone and you just feel out the same thing you said to the last 12 people and here you go. Like it or not, I'm going to give you my off the shelf solution. Well, you don't like that. What's wrong with you? Right? You would think that the doctor knows what to do in every visit. But in today's world, you've got to ask yourself what, so what's the difference between what you do in service to your clients and what a physicians, MD, nurse practitioner - by the way, it was a nurse practitioner who first told Erin that he found that in her chart and he was so grateful for it.

Dave:                                 15:10                   That's a whole separate discussion of how nurse practitioners generally have more of a cultural license, so to speak. Figuratively speaking, to just plain be caring professionals. What are the cultural reasons why we - in healthcare - we wouldn't start with finding out what's important. I mean, my doctor, the famous doctor Danny Sands, he was the one who in 2007 when it turns out I was dying. He, was the one who you have a good patient community and he didn't say stay off the Internet. He showed me where to go on the Internet.

Janet:                                15:52                   Oh wow. He's unusual.

Dave:                                 15:52                   Well that's, that's modern. That's modern today. He wears, I just saw on my last clinical visit with him, he has a button on his wife coat that says what matters to you with a question mark, what matters to you? Because you know, you prescribed somebody, okay, you got to eat better.

Dave:                                 16:17                   You gotta do this, you've got to do that. That's all external shut up and do what I tell you. Unless it is grounded in me one thing, some form of a better life, to know that somebody really would love to live to see their grandchildren get married versus my bucket list has one big item. It's a month in Hawaii. You know? Then any recommendation for exercise or behavior change or anything. And that's, that's the point these days. We have so many options, treatment options and so on. All proper respect and appreciation to physicians who in today's economic environment, we'll take that extra time because they don't get paid any more for being that kind of a good physician.

Janet:                                17:10                   Hmm. Okay. Dave, I want to ask your perspective on something. The world I'm in where, again, as a fortunately healthy person and in my podcast, the work I do tends to be with startups, with new companies, with digital health folks, with young people who are inventing apps and it's a very exciting world. However, I know you've spoken to physicians and healthcare practitioners in the hospital environment and one of the things that I feel is happening and I'm looking to you for clarification or validation is what's up with the medical schools? Are they focusing on integrating some of these new ideas and changes or are still training physicians the same way they always did? Therefore, we're just going to have one more generation of folks who want to say do as I say,

Dave:                                 17:57                   Well, surprise, surprise. There's a spectrum. Whoever would have thought that there would be, we know social change takes generations, right? The conventional wisdom that I've heard physicians express to each other is, you don't want to be the first to do something new and you don't want to be the last, just stay in the middle of the pack. Now, surprise, surprise. That turns out to also be exactly how the curve in high tech innovation; there's to this curve where you have the early adopters, the innovators, then you have the early majority and so on, and then the laggards are the last ones to get into it. Some medical schools are primarily interested in preserving their reputation and their position. They want to do a good job of doing what's well accepted. I don't necessarily fault that. I do think it's a good way to guarantee that you will never be in leadership.

Dave:                                 19:01                   You know, you may be leadership and reputation, but you'll never be leadership and turning out of the next generation of innovative, smartest, best future doctors. Others though new medical schools that come along and the best example that I know of is the Dell medical school at the University of Texas. That has just opened recently. An example of how they're willing to conspicuously differ because there is this thing that some of us learned in high school, high school biology, the Krebs cycle, how energy gets generated. And I don't remember a thing about it. And the important thing is it's always been something that doctors have to master in order to become an MB and then they never ever use it. So why is it taught and why is it so important? Some people think it's just to be obnoxious and make it difficult to get over that hump.

Dave:                                 20:01                   Anyway, Dell medical school's conspicuously said, we're not teaching the Krebs Cycle. We've got better things to do with our time. And similarly there is a great social penalty within the medical community or going after something that is not well established with a larger body of published literature about it. So to get deeply into patient engagement today is risky in that context. People will say, where's the evidence for that? And that's good because once upon a time, you know, just within the last 50 years, it was discovered that doctors were doing a lot of things despite the that it doesn't work.

Dave:                                 20:50                   And that's a whole separate subject. My point is it takes genuine vision and leadership to see that something is the new path forward, even if the literature doesn't exist for it. And some schools are beginning to do that, but not enough. I have begun lecturing to some medical schools. Just as one final hint of that. I opened an email late 2014 and it was an invitation from the Mayo Clinic, from their chief residents to be there visiting professor in internal medicine in 2015 despite the absence of any curriculum or anything of the sort. So I went to, we talked a lot about the future of the role of the patient.

Janet:                                21:41                   Well, I love working with the team at Mayo Clinic. Now I haven't been on the clinical side, obviously I've been on the social media side, but the embracing new ideas and at least let's look at everything and what is it's potential impact is just a phenomenal philosophy that you don't turn your back on it till it's, you know, so proved, it's carved in stone. Dave, you've teamed up with probably one of the most well known medical futurists and medical device testers in the world. Dr Bertalan Mesko. What did you do with him and what is the digital health manifesto?

Dave:                                 22:16                   Well, it's an ongoing thing. You know, and it's funny because this just freaks me out. One of the things that changed, I said if you live long enough, things change. Well, one thing that's happened is I am 12 years older than I was 12 years ago. And that means for instance that my daughter who was just getting out of college when I was sick is now a mid-career science teacher. And I can't believe this, but Bersi is younger than my daughter. And so there we are having these conversations and he's showing me all his digital gadgets and we actually both spoke at a conference. A company had a, an important user group meeting in Chicago a few months ago. We both spoke one after the other and he and I both are thinking in terms of what could we be achieving and what's holding it back. And we see, especially on LinkedIn, LinkedIn is a wonderful place for making connections and so on. But you'll also see in the same way that Twitter became a sort of a festering swamp of rumors and illusions. On LinkedIn, you can see investor type people, Silicon Valley type people getting frothed up about a wrong concept and just the fact that other people are getting excited about it makes it seem like this must be the right thing. So we decided together to publish this manifesto saying, Whoa, step back you guys. Just because something is an amazing new technology. I like to think of it in terms of the Pharma concept, pharmacological concept of what's the mechanism of action by which this new gadget is going to improve anything. You know, so many silicon valley inventions, as well, meaning as they were, turn out to not make any difference or they make a difference, but they don't get commercial uptake and they die.

Dave:                                 24:26                   So we wanted to point out, here are the principles that you need to think about if you want to understand what's happening with digital health, because believe us, something real is happening. I used gadgets, for instance, to overcome prediabetes a few years ago, and everybody, I'm over 60 I'm well over 60 and a bunch of people said, look, people over 60 aren't going to ever change their behavior. It's a lost cause. Those people are ignorant. All right? So we said principals, it's a cultural transformation, not a technological revolution. All right? It's about behavior change. It's not about - see when I, when I got this prediabetes diagnosis, I went out and bought a Garmin wristband and I collected lots of data about my activity and my weight went up. Well. So here's the thing. Information enables behavior change, but it doesn't cause it. What produced weight loss for me and a victory was that I got into the YMCA's diabetes prevention program, which is a behavior change program. Okay? So it's not about having the technology. What's important about that from a business sense for a couple of years, cynics - so you have the enthusiasts on LinkedIn who are blabbing about how exciting this innovation is and then you always have the wave of cynics who come along and say, yeah, you know, where you go ahead and search, buy a Fitbit. You know what you find? You find ads for used ones that have been discarded on eBay. Those are stupid people who say that because somebody buys the Fitbit and they expect it to reverse their prediabetes stupid. And when I say stupid, I mean uninformed, right? It's okay for me. If somebody is uninformed and they admit it, which I do a lot. But if they are uninformed and they go around with their chest puffed out acting like they're smart, that's ignorant.

Janet:                                26:36                   Well I know there's been conversations about around ADHD; that ADHD with med and no behavior modification, you're better off not taking the meds at all. So you have to understand how the medication or how the issue is impacting your body and be able to take action as well as work with the med.

Dave:                                 26:57                   Well. And so now, to switch back to Erin Gilmer's perspective, because all this stuff is interrelated as everything cultural is. One of the first things I did online before the Internet was back on Compuserve. I started out being a discussion leader in desktop publishing and then I became one of the forum managers on the ADD forum back when it was called ADD. And one of the things you found there was that when the people who have the problem, and I still pitch this in speeches today for certain audiences, when the people who have the problem get the ability to express themselves and choose among options, one of the things you find is they may pursue different objectives than the therapists or being told to follow what's in the published literature, so as just one of many examples. We had one guy - and this was 1994 was when ADD was brand new - we had one guy who was a travel agent back in the days of travel agents. Did I mention that things change? And he was getting occupational therapy so he could tolerate sitting at his desk and the other patients in the community said, dude, get a job you enjoy, and he ended up becoming a UPS driver, which was a great job for our hyperactive person. Drive, drive, drive and run to the door, drive, drive, drive, run to the door at Christmas time you get bonuses for productivity. That's rethinking the issue. Anyway, my point is this really is like a seismic shift because if you shift to where you're giving the person who has the problem, permission and information and tools, what they come up with may be different than what was on offer at the hospital. That can be bad news for the hospital, but since the hospital only exists to improve health in the community, it's good for society.

Janet:                                29:13                   No, that's an excellent point, Dave, and I definitely think it's one that hospitals need to hear just because you have a perspective that this, you're going to do this program, you're going to initiate this special effort or this patient initiative. It doesn't mean that the results are expected and you have to be willing to be flexible and learn from what you're doing as well as the patient learning from it.

Dave:                                 29:39                   Well, and what I really hope, I don't want to sound like I'm rejecting doctors. That's the last thing. When I was sick, I did not reject doctors and go read up on herbal remedies. That might work. I went to the doctor, I still go to the doctor, but my doctor welcomes all of my doctors. Welcome me wanting to learn more and ask questions. That's the point. And now you want to know what's really ironic. So I have all these different apps. I have a wifi bathroom scale, I have my diet tracker or I'm counting fat grams, steps, and all of that stuff. My doctor can't see that data because there's big fancy hospital computer doesn't have an interface. So now we're in a world where all of a sudden I have access to a ton of data that he doesn't have. That is an inversion.

Janet:                                30:40                   And so we have to figure out how to get those two things married up.

Dave:                                 30:43                   Perhaps. It may be that he can do his job as well as he needs to without seeing all my data. But we were just approaching, there's a new it technology called FHIR - F H I R - which is just really maturing now after six or seven years of software development that will, for the first time, let people develop products that blend the hospital information, hospitals, plural. And my information from my devices. So there is a world coming where we can truly be partners in the same way that my tax accountant and I can both look at my Quickbooks data. Why as medicine not figured out that that's the best way. Now my tax accountant can coach me to stop doing this. See this over here? That number's too big. Why can't my doctor do that? My whole thing is helping healthcare achieve the available potential.

Janet:                                31:47                   Oh, that's excellent.

Announcer:                      31:49                   You've been listening to the Get Social Health podcast. The show notes are located @getsocialhealth.com to join our healthcare social media journey, follow @getsocialhealth on Twitter and start a conversation.

Janet:                                32:04                   I hope you enjoyed today's podcast with Dave deBronkart. We're going to be talking about some of the projects he's working on and some exciting new things happening in his life in the next episode. So make sure you tune in for part two of our conversation with e-Patient Dave.

Find Dave online:

LinkedIn profile: http://LinkedIn.com/in/ePatientDave

Twitter: @ePatientDave

Have you heard the term Patient Advocate?

How about the expression "not about me without me" in the patient space? So often over the past decades, if not hundreds and thousands of years, the patients have sometimes the least consideration when healthcare decisions have been made. Well, that's changing due to empowered patients who are using social media, online resources and the ability to connect with other people of like situations. Patients now are finding that they not only have a voice, but that voice is starting to be respected and drawn into the healthcare community.

Today on Get Social Health I'm very proud to be speaking to Lilly Stairs. She is a leading voice in the rapidly growing patient engagement field. This will be the first of a number of podcasts that I'll be covering where we'll be talking with patients or about patients and their engagement in healthcare. So join me for a discussion with Lilly Stairs on Get Social Health.

Connect with Lilly:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Follow the conversation or drop in at the timestamps below:

Janet: 00:00

Announcer: 01:07 Welcome to Get Social Health, a conversation about social media and how it's being used to help hospitals, social practices, healthcare practitioners and patients connect and engage via social media. Get Social Health brings you conversations with professionals actively working in the field and provides real-life examples of healthcare, social media in action. Here is your host, Janet Kennedy.

New Speaker: 01:33 Hey everybody, this is Janet Kennedy. Welcome to Get Social Health. On today's podcast, I am thrilled to be finally talking with Lilly Stairs. She is head of growth and partnerships at the Savvy Cooperative. We're going to hear a lot more about that in just a little bit, but first I want to set the stage. Lilly and I have known each other through social media for quite a while and one of the things that she brings to the table is the importance of including patients in the discussion online and in the work of healthcare. So whether it's the work she's doing as a speaker or the company that she's with, she really has a fascinating perspective on getting patients involved. And why is she such a strong patient advocate? Because she has battled a couple of very serious chronic health issues and I think you're going to find that really interesting to hear about. So without any further ado, welcome to the podcast. Lilly.

Lilly: 02:31 Thank you for that lovely introduction, Janet.

Janet: 02:35 You know, it's tough when you're really representing well, every part of healthcare. Which hat you put on must be kind of confusing.

Lilly: 02:42 It is. You know, I always, I do joke all the time about how I wear so many different hats and now I have to take them on and off and sometimes they wear them all at once. They've even done a post on Instagram ones where I put a bunch of different emojis on my head representing all the different hats that I wear.

Janet: 02:59 No, that actually makes perfect sense. I appreciate that you're with a company called Savvy Cooperative, and I think it's a fascinating concept. I love the idea of how it came about and I want to hear more about that. But first, why don't we set the stage? Can you tell us all a little bit more about your personal health journey and really how you got to the place you are today in some ways, patient number one, and how you were able to translate that into a life worth living and a career.

Lilly: Oh my goodness. So I never thought that I would end up in health care, to be honest with you. I didn't even know what the term biotech meant. And here I am working hand in hand with the industry, but when I was 19 I actually started having this pain in my left knee and we weren't really sure what it was.

Lilly: 03:51 I had just wrapped up my freshman year of college at Northeastern University in Boston. I absolutely loved it, couldn't wait to get back. I was home for the summer with my family and we went on vacation and I started to wake up every day and my body was achy and I was like, ah, you know, maybe it's the beds. But then I thought, Huh, well I'm in college. I could really sleep anywhere and I, I'd be fine. I ended up getting home from vacation and all of a sudden I woke up one morning and I couldn't move. I was paralyzed with pain literally throughout my entire body, unlike anything I had ever felt before. And My mother ended up having to dress me and feed me because that pain was so severe. And so I started going in and out of doctor's appointments. They were not sure what was going on. They thought potentially it could be Lyme disease or Parvovirus. Finally, we had a doctor who said, and then they told my parents at the time, first that we think Lilly has psoriatic arthritis. And I remember my parents communicated this information to me and I just stood there, speechless, devastated, heartbroken. You know you hear arthritis and you think of your grandmother who just gets arthritis in her hip or her knee. You don't think that as a young, vibrant, 19-year-old woman that you're going to receive such a life-changing diagnosis. And so I decided against the doctor's wishes at that point to go back to school. And I was waking up every morning having to take a hot shower to warm up my joints. Hours before class. I tried to find seats on public transportation and when I was sitting down, but an elderly person got on the train, people would look at me like, why isn't this young millennial getting up for this elderly woman? But little do they know that I'm probably in more pain than that, that elderly woman and so on and so forth.

Lilly: 05:42 And six months after I received that psoriatic arthritis diagnosis, I ended up in the hospital. I was in and out of the ER three times in one weekend with excruciating stomach pain. The doctors didn't believe me. They thought I was faking it, which is, unfortunately, something that happens often in our healthcare system to women. And after I was admitted, they ran a number of different tests. Over the course of a week, I lost 30 pounds, was on 90 milligrams of morphine, and the doctor said, listen, we've got one more test that we can try and if this doesn't show anything we don't know what's going on. And so I, I took this pill that actually took pictures as it moved through my body every three seconds. And it was at that point that they discovered I had bleeding ulcers in my small intestine and they diagnosed me with Crohn's disease.

Lilly: 06:31 And so within the course of six months, I had received two life-changing diagnoses that I would live with forever. I remember pulling up my computer and while I was sitting in the hospital bed and I started typing in Crohn's disease and psoriatic arthritis and what comes up, but the term autoimmune diseases, turns out there are 50 million Americans who are living with autoimmune diseases for point of reference. That's about twice as many as people with cancer. I just remember her being so angry because I had never heard the term autoimmune disease before, but here I was living with two of them and there are 50 million Americans who are in during this unbearable pain and suffering that I've been through and I was just so angry and knew I had to make a change. So I like to say that my truest self was really unearthed in the hospital bed and it was at that point that I decided I'm going to do something about this.

Lilly: 07:22 I'm going to raise awareness for people battling autoimmune diseases. I'm going to help find new treatments. And so I ended up going through over the next couple of years, went through a number of different treatments because it's as an autoimmune disease patient, it's really hard to find one that works. I am very fortunate to say that I've been in medically controlled remission for five years now thanks to the amazing work of the biotech and pharmaceutical just strain. And that led me into my transition into healthcare. I basically was diagnosed at 19 so that was around when I was starting to do ops at an internship and jumped right into healthcare, started working at mass bio, the Trade Association for Biotech and Pharma companies and learned about patient advocacy as a career track when I joined them. And from that moment on, knew that I had to, had to be in patient advocacy. And so that was my transition into the space.

Janet: 08:14 What a fascinating story. Now, these two issues are not related, right? It was just horrible luck that they both happened to you.

Lilly: 08:23 So they actually are related. They're both considered autoimmune diseases and it's, I, I have a friend who says autoimmune diseases are like chips. You can't have just one. And that is the case for many. It's that you'll feel, and there's over a hundred different autoimmune diseases. So lupus, MS, Psoriasis, those are all considered autoimmune diseases and many people who get one often end up getting a second or a third as well.

Janet: 08:49 Oh, well there's something I've learned today. So you've already done your job for the day. Excellent.

Lilly: 08:56 Raising awareness. That's my big goal in life.

Janet: 08:59 When you serve as a patient advocate for a company, what does that really mean?

Lilly: 09:03 Yeah, it's an interesting question. It means something different depending on the company. I think there's an important distinction because there are some companies who truly embody this patient-centric mindset and I really hate the word patient-centric and I think a lot of people do in the industry but its sort of what we're stuck with. If you don't say your patient-centric then people think you're a bad company. It means that you are the person within the company who is championing the patient voice. You are working across teams to ensure that the patient voice is being infused into the work that you're doing and you are fighting at the table. You ideally at a company, you're in a leadership position as a patient advocacy person and you are fighting to ensure that business decisions that are made are what's in the best interest of patients. And so that's really the primary role of somebody who sits in a patient advocacy position. But there are also doing a number of other things. They're managing relationships with the patient advocacy organizations and patient communities and they are helping develop disease education awareness materials to educate on the different medication medicines that they might be developing or supporting, helping offer grants to different advocacy organizations. So there's a lot of different ways that a patient advocacy function within the industry.

Janet: 10:31 So when you were working with Clara Health, you are working with a company that was trying to match up Pharma and clinical trial participants, is that right?

Lilly: 10:41 Yes. It was a multi-sided marketplace there. We were working to, or we are working because I am still a lead patient advisor with them and love the work that Claire is doing, but we're working to connect patients directly with clinical trials and making it easy for patients to connect, which means we're helping them search for the clinical trials. We hold their hand through the process, we call the clinical trial sites on their behalf. We coordinate their travel handle, all of those administrative burdens that a patient would typically be tasked with. And then on the other side, we work with companies to help them recruit for their clinical trials and retain patients. It's in their clinical trials and we take a very patient-centric approach through that because we actually work with patient advocates to help companies think about what their clinical trial protocol looks like and actually help support like have live patients to help support other patients through the process.

Janet: 11:38 All right, and then tell me about making the transition over to Savvy Cooperative. How did that come about?

Lilly: 11:44 It was an incredible opportunity. I've admired Jen and Ronnie who are the co-founders for quite a while now. Jen and Ronnie are notable patient advocates in the space. Ronnie is a cystic fibrosis advocate who developed the largest online community for cystic fibrosis patients and Jen is a juvenile idiopathic arthritis patient. And she has spent her life really dedicated to patient advocacy. She works with the FDA. She got her Ph.D. in human factors research so that she could really bring her perspective and to industry. What they've created is something so special that I am really honored to be a part of because it is a patient-owned cooperative. As these advocates, they were constantly being asked by companies to give their perspective, but what they realized was that yes, we love giving our perspective and it's great that they're asking us, but you know what? We can't offer a diverse perspective. There should be more patients who are giving their perspective and just because there may be not public about their disease on social media, they're a little harder to find, but that doesn't mean that companies shouldn't be actively trying to reach out and get those diverse perspectives. And so that's why Jen and Ronnie founded Savvy Cooperative, and they made the decision to make it a cooperative model, which means that patients actually own shares in the company and share in our profits at the end of the year because they believe that the business model should benefit the patient and patient should be fairly and equitably compensated for the work that they do. And so I couldn't have imagined more of a perfect fit for me as somebody who, you know, my priority is to ensure that we are infusing the patient voice across every aspect of the industry, from Pharma to startups to health insurance. We want to make sure that that patient voice is incorporated early and often. And that's ultimately Savvy's goal. So I, I'm living the dream, getting to work with all of these different companies and, and learning about all of them, all of the incredible work that these companies are innovating on and being able to bring patient experts into to give feedback on that and so that they can iterate and make a product that truly fits an unmet need.

Janet: 14:06 Oh man, that's fascinating. And sometimes I think a lot of people don't realize or I don't know, maybe we should realize that patients traditionally really don't have a lot of money. And yet these companies, Pharma companies, in particular, they're going to be making millions and billions of dollars through selling all the way through to the patient. Yes, via a provider, a physician, a nurse practitioner. But ultimately it's coming out of the patient's pocket in some way. And yet they've had very little economic say and how these businesses and medications have been developed.

Lilly: 14:40 Absolutely. And I mean, and it's, it's crazy to me because in every other industry we consult the end user. If you look at consumer-facing products, they're constantly running focus groups. And I actually wrote a piece on this called challenging healthcare to engage in a Pepsi Challenge. The idea for this story came from a book I was reading called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. And in it, there's this whole section on Pepsi and Coca Cola. And he talks about how they were really had to have, I mean they still go head to head, but how they were trying to figure out what they could do to get consumers to buy more of their product. And so coke even went to such lengths that they ended up altering their secret formula based on feedback from consumers. They have this really secret formula that they are used for years and they altered it to try to sell our product.

Lilly: 15:40 And as I was reading it, and this was right around when I started at Savvy, just thought, oh my God, if we could get health care to engage patients. For the way that consumer-facing industries engage patient, engage their customers. We would be golden. I mean health care would actually be innovating in making things that matter to patients because right now part of the problem is so much money is being wasted on products that patients don't want or that aren't the right fit or that don't even end up being successful. And so not only is it really d quote unquote right thing to do when you engage patients, it's actually a really smart business decision that helps save money and earn more money because your end user is happy. They want the product.

Janet: 16:38 You know, I've been involved in the startup community for a while and a lot of Startup Weekends are about young people coming in with an idea and I'll give them credit. They're thinking through challenges that people unlike themselves or having predominantly their grandparents, for instance, their Nana or their grandfather, and they've got this really cool idea that they may be figured out at Thanksgiving, I could solve this problem. The problem is I wonder if they've actually researched it and talked with not just their grandparent, other people in the industry. So how exciting it is that they seem to be getting startup funds and get support for an idea that really hasn't drawn in the patient's perspective and that generationally it hasn't really been vetted out by a true need.

Lilly: 17:25 Yeah. And you bring up such a great point because the young tech entrepreneurs are, while they mean well and I think that some of them are doing it right. Okay. They are doing their research to actually really yeah, boots on the ground and talk to the patients who this matters too. And I had the opportunity now to work with a number of different companies who have made the decision to talk to patients and are actively working with them and it makes a major difference in the development of the products in a way that it's iterated on. I mean, I have to give the hats off and a shout out to Clara Health for bringing me on as their patient advocate as one of the first hires. That's really unheard of at most small health tech companies and but, but that made a big difference because I was able to come in and share my perspective and then say, Hey, you know what?

Lilly: 18:20 I'm going to give you this perspective, but we need to bring in a lot more other patient perspectives. If we want to actually develop a product that's going to meet a diverse set of needs because one patient, much like in a consumer-facing industry, you can't talk to one person and build an entire product off of that. That's crazy. People would not do that. It would not be allowed. And in the consumer-facing industry, you would not get to move forward with that product. It just wouldn't be an option. How tap? Because it has not been and in healthcare in general, because it has not been the status quo to talk to the patients. Nobody's doing it and you're not expected to. And VC firms aren't forcing these companies to talk to patients because again, it's just not what's expected. And I think that it's resulting in a lot of products that are not making it to market or are startups that are failing.

Janet: 19:12 And you know, there's a limited supply of cash out there and every time we see something fail, that limits the pool of cash for other maybe more on focus ideas that have maybe a little bit deeper research or a better validation. I love that everybody's trying to solve problems and I'm sure that that was a good thing they were trying to do, but really how many diabetes apps do we really need? I think it would be very cool, you know if we could figure out how to get the patients involved in doing this kind of development.

Lilly: 19:43 Yeah, I mean certainly. And so really our plea at Savvy is that you get out there and, and you talk to patients and we've also made a real effort to be startup friendly. I think another big part of the problem here is that it can often feel cost restrictive to some of these small startups to be able to say, hey, we need to allocate the money to go talk to patients. And so what we've done is we've created a pricing model that does accommodate some of these smaller startups that they still have the ability to talk to patients but not break the bank because we understand that every dollar really counts when you're at that stage. And so I really encourage companies, help small tech companies to spend the money. It will be worth it. I know every dollar counts, but it's so critical that you spend that money there.

Speaker 1: 20:32 You know, one of the things you mentioned is that diversity in your community is really important, but when I think about the number of conditions and disease states out there, holy cow, your community could end up being millions and millions of patients.

Lilly: 20:48 Absolutely, and what's interesting about our co-op model is that we already have a very large reach. So because our patients are owners, many of them are owners and our platform rights, they own a share and again, they share in our profits at the end of the year. This means that let you know if we're recruiting for a company that really wants to talk to a thousand patients, a thousand patients in Crohn's disease, let's take Crohn's disease because that's what I have and it's an easy one to go to. And let's say we have 500 Crohn's disease patients on our platform. We could reach out to those 500 patients and they'd all find us enough to get us to that 1000 and sent the company and they would all do that because they're all highly motivated in Savvy success because when we are successful, they're successful. And so it's a really, really unique model unlike anything else that exists. And so we're able, we have this really special reach into private Facebook communities and support groups and boots on the ground because our members are, are the conduit. There are salespeople of Savvy, of spreading the good word about patient feedback and bringing their fellow patients into the fold.

Janet: 22:05 Okay. So what I'm imagining is that there are a lot of groups that patients may be involved with, ones that are, say specifically about their disease state or condition where they're talking to patients. So that's not really what you're trying to do out there, but they can on your behalf, recruit more people with like conditions into your projects.

Lilly: 22:28 Exactly. And that's how we get a more diverse range of folks on our platform as well. Because not every patient works with an advocacy group or shares their story on Twitter or regularly it goes out to companies. So that's sort of the low hanging fruit if you will, or the patients who are easily accessible. But there are a lot of patients who, you know, maybe live in the middle of the country and the way that they're expressing their patient journey or they're learning more about being a patient is through a local support group. And so we're able to reach those patients because we have folks on our platform who are connected everywhere, which is really, really special. And just unlike anything I've ever seen working in this industry.

Janet: 23:18 You know, and that's a really big issue for hospital systems. I know for instance, in the state of North Carolina, we've had some rural hospitals close, well those patients still live in the rural parts of North Carolina where those hospitals formerly were, and they're losing all kinds of resources, not the least of which is the ability to connect to other like-minded patients. So as we look at critical clinical trials, mostly taking place in major cities or even midsize cities, there are a lot of patients that are falling through the cracks, are not getting to participate because of this limited geographic viewpoint.

Lilly: 23:55 Right. On the money. I don't even have anything to add to that because that's exactly what we're always talking about.

Janet: 24:02 Excellent. And I'm glad we're on the same page. So tell me about the kinds of things that as patients they can get involved with. And I'm assuming that of course, this is all going to be Phi protected health information, or are they participating in anonymously? Are there times when they would actually block their identities from being known?

Lilly: 24:22 Yeah. So it all depends on the gig. So when we call them gigs, because what we like to say is we've created a gig economy for patients. So patients can log onto our platform and they can see different opportunities that are open to them and they can raise their hand if they feel there are fit. So some of them involve maybe an anonymous survey where you provide your feedback online via a survey. Some could be sharing your story via a blog post with a company, um, in which case you would be talking more publicly about your story. There are gates that allow you to stay in anonymous, but there are also games that allow you to get out there and share your story. And, and I think we certainly have a mix of patients on our platforms, some who really want to be out there and some who still want to contribute but want to do so in an anonymous way. So there are options really for everyone.

Janet: 25:09 Oh, well that's excellent. And I think you're gonna find that you probably have already found that there are patients who are just tired of being in the dark and they're learning to embrace, you know, where they're coming from. And of course, we get to the question of stigma and while they might be ready in their own groups to come out and talk to other health professionals that don't necessarily always translate to their own neighborhoods or even inside their own home, you know, talking about their conditions with friends and family.

Lilly: 25:38 Certainly. Yeah. And, and that's something that we're very sensitive to because we know that unfortunately there is still a stigma for patients within their kind of everyday communities and in the workplace. And some people would like to keep that private. But it is my hope that we can continue pushing to raise awareness, especially about some of these invisible illnesses where people, you know, in your workplace, they may not fully understand and you might not feel comfortable sharing with them that you living with an invisible illness. But I want it to become more commonplace, that that's what people are doing so that we can raise more awareness and people can understand that, you know, if you're living with an autoimmune disease, when you'd say you're tired, you can't come into work because you're tired. That's not a normal tire that's on a tired, that healthy person feels, that is crippling fatigue that forces you to be in bed all day. You just, you barely even feel like you can take a shower because you're so tired. And so I think that we need to actually keep pushing. And I do encourage people when they comfortable to share their stories, wherever they can with their workplace, with their family, with their friends, and with their communities to help raise that level of awareness that we can have better support services in place where people living with invisible illnesses or autoimmune diseases.

Janet: 27:03 Oh, that's excellent. Probably have already found that there are patients who are just tired of being in the dark and they're learning to embrace, you know, where they're coming from. And of course they, we get to the question of stigma. And while they might be ready in their own groups to come out and talk to other health professionals that doesn't necessarily always translate to their own neighborhoods or even inside their own home. You know, talking about their conditions with friends and family.

Lilly: 27:30 Certainly in it is, and you know, we'll get there. It's taken time. But if you look at cancer, cancer, something, something like the American Cancer Society, that advocacy group has been around for, I think it's over a hundred years and anybody says, you know, so and so, and my family was diagnosed with cancer. There's really this automatic empathy that strikes I think between a peep. People get it, they understand how difficult that is and if you were to communicate that at the workplace, it would be understood, oh, this so and so needs to take time off because they have to care for their family member who has cancer. We lack that same sense of empathy when we're talking about invisible illnesses, autoimmune diseases, mental health issues are another big one. And I believe the only way that we can really push forward in that is by people coming out and sharing their experiences and telling their story.

Lilly: 28:29 Whether it be at companies or just at your, in your local community center is at Church, at a place of worship at the local YMCAs. It needs to be happening everywhere. It really is a grassroots movement. It's amazing what all of these patient influencers have done and the movements and changes they are helping make in shifts in mindset. But a lot of work can be done on a grassroots level as well. And so it's my hope that you know, we can continue to inspire patients to, to get out and feel comfortable to share their experiences and their stories.

Janet: 29:02 Now you just got back from a conference that was very patient-focused, didn't you?

Lilly: 29:07 Yes, I was at a Patients as Partners in Philadelphia and it was my first time there. I spoke with a number of folks who said, oh my gosh, you're going to love this conference. It's one of my favorites. And what's really special about it is that on almost every panel they have patient representatives who speak on behalf of patients and advocates alongside industry professionals. And that's really unique because typically at a conference you'll see a handful of panels, maybe sometimes no panels that include the patient voice. And so this is really unique in that the patient really is present throughout the entire conference. I think it makes a massive difference in the strength of the content, the value of the contents. And I only wish that we could scale it up to see this happening at more conferences, not just patient-focused ones, but really across the board and in every nook and cranny of industry.

Janet: 30:09 I really challenge every single health conference, not just to make a place for patients to actively engage, but to fund their presence through scholarships because let's face it, so many patients are facing huge financial burdens. Therefore, it isn't just a question of time and even money and the hotel, it's like money for food or for care for their families at home while they're away at a conference. I'd love to see more of this happening.

Lilly: 30:39 Yeah, Janet, you couldn't be more right. And, and that is something that patients face. It's like, okay, now we have a seat at the table, but what about the fact that we have to take off work to go to this conference? You know, maybe not all of us work in the industry and, and so for us to have to leave work and take time off, and find childcare, daycare and who's going to go check on elderly parents? There's just so many factors that we need to think about. And then this kind of goes back to the clinical trials as well. This idea that we need to be designing experiences around the patient's life. We can't expect patients to just plug into what we want them to plug into. That's not fair. That's not right. So I do, I challenge people to really think about how we can design around the patient instead of, you know, trying to get them to just plug into what we've already developed.

Janet: 31:37 You know, you mentioned to me earlier about the administrative burden that gets put onto a patient file or in a specialty Pharma situation. Can you describe that a little bit more?

Lilly: 31:47 I'll talk about it a little bit from a, from a personal point of view and something that I've been experiencing over the past couple of months and really have been quite infuriated with the burden that I has been placed on me when it comes to dealing with insurance and some of the specialty medications that I need to be on. And I'll preface this by saying I'm in medically controlled permission. So I function remarkably day to day, kind of like an average person, which is again, remarkable and, and all the credit in the world to this industry that has developed these, these life-changing medications. But there are a lot of patients who are dealing with administrative burdens on top of being incredibly sick and being so sick that, you know, as I was talking about that they can barely take shower without feeling exhausted. So keep that in mind.

Lilly: 32:42 Is that, as I kind of talked through all this frustration, there are a lot of people who are dealing it with, with it while they're actively sick. And I just can't imagine that. So lack of specialty medication is something I need every two months and it costs $20,000 every two months. So it's a hefty price tag. I am very fortunate that I'd have an insurance that covers it. But for years now I have had major issues with ordering and delivering this specialty drug. I spend all of this time coordinating hours with my physician who needs to write the prior authorization, which goes to the specialty pharmacy and my insurance. And then it gets, you know, most recently I was told, oh it's, it's approved, it's approved. Okay, excellent. It's approved. Great. I get a letter in the mail saying it's approved. I called to schedule the delivery. Oh No, it's not approved. I'm not sure why. I said, well, I have a handwritten letter from, from you that says this, this medication has been approved. So, oh no, I don't know what's happened with our system. That's, that's not the case. So then it's up, got to go back to my physician who my physician then has to call the specialty pharmacy and then I call the specialty pharmacy again to check in and you get the picture. I mean this is this, it's a constant frustration and this is one time and so finally we get it all set up. The delivery is supposed to happen. We get to the day, I stay in my apartment all day. I do not leave my apartment, I do not take a shower. I did not do anything because I don't want to miss the ups truck that delivers my medication.

Lilly: 34:21 And so it's 3:00 PM and I receive a notification on my phone that the medication has been delivered. And I say, well that's interesting because I'm supposed to sign for the medication and I had no bell ring. And then I pop outside. I'm like, Oh, they left this $20,000 medication outside. Somebody is in trouble, but the medication isn't even there. So now I'm left, you know, in a frenzy trying to call ups to try to figure out what's going on. I am. Nobody's being helpful. I kept, I keep getting kicked out to an international helpline. And so I go to Twitter and I started tweeting about it and I, the patient community totally rallied around me and it ends up that I get the phone number, the direct line to the San Francisco office. Then you need to speak to again on the phone with them.

Lilly: 35:08 They tell me that it was delivered to the restaurant next door. Oh my gosh. So my $20,000 medication is sitting in a restaurant next door that I was supposed to sign for. So I first opened my door, run downstairs to the restaurant and they have it miraculously and they put it in refrigeration because it says perishable on it, but at, so I get the medication. But it was only because the only reason I got my medication that day was because I am on Twitter actively and how to following within the patient community. If I was kind of, you know, an everyday person who didn't really, you know, have the wherewithal to like navigate all this and put it on Twitter. And I mean, I don't think I would have had my medication. And that is upsetting to me because Twitter shouldn't be a privilege to get your medication.

Lilly: 36:03 And so that's just one example. I've got a million more examples of, of instances like this that happened. And I know that this is, this is the struggle of countless patients who are on some of these specialty medications that they deal with. And so there is a massive administrative burden being placed on the patient to be coordinating appointments, to be coordinating medication, to be calling insurance and fighting insurance bills. And I, I mean, I feel like I spent half my life on the phone fighting with insurance about charges. So this is just the reality that patients are living with. And I, and, and I don't think this administrative burden is fair and I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done in that space and I'm eager to see more people come into disrupted. I'm, I'm encouraged by some of the insurance companies that I've seen coming into the space like Oscar health. They're a startup insurance company and I'm actually a member of theirs right now and I've been really impressed by air communicative nature and how easy they make everything and the on-boarding and so I'm really thrilled to see some innovation happening in this space and I hope we can continue to move the needle because it's a big issue.

Janet: 37:18 You've raised so many good ideas here for startups and to inform them about issues being faced by patients, but I do want to clarify one thing. The Savvy Cooperative is not a place for patients to come and share stories with each other. Right? It's not a support forum. It's about getting the patients from a business perspective, engaged with the health care companies, the Pharma companies, people who need to better understand what the patients are going through. They need to reach those folks, which sometimes is very difficult to do. Is that right?

Lilly: 37:50 Yeah, that's a great point. And I'm glad you brought that up. And, and the reason that Savvy isn't necessarily a place where patients can talk and share their stories is that there are already so many people out there who are doing that. A lot of advocacy organizations have offered that platform and we see a number of different people who have taken the initiative on that. But we really haven't seen people coming in and, and giving patients an opportunity to monetize and to really actively get connected to companies and, and transform the space. And so I, that being said, I think that Savvy really is a wonderful community of patients and a community has sort grown organically if you will be, all the patients who have been involved. And we do share the stories of some of our members, but it's not really a place for that pure peer support. It's more of a place for, hey, how can, how can I share my experiences too and get paid for doing so.

Janet: 38:54 Okay. Awesome. Now you do, I know, embrace social media and I know that you have a Savvy chat on Sundays. What's that all about?

Lilly: 39:02 Yeah, so Savvy chat is where we actually chat with folks for really like across the industry, which we chat with patient advocates as well, but we chat with people who are doing really cool things in the patient experience and patient innovation and patient feedback space. So we try to bring that to light so that we can spread the good word and share ideas so that we can start to see this movement happening across the industry.

Janet: 39:33 Oh, that's exciting. All right folks, now you know where to go to get involved and let's direct people how to find them.

Lilly: 39:39 Yes, so if you go to Savvy.co op, that is really all you need. You can go right there and our social media is there. We're on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and YouTube. But you can sign up very easily. You can create a profile. You also don't even have to sign up to see the gigs. You can go in just as we, because we want it to be accessible to everyone. So if you don't want to sign up, you don't have to, you can just sign up for the gigs that you're interested in. But of course we do hope you sign up and we do hope you become a cone or it costs $34 it's a one time fee to become a co-owner. And we do have financial aid available for those who are unable to afford the $34. So again, it's a very accessible platform and we're looking to bring diverse perspectives. And so patients, caregivers, healthy participants, all are welcome.

Janet: 40:34 Oh well that's awesome. I hadn't thought about healthy people.

Lilly: 40:37 Yes, well they're important to write for sewer and it's, and it's interesting because you know, at some point, unfortunately in our lives, most of us or all of us will become patients. And so getting actively involved in research, we certainly have a number of people on our platform who maybe are healthy participants because they've seen loved ones who have been through something and they all still want to be able to give back.

Janet: 41:00 Okay, great. Well, I'm thrilled to have finally had the chance to talk with you, Lilly. And I am sure to put all of your LinkedIn and social links in the show notes for this podcast so people can find out more about the Savvy Cooperative and folks. Of course, it's Get Social Health.com if you happen to be listening on a podcast APP, you can come on over to the website and get all of this information.

Lilly: 41:22 Well, thank you so much for having me, Janet. I love the work that you guys are doing. You've brought together, you really created such a vibrant community of health care professionals and I am honored to be a part of it and look forward to continued collaboration.

Janet: 41:39 Thank you, Lilly.

Announcer: 41:41 You've been listening to the Get Social Health podcast. This show notes are located at getsocialhealth.com to join our healthcare social media journey. Follow at, Get Social Health on Twitter and start a conversation.

A healthcare website is a critical element in patient communications even before they become a patient. Setting up and maintaining an active website is not easy and requires specialized skills. On the Get Social Health podcast, Janet Kennedy interviews Ajay Prasad of GMR Webteam and the work they do create and optimizing healthcare websites.

Listen to the podcast or drop in on the timestamps below: 

Janet:                                00:00                   Five years ago or so, you used to be able to build a website and expect that patients would come. Well nowadays "if you build it. They will come" only works for baseball fields, built in obscure corn fields in the Midwest. Now you need a real digital online expert as part of your ongoing web presence and I've got one for you today. Joining me on the podcast is Ajay Prasad with GMR Webteam and we're going to talk about those other things you need to do besides have a great website on Get Social Health.

Announcer:                      00:40                   Welcome to Get Social Health, a conversation about social media and how it's being used to help hospitals, social practices, healthcare practitioners and patients connect and engage via social media. Get Social Health, brings you conversations with professionals actively working in the field and provides real life examples of healthcare, social media in action. Here is your host, Janet Kennedy.

Janet:                                01:07                   What are the important things about being accessible to patients is to be, I found online and that isn't as easy as some might think. It's not as simple as putting up a website and the patients will come. With me today is Ajay Prasad. He's got his own company, GMR Webteam, and they're doing some really interesting things with online presence for a wide variety of health care practices. So I wanted to drill down a little bit and invite him on to Get Social Health so I could ask a lot of the dumb questions that honestly I still need to ask and I'm sure as healthcare practitioners you might need to ask. Ajay, welcome to the podcast.

Ajay:                                  01:48                   Thanks, Janet for having me. And I'm excited.

Janet:                                01:52                   This is a very interesting subject to me because I am involved in a part of this equation, but not the whole equation. And what I mean by that is my partner, Carol Bush and I have a company called the Healthcare Marketing Network and we source freelance healthcare writers, many of whom are clinicians for companies like yours. But in many cases, good content is just one part of a good online presence. So I wanted to talk to you today since your company focuses on healthcare and learn a little bit more about what is unique about that and what is unique about having a presence as a healthcare practice. But before we jump in, I think people need to know a little bit about you. So tell me a little bit about your company. I know you didn't start exclusively in health care, so tell us a little bit of the journey of GMR.

Ajay:                                  02:42                   Sure. Before I even started my company, I had a very extensive experience in marketing in general and the last couple of years in the Internet marketing, which was a very new thing. I started GMR Webteam in 2004 so we'll be celebrating our 15th anniversary in a couple of months. When I started, Actually you'll be surprised, very few people even had website. So we started then and, and my goal always was to help businesses really get the most out of Internet, which was like a mystery in those days for them. Now everything has gone to internet, so it's no longer a new thing. That's where I started. My personal background has been in, you know, doing marketing in several industries. So I did not start with, with any kind of specific focus on healthcare. I was doing marketing for all kinds of businesses and I had several businesses, but over a period of time, we started to realize that in the healthcare area and whether it is medical practices or urgent care center or dental practices, smaller surgery centers, generally speaking, they will understand the least of it, you know, digital marketing.

Ajay:                                  04:01                   And they were the ones who really needed it, but they did not realize that they needed it. They don't have the expertise. As you know, you won't run into many medical practices who have like a marketing manager. So we started to, I started to realize that we're becoming like a marketing department. Think offered as far all our healthcare client. So the gradually we just moved away and we stopped taking any other client. We just totally focused on healthcare because we started to also see that the healthcare marketing was fairly different from, you know, not conceptually, but on a day to day basis. You know what is important was so different that by focusing on just the health care practices industry, we could become more efficient. So that's when, so gradually we moved away or always even among my first clients were healthcare providers, but now we just totally focused on healthcare.

Janet:                                05:00                   I have a couple of questions based on what you just said, so we're already starting off with, you know, it is a mystery and yes, I think in 2004 there were a number of practices, if not the majority of them, didn't even have a website. I've also heard that there are still healthcare practices without a website. Many, many healthcare practices without a website, which really baffles me. But I think the part of the reason is, the older practices, all the partners don't understand because they are not active online so they don't get it. But as they start to get younger partners that's the first thing that it seems like the younger partners want is a website. Because guess what, the younger population, they are on the net a lot, so then they know the value.

Janet:                                05:54                   Absolutely. The other interesting thing is while those providers themselves may not be utilizing online, what are the fastest growing groups in Facebook and online is the 65 plus, because guess what? They hit Medicare and now they really need to understand what's going on.

Ajay:                                  06:11                   Exactly. Right. You are so right. It used to be that Internet presence are, the market was only for the younger people, but now the biggest growth is in the older segment and really I an internet, they're realizing it's not a big mystery one Google, you type a question and you'll get the answer.

Janet:                                06:31                   Okay. But I think that mystery is how Google makes that look so simple, but there is so much happening underneath. You know the old adage about a duck on a pond and they look like they're just swimming along nice and smooth but underneath their feet are going a mile a minute. And that's how I feel the Internet is to me. There's a whole lot going on under there. I don't understand.

Ajay:                                  06:54                   That's exactly right. When you go on Google and let's make it relevant for the audience and and say you are in, I live in Irvine, California. So if I go on Google and just, and if I'm looking for a say a primary care physician for example or ophthalmologists and if I type up their model is in Irvine, yes, you'll find a lot of you know, you will see the list of ophthalmologists, right? But how they appear in what sequence, you know, first thing I can tell you that not all ophthalmologists will will show up and the ones who show up, you know, why someone is showing up on top ranked number one versus of why someone is showing up on page two, page three? There is a, there is a very, I would say well defined logic behind all that. So just like you said, you don't see how fast, you know what is happening on the under the water.

Ajay:                                  07:48                   See I behind the scenes there a lot of activities that is being done and that's why you see someone show up number one. And, and just to let you know on Google and the value of it, if you are number one... suppose there are a hundred searches for ophthalmologists in Irvine. I'm just throwing a number and if you will show up on number one 35 people, we'll we'll go to our website. Click. Generally this is, I'm giving you a very broad, Google start. If you are number two then you will have 15 people. If you are number three then you'll have 10 people who are searching for will, will show up and beyond that now you're looking at a handful, four or five people. That's it. So it's makes a big difference where you are ranked in terms of what kind of results that you will get. And how you're ranked is, you know why you should be on number one versus number 10 or number 30 on Google listing. That is a mystery that needs to be solved and that's what we solve.

Janet:                                08:49                   Right? Well, you've heard the expression "Where's the best place to bury a body?" On page two of Google!

Ajay:                                  08:55                   Exactly.

Janet:                                08:58                   Okay, so can you buy your new way to number one? Can I just buy an ad and be number one?

Ajay:                                  09:04                   So you know, the answer is yes, that you can buy an ad on number one. But here's a challenge. So if you don't have a very good web presence, then you will have to pay a fortune. And it's still, you may not be number one because we will now, even if you're paying Google money, they have a very strict requirement that you have to meet in order to, to show up number one on, on the advertising, but then your bigger challenge, all of it also is that about 65% of the viewers of the people who are surfing would skip ads because they don't trust advertising. Right? So they will skip all the ads and they will go straight into the what they call organic ranking. So you can do it unless you are, and by the way, or in some instances you could, you may say, I will pay $500 for each click and still you may not get to number one. So, so that is again, there's a, it used to be very simple. By the way, when I started this business, we would pay the highest would show up. Number one is no longer true. Now even when, if you are advertising,

Janet:                                10:14                   All right, well we know that how Google ranks is something that companies have founded complete businesses on just following Google and trying to figure out day to day what they're doing. So you now have a dozens of healthcare clients who need to know that kind of information. I don't think this is potentially manageable in any way, shape or form by a practice. Even with an in house marketing department, which as you mentioned, a scant few even have.

Ajay:                                  10:46                   Yes, you, you are very correct because in order for you to get ranked, there are unique to have expertise in five, six different areas. You need to do to be an expert in social media. You need to be an expert on, on website design. You know, in terms of speed and loading and all that you. You need to have a lot of content and that content needs to be marketed. So, there are five different level of expertise because even in social media, if you are an expert on Facebook, that doesn't mean that you can also do a Twitter, right? Or you can do LinkedIn, but you need to be doing all of the above in order for yourself to be ranked Google. So what, what happens that the best that a practice can do is if they have a marketing manager.

Ajay:                                  11:42                   Generally speaking, marketing managers will work with an agency like ours because we have experts on our payroll on all those areas. So yes, you know, we will have five people working on one project, which we have typically we have five, six people working on one project, but they are not working full time. So even if you have all the money in the world and you say, okay I'll build the team. Yeah, wasting money because on the all these small pieces you don't need full time employee. So most of my small practices we spend like you know, 50 60 hours a month. So you're going to imagine it's not like a lot of work. And that also in, we have like four or five different kinds of people doing. So one of the reasons why we are far more efficient is we have experts working on it.

Ajay:                                  12:33                   So it's not like every time we are trying to figure out what to do. And so that's what is needed for a website to be ranked higher. And it just does not make sense even for very large companies. We have medical providers that with the revenue in billions of dollars who are still using our services because they realize it doesn't make sense. I mean they say ton of money by using us and the, you know, they have a vice president of marketing who works with us.

Janet:                                13:09                   Even the vice president of marketing doesn't want to have to learn about, and you know, every day the changes that are happening in SEO and keyword research that Google makes. Hire the experts.

Ajay:                                  13:22                   Yeah, it wouldn't make sense. You know, we have people whose focus is to stay on top because part of the problem with the online marketing really is say Google, it's a moving target. What is most effective today may become like a negative tomorrow we will just changes algorithm. And all of a sudden you said, oh, what happened? So you have to be to totally stay on top of what is happening on the Google world. And by the way, Google does not announce it, right? So it's not like Google is saying, hey guys, we are making these changes. We will gives you a very broad outline and then there's a lot of trial and error that goes in now because we have 65 plus clients. So we, we tend to pick up very quickly on what happened if suddenly Google Changed Algorithm, we can just based on which of our accounts got affected, helps us sort of, you know, figured out what happened and then we can make adjustment and generally speaking it in or it is okay very quickly. But yes, in order, this is a big challenge.

New Speaker:                  14:31                   I understand the update last August was particularly devastating for healthcare. A number of practices and health care organizations have said that the Google uptake just really kind of wiped out a lot of their response rates and a lot of their ability to do well in search.

Ajay:                                  14:49                   So again, so one of the things that Google did is some of the practices that were, you know, very common in I would say up and up, some do three years back, Google decided that they are not going to, so first they said, okay, we are not going to give you credit for these activities, right? Certain activities. And then all of a sudden they said, okay, now you get like a penalized if you, if you are doing this. So if you did something three years back and what we do is the moment Google announces that, you know, you don't get credit for that, we start removing those items okay.

Ajay:                                  15:29                   From our, our activities just to see number one, do they mean what they are saying? and if they are we cleaning it so that we know that it will always come in and analyze it. So, and the one of the things that we will did last year, by the way, which also impacted a lot of practices, so they started giving a lot of weight-age. So they always were giving weight-age on is your website mobile friendly? Right. Because majority of the searches now are happening is happening on mobile. But then they said, okay, now we are also going to give weight-age on how fast your website comes up on mobile. Okay. And that's an entirely different challenge. And it was one thing to create the website that will be that will adjust automatically on the smart phone versus on the desktop. But the challenge of, of now doing that website so that it loads on mobile very quickly is it was so daunting.

Ajay:                                  16:26                   I mean, just to give you an idea, we had to literally Redo the website of many of our clients and we had to basically create two different websites. One for mobile, one for desktop, you know, order to two. Again, comply with Google requirements. And by doing that we moved up very quickly because the ones who did not do it, you get paralyzed. So, so that's where that is part of the problem where you have to stay totally on top of what is the latest requirement and make sure that you comply. If you don't, then you get dropped.

Janet:                                17:02                   That sounds so overwhelming. And I would be so happy to outsource all of that.

Ajay:                                  17:08                   Yeah. I mean it, it, it's almost like, you know, if I'm, if I get sick, I'm not going to go on, on web MD and, and, and do my treatment. Right. You know, I'm just going to go to a doctor, you know, who can, who has the experience. So I don't care how much research I do on Web MD, I will never be able to come up with what exactly it is. We know with confidence. So, so yeah, I would, I may want to get informed, but it's still, I want to get treated by a doctor. So I encouraged, by the way, I really love my clients who are up on what is happening on the internet because unfortunately most of my clients, it's like a mystery to them and they don't want to learn. I mean they are like, you know, I already have too much work or taking care of my patients so I'm, I'm, you know, it's your headache. But the, some of the young doctors who stay on top, I find it really easy to work with because they understand anything I say.

Ajay:                                  18:11                   It's like, Geez, you know, I, that's what I read. You know, what are you going to do? It's a whole different discussion versus saying, so Google has changed and we have to do this. And the doctor is saying, I don't know. You know why we have it

Janet:                                18:26                   "It looks fine to me!" Well do you find that dealing with different practices based on their patients? So let's take two extremes. You've got your orthodontist where the majority of the patients are, you know, teenagers or sell and then maybe a podiatrist where the majority of patients are mature adults. Do you find that the work you do for those two different types of practice is very different? Or are you still going through the same process to make sure they're online presence is good.

Ajay:                                  19:01                   Okay. So first thing, you know, just like in traditional marketing, you have to tailor your message right to the target audience, you know? And so, so, you know, what is your target audience? What will pick their interest, why they would follow something, why they would read something. So of course the messaging has to be a very specific to the potential client or the of all the patients of our clients otherwise over-arching process is same for for Google. But then then by the way, one of the things that Google also rate you on is how many people when they go to your website and suppose someone goes to a website and just clicks back. It is a demerit and Google will rank you down because they are saying, hey, you know your looks like your website is not relevant for this keyword. Right? So, so the messaging on the website is become very important and the way you engage with the messages, you have to make sure that, that your message is tailored to the, to the target audience.

Janet:                                20:06                   All right, so I think what you're talking about there is the bounce rate. Someone comes to the website, they click on there and go, oh, that's not what I'm looking for, how quickly that happens.

Ajay:                                  20:15                   And, and if that happens a lot, then then you'll see yourself dropping and dropping and dropping. And the worst part is that the more you drop, then the more your bounce rate becomes, because now you're getting like, you know, the people who are, I don't know, they're browsing so they click and go. So, it's almost like a death spiral when you start to see or bouncer to increase. So that's where the whole messaging, you know, a call to action, all those things come to make sure that you are engaging your you know, patient or the prospective patient will come to the website.

Janet:                                20:53                   I would assume that when you get a new client, that's probably one of the first things you look at. How relevant is your website to a current audience?

Ajay:                                  21:01                   Exactly. So, so, you know, the good news is that, the, we have a lot of, unlike like when I used to be in TV advertising, that's where I started my career. Unlike dark, everything is very transparent on digital. So when we get the nose, sometimes we will get a client and they have not even the website is not done properly. So we cannot even read, you know, the information. But if everything is done right, install, on the website, you would know from analytics exactly what is happening. And so the first thing, first we do is we analyze that, the their data and then we pinpoint where the problems are, and then we will from there is, it is the part of the initial discussion, we always ask things like why someone would come to you. I mean, in what you do is very obvious, but, but why you, why not the other orthodontist or why not the other primary care physician who is in your insurance list?

Ajay:                                  22:00                   Right. So I mean, you know, it's it just dead. I just recently was meeting with the wood with a prospective client who said, "I don't know why I need marketing because all my patients come from the insurance list." So my question simply was "In your area, are you the only doctor in the insurance list?" He said, "No, no, no, there are about 15 so." I said, "Okay, so if I am a new prospective patient, I moved in that area and I buy this insurance. I'm given that there are 15 doctors, why should I come to you versus the other 14?" And he said, "Okay, I, I see where you're coming from." As you can imagine. It is so personal. It is so critical that the patients will be for the selected doctor, they do a lot of due diligence and then you have to stand out among whoever you are competing with.

Janet:                                23:03                   Now what I think is interesting about what you do at GMR is that you really partner with your clients and you hold them accountable for their practice. You can't, in essence, you're telling them, I can't buy you a number one position. All is you're going to commit to being that practice. I think that's really fascinating. Exactly. So, so, you know, we first thing,

Ajay:                                  23:27                   You know, one of just, just sort of, you know, one of the, the goals that we have in our mission is, is we want to increase the market share of patient-centric, providers. That's what we always say. So, so when we, when someone to us and says, you know what, just give me a CEO and I'm like, you know what, even if I do that, you're not going to get a new patient, even if I can get you on number one, which is very difficult unless someone is taking a holistic approach anyway. But our big thing is that we cannot do magic unless you really care about your patients. Unless your patient is happy with your services. We cannot go in any magic. So, so that to me is the requirement. So when, when someone comes to us, we said, I'm assuming that you are, you want to take care of your patient.

Ajay:                                  24:20                   And so one of the things that we do, just sweat, you know, is part of, as we, we start measuring patient satisfaction, we will not take a practice who says, I don't need to measure my patient satisfaction. Because then I'm like, you know what, I don't know where your problem is going to be. I don't, I will never know much about your practice. So you are better off going to another company who does not. Because to me that's a central piece is we look at patient satisfaction, you know, that tells us where they have to make an improvement. what is their strong point that helps us with the marketing message, right? You know, what people like about you. We help them identify the weaknesses and get around the weaknesses. How, how, what, what you handle. So that is the starting point. We just say, listen, unless you are taking care of the patient, really, you know, we can't help.

Ajay:                                  25:13                   And that's one of the reasons that it's unfortunate. But what I'm noticing that, so I am in California, there's something called medic cal here, which I don't know if it's some some state program, right? If you don't have any insurance, then the state will I guess buy you insurance. But they don't pay a lot to the providers. And as a result, many good providers don't take that as a result. The ones who take it, they're overwhelmed and they will blindly tell you that. You know what, frankly speaking, I don't care. I, you know, these people come in of what I want is I need more like a more patient with good insurance. And I'm like, unfortunately it just doesn't work like that. If you say, oh, half of the patient can go to hell, I don't care. But other half I've, I want to be very to make them very happy.

Ajay:                                  26:04                   I'm like, just the whole philosophy doesn't work. And, and actually just because someone is on whatever Medi-Cal, that doesn't mean that they expect like a sub sub optimal performance right. From the healthcare provider. So I tell them, I totally, I am not into the business of making a decision for you. So if someone says, I don't take medical, that is great if someone says medical grade. But I, we always said that. Here's the process and the, and the number one is you have to have a patient satisfaction measurement and you have to have a very high patient satisfaction index, otherwise it doesn't work.

Janet:                                26:43                   So you actually have that as part of your services?

Ajay:                                  26:46                   Is it is a not only that as part of the sort of mandatory.

Janet:                                26:51                   And how does that work? Is it like a a survey that's sent out post visit?

Ajay:                                  26:55                   Yes. We have created our own platform and personal, we do a survey, post visit. We asked them a simple question, would you recommend this medical office physician, whatever it is, is what we are. We are surveying based on your experience today, right? And on the scale of zero to 10, and then then be whatever is the answer. We, we asked them, let us know your reason for rating the doctor or the clinic seven or zero one or whatever. so so what happens is we are constantly tracking and we get about 40% of the patients generally will respond to our survey, 30 to 40% depending on the specialization. So which is a very good sample size. And then we do that analysis, not only we see what's your average and everything. We analyze the comments and we use artificial intelligence to analyze the comment so the practice knows exactly what is their strong point.

Ajay:                                  28:03                   So we will analyze comments of unhappy patients. We just lay it out right in front of the clients and say, "Guys, you need to address this thing. This is your strong suit." And then our marketing will focus on those strong suits in our messaging in terms of why you should be coming to this provider.

Janet:                                28:26                   Excellent. Now I understand that the way you work is you just don't build a website. You are looking for someone who really is committed to the long term marketing.

Ajay:                                  28:37                   Exactly right. Because for me it is a distraction to just build a website. I don't care how much money someone is paying, so we just do a website and not do anything.

Ajay:                                  28:57                   When I first started my career, I worked for a market research company. And what we are doing is all these companies will have the issue, then we'll do research and we'll come up with this beautiful deep analysis, send it to them and we would never know what happened. And I got bored literally, and in eight months I said, you know what? I want to be on the other side. I can do something with this and, and show results. That's how I feel about just doing a website. It's like, okay, I just did a website. Who cares? Yeah. Right. and, and I would like to know that what we are doing is really helping our clients. So unless I'm able to measure and see that the plant is getting along, I'm not interested.

Janet:                                29:44                   Oh, that's absolutely fascinating. Well, I love the work you're doing and, and I really love what we talked around but didn't use the term that you developed the three pillars of health care, marketing success. I think that's critical for, for anyone and the fact that you actually tell your prospective clients that they have to commit to that I think is really, really amazing. And it speaks to your partnership with your practices.

Ajay:                                  30:10                   Yeah, I mean a killer on my website we just laid out also it's like are we a good fit? So you know, someone who is wondering whether they should be working with GMR. Of course, you know, we always explain it, someone calls, but they can go and check the website on the side. We just laid out what we do. The three pillars are, patient satisfaction, you have to have a very good patient satisfaction. Do you have to have a stellar online reputation and the new, you have to have a very robust web presence. So those are the three pillars that I talk about.

Janet:                                30:52                   It sounds like it's working for your clients and their patients. That's a great thing. I think you're doing a a wonderful job at GMR.

Ajay:                                  31:00                   Thank you.

Janet:                                31:00                   Awesome. Well Ajay, I really appreciate your being here. I do find search and SEO to be a mystery and I am always trying to ask questions to understand more about how that process works. And I know you've written a couple of books including "local search marketing secrets unveiled and plant your online biz money tree. So the fact that you've been able to kind of put some of these ideas in writing is super helpful and I congratulate you on, on the great work you're doing at GMR.

Ajay:                                  31:32                   Yeah, thank you. Last week I wrote four or five pages for my blog that says, for your prospective patient to become aware about you and what do you have to do to convert them into your actual patient. I find marketing really fascinating for the same reason that it's never perfected. It's never ending work that you have to do and it always keeps you challenged.

Janet:                                32:34                   Absolutely. Well, thank you for bringing me up to date. For at least the next five days.

Ajay:                                  32:41                   Thank you, Janet. I'm always here when any update happens. You know what? I will also make sure that when something big happens I will just let you know so that you can just share with your audience.

Janet:                                32:57                   Absolutely. Well, if you just tag your tweets with at Get Social Health, I'd be sure to pass it on. Folks who are listening, I will help all of Ajay's contact information in the show notes for this podcast. Ajay, thank you very much for joining me today.

Ajay:                                  33:11                   Thank you Janet. It was good talking to you.

Announcer:                      33:15                   And now here's a social media success tip.

Janet:                                33:19                   Hi, this is Janet Kennedy with the Get Social Health podcast. Wait, you just heard me, but you know what? Today I'm going to give my own social media tip and this is specifically for those of you who are or would like to be a writer in the healthcare space. I am so proud to announce that my partner's Carol Bush and Janine Kalbach have launched their own podcast! No arm twisting was involved at all. Well, okay, maybe a little. So what I want you to do is go check out their new podcast. It's called The Savvy Scribe and it is going to be a whole combination of things. Great interviews, fun conversations. Buckle in and go on for a great ride with them. Plus they're going to give you lots of tips and little mini sessions of quick wins. So it's gotta be a fun podcast. It's going to go all over the area of everything to do with writing, freelance writing, the freelance writing life, what it's like to be a parent and right and also some good hardcore writing tips. So check it out on iTunes. The Savvy Scribe and you can always find it on our website, the Healthcare Marketing Network.com. Click over to the blog. That's where we're going to mix the podcast and the blog posts in together. So check it out. The Savvy Scribe

Announcer:                      34:40                   You've been listening to the Get Social Health podcast. The show notes are located at getsocialhealth.com. To join our healthcare social media journey, follow @GetSocialHealth on Twitter. And start a conversation.

Seth Rotberg found out as a 15-year old that his mom had a rare neurological genetic disease known as Huntington's disease. Five years later, he tested positive for the disease. Today I'm talking with Seth about secrets, strengths and recognizing the power of community on Get Social Health.

Connect with Seth at the links below:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Website
• TEDx Natick

Interview Transcript

Janet:                                00:01                   Seth Rotberg found out as a 15-year old that his mom had a rare neurological genetic disease known as Huntington's disease. Five years later, he tested positive for the disease. Today I'm talking with Seth about secrets, strengths and recognizing the power of community on Get Social Health.

Announcer:                      00:21                   Welcome to Get Social Health, a conversation about social media and how it's being used to help hospitals, social practices, healthcare practitioners and patients connect and engage via social media. Get Social Health, brings you conversations with professionals actively working in the field and provides real-life examples of healthcare, social media in action. Here is your host, Janet Kennedy.

Janet:                                00:48                   Welcome to Get Social Health. My name is Janet Kennedy and I'm the host of the podcast in case you didn't know. Today I have a special guest on who is going to share a very personal story of his own health journey, and how he is using that experience and his situation to make the journey for a lot of other people. Seth Rotberg is a rare disease advocate and a motivational speaker and he's got a really amazing story to tell, so I'm happy to have him join me on the podcast today, Seth. Good morning.

Seth:                                  01:20                   Good Morning Janet. How's everything going?

Janet:                                01:23                   Well, as we spoke before, I'm getting over a little bit of a cold, so I'm going to sound a little funky to my usual listeners today. But it's a beautiful day in North Carolina where we have eight inches of snow. Also a rare situation.

Seth:                                  01:38                   Yeah. Well, I can't complain myself. Being up north in DC, you know, it's nice and warm here. I think 30 degrees?

Janet:                                01:51                   You are in Washington DC now, but you are a Massachusetts boy. We were talking about both sox and teams up in the Boston area. So tell me a little bit about where you grew up.

Seth:                                  02:09                   Well, first off, I do have to say it's exciting to grow up with a lot of gray Boston sports, especially with the Red Sox winning the world series this past year. I grew up about 30 minutes west of Boston in a town called Natick and I'll just jump right into it.

Seth:                                  02:27                   My mom had this rare neurological and genetic disease not as Huntington's disease is also known as HD. Similar to having ALS, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's all into one disease, slowly deteriorating a person's physical and cognitive abilities and unfortunately currently there's no cure. I found out my mom had this when I was 15 years old when she was officially diagnosed. However, prior to that she was like most people misdiagnosed for about seven years, was a long time to for someone to be told that they have depression or bipolar disorder and then find out it's even worse than that, which is a disease without a cure. Growing up it was very difficult, especially as a young person, which is kind of where we'll talk about later. The work I'm doing today focusing on providing resources and support for young people impacted by rare chronic condition, more importantly in the Huntington's disease space. And then we can talk later about my professional career trying to connect patients and caregivers. Don't one another anonymously in the health space.

Janet:                                03:37                   Well this is something that is also a hereditary disease?

Seth:                                  03:43                   Yes. You mentioned hereditary and when I first learned about it, and I'm going to take everyone back to biology class where you do those Punnett squares. Do you remember that at all, Janet? Like the Punnett squares, we have the match like the upper case and lower case like the dominant and recessive.

Janet:                                03:59                   Are we going to talk about peas in a minute?

Seth:                                  04:02                   Yeah, we might. I mean my thought was with a disease they say, well if your Dad's dominant recessive. And so when I did it, it was like, , I'm in the clear I'm all set, but that's not how a lot of these rare diseases work, especially Huntington's where I'm at a 50/50 chance of inheriting it. It's a simple flip of a coin and it's tough to really look at that and say, well where's my future going to end up? Am I going to end up just like my mom or am I going to end up props testing negative and having survivor's guilt, and that's when I ultimately decided at the age of 20 to test for Huntington's disease where I found out I tested positive. I'm a gene carrier and one day know that I'm going to end up just like my mom just slowly deteriorating both physically and mentally and not much I can do at the time.

Janet:                                05:00                   So is it a given? If you have the gene, that's it.

Seth:                                  05:05                   That's it. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, that's how it is. And what's unique about Huntington's disease is that they can test it, they know where it is, but it's such a unique gene that you would think that they'd be like, here's how we cure it, but of course like any rare disease is a lot tougher than just saying, hey, we're going to pull it out or do something like gene therapy or DNA silencing and hope for the best. But at the end of the day, Janet, it's a 100 percent. Given that within maybe 15 or so years I'm going to start developing symptoms and there it is.

Janet:                                05:47                   You were a very young man when you were brave enough to get tested. But I understand you also didn't share that information with very many people.

Seth:                                  05:57                   Yeah. That's something I wish I did and I think the challenge was knowing that my mom was still alive and didn't want to put more on her plate. I didn't want her to suffer even more than she was. My Dad being a caregiver, not wanting to worry him, put an additional load onto him. And then having an older sister, I felt like she may feel the pressure to also get tested. So I actually only told a few friends and over time felt a little bit more comfortable telling more and more friends. But telling my family was very tough and it, it was challenging because I value family a lot and I, I was trying to do what's best for them and not having them worry about me, which again, it's, it's a difficult point because it's your family and you want, you want to be open with them, but at the same time you're like, , well how much do I share with them and how comfortable am I going to feel afterwards?

Janet:                                07:02                   And that's kind of where I was at at the age of 20. And it actually took about three years. I really thought it took about two years when I had to like trace it back. And I'm like, wow. Actually took about three years until I told my Dad and my sister and then told my family. And I did this TED-X talk earlier this year in January. And it was like what I mentioned, there's coming out of this like genetic diseases closet where I was open about it and I just felt like I didn't have to hide that big secret. Have you ever been ever had that like big secret or like a secret that you're like, you just can't share with anyone or are you just not sure how people are going to react?

Janet:                                07:38                   Well and it's also the fear that that gets built out of proportion about how people are gonna react. You spend so much time thinking about how they're going to react that sometimes it's nowhere near as bad as you imagined.

Seth:                                  07:51                   No, absolutely. And that was it. I, I figured if I was to tell them, my Dad first off might try to talk me out of it and saying, "Oh why do you want to get tested so early?" And I knew this is something I wanted to do because similar to my Mom, I would maybe drop my phone or forget a conversation or something that my friend just told me and I would think, "is this Huntington's or is this just me being a 19, 20-year-old college student who just happens to do this?" And so it was just mentally draining that I didn't want to live with the unknown. I like to plan ahead. I'm definitely one of those planners. So I wanted to know what my future held. And again, like you said, Janet, it's something that, I didn't know how people react, but I also emphasize the importance of making this decision on your own because it is a very personal decision.

Janet:                                08:49                   I can't imagine what it must have been like, not to tell. I'm sort of known as not being able to keep a secret in my family that I feel like people ought to know things. So I cannot imagine keeping a secret for two to three years about something like this. But what I'm really curious about is. So you actually have identified that you have a life-terminating disease, an illness that has no cure. Are you talking to medical professionals? Are you talking to other people who have the condition? Who do you confide in because that sounds like a really big burden for your dorm mate too.

Seth:                                  09:25                   It definitely is and for me again, I was very fortunate to have some good friends who were very supportive and if-if I go back in time I definitely would have told my family from the beginning because the importance of having that support system and making sure it had the right resources because I didn't go through genetic counseling, which again, I always emphasize when I do other talks about the importance of it because they make the process more manageable a lot easier. Nothing is going to be easy, but if you can make it somewhat easier, more comfortable, it does go a long way in the long run.

Janet:                                10:04                   Can you explain what exactly is genetic counseling? Because hey, you got what you got. So what does that really mean?

Seth:                                  10:11                   So also I'm going to open. I hope I do a good job explaining what genetic counseling is, but it's somewhat new compared at least to a lot of the main specialists, but it's done by a genetic counselor, someone who focuses on helping someone who has to figure out whether or not they should go through testing what their options were. Talking about family planning, talking about maybe life insurance or health care. So a lot of things, that we really, especially the young person, don't really say. I don't know. I never thought about, oh, should I get life insurance or long term disability care or family planning options. I originally just thought, well I can either have a kid or adopt. And then I learned later learned about IVF with PGD, which is a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which tests the eggs and makes sure that they're free of any genetic conditions.

Seth:                                  11:16                   And then I also found out about the whole idea of like sperm donation. So, what's funny Janet, is I was doing this talk to genetic counselors and I mentioned the whole option of sperm donation that I found out from speaking with a genetic counselor and it got me thinking right away. I was like, well which of my friends are going to be willing to donate their sperm or do I go after one of our famous Boston sports, Tom Brady or Gronk or David Ortiz or someone like that and just say, hey guys, I know you don't know me but I need a favor.

Janet:                                11:58                   Well, that's unusual and I'm not sure if there is a professional athlete for sperm donation organization, but maybe you should be the one that starts it.

Seth:                                  12:09                   Yeah. I'm not sure how they would feel about it, to be honest, but I was just more of like the idea of knowing if there's any alternatives, what are the options? And honestly just counseling you to make sure that you have the right resources and support. So when I say support, I'm not just saying family, but also friends, maybe it's professional support such as a therapist, like high trust. And then with the resources, making sure you have the right educational content to social and emotional resources. Maybe it's some type of program or service you're involved with. Maybe it's connecting to a local nonprofit. These are a lot of things that I wish medical professionals did more of, which is simply saying, like here's your results, but here are some great organizations that you should reach out to for more help or here's, you know, I'm going to follow up with you in six months just to check in.

Seth:                                  13:00                   These are like little things that I think go a long way because you know, when I, when I learned about it, I was a little lost. I didn't know what those next steps were at first. But as soon as I met some other people in the Huntington's disease space, I was like, I want to get more involved. I want to do more. And I used my results as motivation to fight back, to not give up hope. And that's kind of led me to my journey of where I've been doing all these talks. Especially this past year I've. I've lost track of how many different talks I've done, but I would say at least a dozen talks this past year.

Janet:                                13:35                   How did you connect with people in the HD space?

Seth:                                  13:39                   The first time I connected with someone it was because I ran my own throne through basketball charity event called hoops for Huntington's with one of my good friends and we would look into figuring out where the money's going to go and I got connected to a staff member for the Huntington's Disease Society of America and a national nonprofit focusing on HD and then from there I just started connecting with other people, but one of my friends, she told me about this national convention and how there's other young people and they had space and that kind of opened my eyes and say, oh wow. I'm not alone in this fight. I'm not the only young person who has to deal with the everyday challenges, but more importantly, I was always connected to older adults who had different needs than a younger person where an older adult adult may already have his career, his or her career, their family, a house where I have to figure out all of those things, plus how to cope with it in addition to like romantic relationships, personal family and friends, relationships, things like that where it was a lot easier to relate to someone around my age who understood what I was going through.

Janet:                                14:55                   And now, you're a part of a more formal organization at the Huntington's disease organization.

Seth:                                  15:02                   Yeah. So I now sit on the board for the Huntington's disease youth organization. What the young people call "HD Yo". Our mission is to support young people impacted by Huntington's disease worldwide. So we put on camps all over the world. We've done at camp in Europe. We'd done a camp in North America. We'd done a camp in Australia - New Zealand. But when, when I say youth, I mean more young people, so young adults. It could be up to the age of 35 years old and ultimately we, the organization was started because we saw that there was this missing piece where they're young people weren't getting the attention or the support they needed and we wanted to bridge that gap. We wanted to fill that missing piece, so not only do we provide camp, but we actually provide educational content on our website in 14 different languages. I was like, wow, that's, that's amazing where we can not just do it in English and Spanish and Italian, but now you know, potentially I think Chinese, a Dutch and German.

Seth:                                  16:09                   I think in Russian it's just like all these different languages and then on top of that we also have a director of youth services actually in the DC area, but she's our Director of Youth Services in the US where she helps young people make sure they get the right support and resources and connect them to the right doctors and specialists and I think that's just amazing work that I never had growing up. I didn't have HD YO. I didn't have any of these educational content that I wish I had and said, I just googled, you know, what is Huntington's disease? And I think that's what everyone does when they learn about a new condition is they google it and then they see all these big words and they get intimidated and then they either try to learn more or they say, "wow, this is too much."

Seth:                                  16:52                   I can't do this. And that's kind of where I was at his as. Especially as a 15 year old,15-year-old, , this is too much. I don't want to deal with this. I want to just enjoy my childhood. Which I essentially lost out on the whole idea of being normal, which is a whole. Just is not even a thing these days is the whole idea of being normal and it was definitely challenging. And, and so what my goal is, especially being a board member for HD YO, is honestly being that, having the opportunity to share my story, to inspire others, but also to connect people, young people to the right resources. So connecting them to the services we provide are making sure I can make sure I can connect them with another young person in their area or just making sure they know that they're not alone in their fight against HD.

Janet:                                17:46                   I am wondering a little bit about the actual manifestation of the disease. So you obviously knew very clearly that you had the potential for having it because of your mother, but is that how most of these other young people are finding out that they are also carrying the gene for HD through family members or his symptoms? Wouldn't symptoms appear in as young as the teens or twenties?

Seth:                                  18:15                   It really depends, Janet. I think their's is even a more rare form of Huntington's disease, which is the juvenile version. So how it works is everyone has actually everyone has like a Huntington gene, but there's the, what we call it, the CAG repeats your, your CAG repeats and when there's a mutation, that's when the Huntington gene can expand and then that's when you actually have the disease itself. So usually the normal gene per se is anything under, I want to say 26. It always, I feel like it varies every time I talk to someone knew about it, but usually about, I think I would say under 26, 27 is normal. And then there's this gray area. The gray area is a little confusing because it's like, I think it's, I want to say like 28 to 35, but like a section of that means that you have a 25 percent chance of showing symptoms later in life were another part is like, oh, you might still have a chance of showing symptoms, but more importantly this gray area is saying, you tested negative.

Seth:                                  19:26                   There's a small chance that you might show symptoms like in your sixties or seventies, but like very little. But the thing is if you're in this gray area, your kids can still be at risk and I think that's a thing that's not addressed enough. Going through testing, it's either , you're positive or negative. So anything over, I would say 36 and above. I believe it's 36 or above means that you have you carry the gene. The higher it is, the more progressive it is. So this juvenile version is 60 or above, so I unfortunately I've had friends who are in the juvenile stage and they're repeats are in the sixties, seventies and the eighties. And it's tough. It's sad to see, you know. I lost a friend of mine, her name was Megan, at the age of 26 to the juvenile version of this. But what Megan really taught me, not to, not necessarily to grieve, but more to say, here's how you gotta live your life.

Seth:                                  20:23                   You got to live in the moment and live with a positive outlook because that's what makes any situation a better one. And that really stuck with me after she passed away to make me honestly. She was one of the reasons why I wanted to share my story. It was because she was, even though she was struggling and dealing with the symptoms of HD, she's still shared her story. She still always had a smile on her face and that's what got me going. But essentially when people learn about it, learn about it because their parent has it most of the time. But the other challenging thing is how do you talk to it? How do you talk to a child about it? With my parents, for example, they just said, hey, your mom has Huntington's disease. It's a rare disease from what I recall again, but that was it.

Janet:                                21:13                   And so that's something else that I think HBO is trying to work on. We have some staff as well as volunteers who have done a tremendous job on explaining, are working with people of how to talk to kids about HD. We actually have a fellow board member of mine, her name is Dr Bonnie had again, and I hope I pronounced your last name right, but she is. She wrote a book about how to talk to kids about HD, which I think is amazing. I think it can relate to other conditions of how do you talk to your kids about any rare disease, any genetic condition.

Janet:                                21:45                   And that's so important. I think knowing how to communicate to children and children at various ages. You know how you would talk to a elementary age child is different from a middle or high school age child. You know, how much can they absorb, how much should they absorb, what, what is going to empower them to not live in fear and to have the knowledge they need is a very tricky thing and it takes a very good communicator to understand how to deliver that information at various ages.

Seth:                                  22:18                   I couldn't agree more. I think it definitely, you have to communicate it. You have to be transparent. You have to be honest and that's the challenge is you don't know how someone's going to react similar to my situation wants to tell him. My Dad, my sister, they were fine with it. They were like, oh, you know, thanks for telling me. But they're just like how did you hide this? It wasn't like, Hey, I'm mad at you. It's like, oh, thanks for sharing. And they didn't treat me any differently. That's the biggest thing is there's a stigma behind genetic conditions in my opinion, where people don't know how others will react when you tell them and that's I think the difficult part is even having. I don't have children, but being a child of a parent I can relate to saying , like yeah, it was probably tough for them to tell me I'm glad they did tell me I wish they told me more, but now I can help other maybe parents work with figuring out ways to tell their children are making sure that these children wants to knowing about it, are these young people who know about it, that that they're provided those educational content and going to the right places for learning more about the condition.

Janet:                                23:30                   Well, I understand that you've taken your condition, your passion and your desire to really impact others into your career.

Seth:                                  23:41                   I have and it's pretty crazy because. Give you a little bit background. My background is in nonprofit work. I was doing a lot of work previously in youth development, working with under resourced students in Boston and then going to Grad graduate school in Chicago the last few years to get a Master's in nonprofit management and I really thought I would either be staying in Chicago, are moving back to Boston, working for a nonprofit. We're focusing on, especially high school students. I felt like that was kind of my calling of connecting with them, working with them, building that relationship up with them, but then again what happened this past year has been an amazing just experience. As mentioned before. I did this TED-X talk, sharing my story in front of 800 people in my hometown back in January and just kind of took off from there.

Seth:                                  24:34                   I was able to connect with so many other people in the rare disease space. Understanding the needs of young people and then trying to learn about just different organizations and what they do to help support those impacted by rare chronic condition. And that's when actually I came across this company called Inspire who I heard briefly about in the past because they were doing some, this initiative called experts by experience where they would bring in people to share their, obviously their experience of living with a rare chronic condition and you know, next thing you know, I'm working for them. And to give you a background on what inspired does is where a social health online network connecting patients and caregivers to one another anonymously. And what's, what's cool is we actually have staff here who moderate our online communities, 24/seven. So you know, they're taking shifts, night shifts, morning shifts just to make sure to moderate for kind of being that, that online police in a way.

Seth:                                  25:41                   So making sure people aren't potentially giving out personal medical advice. Any type of spam, any of those arguments that go back and forth. We think it's important for people to feel like they can connect with one another and know that they're not alone alone in their fight and we actually have over 100 different nonprofit partners and that's kind of where my role comes in as a partnership's manager is trying to build not only our current partnerships but new partnerships with these nonprofits so that we can build these online communities for their patients and caregivers to connect with one another. Again, that whole idea of being anonymous is something that I've learned more and more about, especially in this role of, you know, you can go to an Instagram, you can go to Facebook, go to Twitter, and I think it's great that there's different social media options, but I think what makes our site unique is that idea of being anonymous.

Seth:                                  26:35                   Idea of having it moderated by professor, by our staff and we're kind of the experts on the online moderation. But that's why we bring into nonprofits because they're the ones with the resources. Making sure that they know where to go when they're looking for educational resources and content or even services that the nonprofit partner may provide. The biggest thing that I always stress is one, I'm not just trying to sell a nonprofit partner on on this, but more importantly, as you know, I've lived the experience. I grew up in a family impacted by the rare disease. I know what it's like. And so making sure that they're being able to have that opportunity to connect with others who know what they're going through. That's the, that's the biggest thing because I didn't, I didn't have anyone growing up until actually to be honest, until about the age of 19 when I was in college and when I was actually a sophomore in college, just turning 20.

Seth:                                  27:34                   Someone who lived down the hall from me in my dorm, said, oh, my friends come and visit. And her mom also had HD. And as soon as I met her, I felt like I knew her for years because I didn't have to explain myself over and over and over again. She just knew. She knew what was going on. And it was just great to know that I didn't have to live in isolation. I had someone else I could talk to about this and of course that grew over time, but that's Kinda why I always say, hey listen, I'm not here to tell you just to do it to do it, but here's an opportunity for those who may want to connect anonymously, like a username, think of like AOL or AIM where you have that user name and then if you want to connect more you can message them or add them as a friend or, or just, you know, you can share more if you want, but it also gives them the opportunity to share as much or as little as you want.

Janet:                                28:25                   I took a quick look at Inspire and I lift up Huntington's disease and I know that there's almost a one and a half million members of Inspire, of which 389 are part of the Huntington's disease community. So when you talk about it being rare, that's amazingly rare. What a great resource to put together people who need to find other folks like themselves.

Seth:                                  28:52                   As you can see with the Huntington's disease community, it's a lot smaller than some of our other ones. And that's because of course Alan doesn't have a nonprofit partner yet. That's something in the works, but I think, you know, when you have that partner you can, they can also help drive people to it and make sure people know about this resource with Huntington's disease. There's 30,000 people in the US who have another 200,000 plus who are at risk. And so yes, I think Inspired is a great platform for Huntington's disease space with other as well as other conditions. But I think when you have a nonprofit partner is going to help drive more people and that. And that's something that I'm really excited to do, especially personally being impacted is, is trying to get potentially other people like myself involved in the conversations within that community on Inspire.

Janet:                                29:57                   You know, one of the things that is happening in my household is that my son has and his father's side of the family have all gotten 23 and Me genetic testing kits now on my side of the family, on the Kennedy side of the family. My Dad's an avid ancestry researcher, so I can tell you that I've got family members that we've discovered all the way back to something or other and that's cool. And so we feel like we pretty much know and understand what's going on on one side of the family. On the other hand, on my son's side of the family, past great-grandfather. They know nothing. They don't know anything who were, when they came over. How many folks are they related to anybody in the world. And so I'm really fascinated with this whole experience and the things you can find out from that. So I'm curious since there's so many sales going on with all these genetic testing platforms related to the holidays, are you all gearing up in January for a lot of folks going? Why I have one getting ready for kind of a rush of people who are now going to start to wonder about some of the things going on in their holiday gift, genetic testing.

Seth:                                  31:09                   I think that that's a great question, Janet, and with the whole 23 and Me and learning about your history of your family, it obviously has its pros and cons, but the challenge with 23 and Me and a lot of these other genetic testing kits is again, if you don't have that one to one service, have a genetic counselor. You're not talking to a specialist. You don't know what those next steps are. That's the biggest thing is when someone learns about a diagnosis or learning about them being at risk for something, you always wanted to look at, well, what's my next step in my journey? And if you can connect with other people who have either already gone through that journey or are going through the same path that you are timeless simultaneously. I think it definitely helps make things, again more manageable, but more importantly I stress on the idea of a jag counselor because again, they're going to help provide that support and making sure that you know what your options are, whether you have a jag condition or not. I think the other challenge, again with Huntington's disease, it's so unique that when you're at risk, I definitely think that it's important to go through genetic counseling because you could test negative, but you might have that survivor's guilt or you might test positive and not know what those what to do next and I really just don't know. It's a tough one to answer, but my thought is if you do decide to go through 23 and Me or ancestry.com or any of those other ones, just make sure that, once you do it, there's no looking back. You can't just hit the rewind button and say, I don't want to do this. I don't want to learn about additional potential conditions I may have or that was passed down from my family. So making sure that you know what, what to expect and know what your options are, not only after doing a book prior to doing it and kind of talking to others about your family, about it, maybe friends about it, professional about it, just so that you know what to expect when finding out the results.

Janet:                                33:33                   I think that is such good advice and one of the things I do want to let people know is that in the show notes we'll have a LinkedIn profile and also a link to the talk that he did at TED-X Natick. I thought that was just a really, really interesting presentation and something that people I think really need to listen to because I liked the idea that you've said about coming out of the chronic disease closet. That idea that you don't have to keep this all to yourself. There are other people who can support and help you and don't suffer in silence.

Seth:                                  34:01                   I couldn't agree more and Janet, the biggest thing is it takes time, but understanding that you aren't defined by the disease and being defined by who you are as a person. And I actually had one of my good friends, his name's Peter, he and I had this conversation because to be honest with, with dating, you know, when you tell them about your condition, do you say on the first date, you know, the six days, six months in, you don't know how they're going to react, but what he told me, he said, listen, you can't talk about it. It shouldn't. It shouldn't be part of your life every day. And, and it really kind of changed my perception of say he's right. Like even though I am doing these public speaking talks and I'm doing a lot of work in the HIV space, at the end of the day I don't need to tell them about it because, and I say that in a nice way. I'm saying I don't need to tell them that that's all I do and that I should be defined by Huntington's disease rather than who I am as a person. And it's really changed my perception on, looking at, at life differently, but it also just helped me understand that it's not about being perceived as, hey, I'm Seth with Huntington's was, hey, I'm Sam, I'm impacted by it, but here I am as this is who I am as a person.

Janet:                                35:20                   That you are not defined by your disease.

Seth:                                  35:23                   Exactly. Not defined by the disease and still trying to do great work. I mean, as as mentioned before, not only doing a TED-X talk, I spoke at global genes talking about the emotional toll toll a condition as a rare disease patient. I actually have spoken in front of genetic counselors, genetic counseling students and Undergrad and graduate. And also more recently I've, I've spoken in front of researchers. And I think that's the biggest thing is how do we bridge the gap? Getting the patient's voice more involved in research, listening to what our needs are and how we can take those next steps to speed up medical progress.

Janet:                                36:04                   Well you are certainly on the right path and I congratulate you for the work you're doing and also for the passion that you're sharing with people because it is through stories that people will really connect with each other.

Seth:                                  36:18                   Yeah, and I appreciate you having me on here chatting. It's just more of an opportunity not for me but just for others to know that they're not alone when dealing with their health condition and knowing that there's people like you and I out there who want to help others and make sure that they hear stories like my own or stories of others on the podcast and just hearing that, you know, even though there are challenges in our lives we're still trying to make the most out of each day and that we can always do more to help others out. We can always do more to make a difference in the health space.

Janet:                                36:51                   Well, you keep at it, Seth, and I look forward to hearing some more about what you're up to in the coming years. You've been listening to the Get Social Health podcast. My name is Janet Kennedy. My guest today was Seth Rotberg and you can find all of his contact information in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening

Announcer:                      37:11                   And now here's a social media success tip.

Mike Sevilla:                     37:14                   Hey, this is Dr Mike Sevilla, family physician and physician social media pioneer and here is my social media tip. Now I got a question a lot. He said, "Mike, you know what kind of gear do you need to be a a social media superstar?" And I tell people it's not about the gear. There's three basic success tips I can share with you. One, you need a very cool social media mentor that you can ask questions to to. You need to have a message. What is your message? What do you want to convey out there in three, what are the goals? What do you want to achieve by being on social media? You follow those three tips, Success you will find.

Announcer:                      37:58                   You've been listening to the Get Social Health podcast. The show notes are located at getsocialhealth.com. To join our healthcare social media journey, follow @GetSocialHealth on Twitter, and start a conversation.

Janet:                                38:13                   Thanks for downloading this episode of the Get Social Health podcast. If you enjoyed our conversation, a review and a rating on iTunes will help us find more listeners. The Get Social Health podcast is a program of the Healthcare Marketing Network, bringing you the best in healthcare communications. Our network includes dozens of writers with a wide variety of expertise and a broad range of medical specialties. If you need blog, website, white paper, or patient facing content, let the healthcare marketing network be your external content engine. For more information, contact me, Janet Kennedy. My email is janet@healthcaremarketingnetwork.com.

Forced From Home Exhibition

Immigration is on everyone’s mind right now. As with so many current issues, knowledge of how this global social problem impacts individuals is misunderstood or even unknown. Recently I had the opportunity to tour the national exhibition, Forced From Home, presented by Doctors Without Borders during its stop in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was graciously given a tour of the exhibition that included interactive activities designed to convey the challenges facing the more than 68.5 million people currently forced from their homes. I saw a re-creation of a refugee’s journey demonstrating the dangers, deprivations, and uncertainties faced by men, women, and children in the millions worldwide every day.

My tour guides were Courtney Ridgway, Erin Ching, and Dr. George Record. As we walked between exhibit stations, they shared the purpose of the Forced From Home exhibition and answered all my questions. An audio podcast can’t fully reveal how moving this program was, so I hope you’ll visit the show notes for photos from the program and more information.

DETAILS: The Forced From Home exhibition offers free, one-hour guided tours with experienced Doctors Without Borders aid workers. Visitors travel through an immersive exhibition featuring a virtual reality (VR) experience, a 360-degree video dome, and interactive activities designed to convey the challenges facing the more than 68.5 million people currently forced from their homes.

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A wise man once said laughter is the shortest distance between two people. Well, there's no shortage of laughter in this episode with Jacob Weiss, who's the director of High-Wired communities and entertainment that gives back. Listen to the podcast and find out why laughter is the best medicine on Get Social Health.

Janet:                                00:00                   A wise man once said laughter is the shortest distance between two people. Well, there's no shortage of laughter in this episode with Jacob Weiss, who's the director of High-Wired communities and entertainment that gives back. Listen to the podcast and find out why laughter is the best medicine on Get Social Health.

Announcer:                      00:21                   Welcome to Get Social Health, a conversation about social media and how it's being used to help hospitals, social practices, health care practitioners, and patients connect and engage via social media. Get Social Health brings you conversations with professionals actively working in the field and provides real-life examples of healthcare social media in action. Here is your host, Janet Kennedy.

Janet:                                00:47                   Welcome to the Get Social Health podcast. Today I have somebody who is going to help me solve some personal problems and that is Dr. Jacob Weiss.

Janet:                                00:56                   He is a researcher and a social entrepreneur and he's going to be speaking at the annual conference of the Mayo Clinic social media network that's coming up November 14th and 15th in Jacksonville Florida. His topic is how juggling taught me to engage my community for health and well-being. Well I have to tell you I'm having a lot of trouble juggling and also juggling and engaging my community. So this is going to be a very valuable session for me. Welcome to Get Social Health Jacob!

Jacob:                                01:28                   Thanks thanks for having me.

Janet:                                01:30                   I was flabbergasted when I saw that we were going to have a person with expertise in juggling at the annual conference of the Mayo Clinic social media network and I'm thrilled because I actually have a cousin who is a professional mime, clown, and she has awesome juggling skills. So that is amazing.

Jacob:                                01:52                   Yeah it is. It's going to be a lot of fun for a lot of people don't realize the connections you can make and the AHA moments you get when you bring in something that's a different industry. But where there is a really positive connection that you can make, and building bridges across.

Janet:                                02:08                   Absolutely. And I think some of this has to do with when you send people particularly to a conference or an event where they're expecting the same old same old. And you throw them for a loop. They've got to kind of think differently.

Jacob:                                02:24                   One of the things I love about juggling is it's that physical getting up and moving it's visual it's it's not another PowerPoint slide for example and it and so if you're trying to convey a message or teach or share knowledge you can't just share the content you have to do in a way that keeps them awake. That makes them engage in a way that it's really sticky that they can remember back to it when they want to use it. So that's one of the powerful ways that we use juggling as part of sharing content and real knowledge as well.

Janet:                                02:57                   All right wait a minute I'm very easily distracted as you'll probably discover in this podcast interview. However, I'm envisioning you being up there and juggling three to five balls and all this awesome stuff is going and your and you're imparting words of wisdom.

Janet:                                03:11                   I gotta tell you I'm going to be totally focused on your juggling skills and I'm not going to be listening.

Jacob:                                03:16                   Fair enough. And I will give you a preview that most of the time that there's talking. It's not at the same time as the juggling so that the juggling will make you can enjoy it and have fun with it and then we use the other parts following before and after to connect when there's a metaphor or sharing a story of what I've done with juggling and community and building healthy communities using both juggling and social media. So it's it's not the distracting part it's the get you focus then you can listen.

Janet:                                03:51                   Well now folks know me as a social media early adopter and somebody who uses it probably to the point where they like Janet you need to take the day off. But I'm trying to put together my idea of social media and juggling. Well, the first thing of course is that's all social media is I am I am bouncing from one thing to another trying to keep all my content up in the air respond to things like there's a perfect metaphor for there. But what you're actually saying this is a physical metaphor as well.

Jacob:                                04:22                   There's the metaphor of keeping the balls in the air. And one of the things I talk a lot about is you know it's a marathon not a sprint when you're learning to juggle. You don't drop a ball and give up in two minutes and say I can't do it. Same thing with social media. You're getting started on that whether it's a new career path or a new project with social media. You don't just try something and say Oh did it work. I'm quitting it. It's really that long-term goal and process which is the same as learning to juggle. So you've got those metaphors. But there's also a real physical mindset shift that you can make a connection to while you're actually physically learning to juggle. And so it's not just a conceptual metaphor but it's a physical experience that you can go through that that you can make connections to when you're working on those other areas of your life or work.

Janet:                                05:19                   All right let me ask you something and maybe this is why I'm not very good at juggling and I can't get past five passes the ball is because I'm always thinking about the ball's going to land here the ball's going to land here and the ball's going to land here as often we do and work of I'm going to do this again to do this again this which means everything just becomes a blur. Am I doing juggling wrong?

Jacob:                                05:41                   I would say you're doing juggling wrong a lot of ways if you can. One of the ways we teach for example when we're really teaching getting past the first couple of throws is to stand over a table or a desk and let those next. Those that you're trying to get to hit the ground right it lands on the table. Then you have infinite time to make the next throws after that's already landed on the ground. And it also helps you get past worrying about the drops and really focusing on that. So it's it's like with work when you're working on social media or any really any work or or project it's its focus on what you can be getting done now not worrying about the next drop that could happen and end. And then you get to that as it comes. And so it's juggling it really is almost like a yoga or meditation is that sense of flow. You have a feeling of when it clicks in.

Janet:                                06:39                   I will say the other part of the metaphor that I really like that a lot of clients or big companies or even healthcare organizations have to grasp is that you're going to drop a ball and in social media, you're going to spell something wrong. You're going to have a link that didn't work that you've got to repost because when you think about the volume of what you're putting out and the speed at which you're putting it putting out if your social media is all 100 percent planned vetted reviewed edited and signed off on it's boring. You know that's like picking the ball up and then picking the ball up and then picking the ball up as opposed to ball hand, ball, hand, ball.

Jacob:                                07:16                   Exactly along the lines of what you said in terms of that's boring people connect on social media. It's not a press release. Right. It's that you're connecting you're having real conversations with real people. And same thing when you watch juggling. I often when I teach other performers they're not watching the balls in the air they're watching you having fun with the juggling onstage and it's the same with social media. It's not just the announcement here announcement their content they're engaging with you and your personality and that has to shine through in a genuine way. Again it's the same thing if you're performing on stage five hundred people as if you're have five hundred dollars on social media that you're engaging with. It really just has to come from a genuine place from you not just what is the content that you're share.

Janet:                                08:07                   You know I can talk about juggling forever but at some point people are going to wonder why are we bringing a juggler to this conference and actually you get some letters after your name and you have some established academic credibility to this work you're doing so tell us a little bit about your background and how you managed to bring this childhood love of something all the way through your academic career.

Jacob:                                08:30                   Sure. Apart from being a juggler since I was about 10 years old I went to Princeton University for my undergraduate and I was focused on computer science engineering where in addition to developing computer-controlled juggling musical instruments that I've played while juggling with sensors I also developed in the pre-Facebook days Facebook-type friends list connecting sharing kind of building between aim AOL Instant Messenger and Facebook world and of bridging the gap and working on projects and developing concepts from that from the computer science and I then went from there to Vanderbilt University. I did my Ph.D. in biomedical informatics where I was taking a lot of that approach to social networking and the healthcare focus. And when I got there it was there was a really strong emphasis not just on the medical record as in information repository but the medical record as a communication medium between the doctors and the patients and the nurses and everyone involved and so that really was a powerful connection to what I was excited about and that was a time when a lot of things were you know how do we email doctors not even considering anything social media.

Jacob:                                09:53                   And so a lot of my research was you know in the first iPhone came out. We were developing projects around medication management for kids using the early iPhone before you could even make official apps for it. And so all of my research has really been about how do you connect people online but offline as well.

Jacob:                                10:16                   So a big part of my focus and from that world is not just thinking about social media as something in it by itself it's something that can also enhance and complement real-world relationships. Right. So if you can have patients all around the world talking. And that's an important part of social media. But you can also use social media to coordinate emphasis with conversations that also happen in the real world. Whether it's between the patient and the care team whether it's in a local support group or which a lot of my work was looking at all of the different nonprofits working in health care in the local community who are very siloed and disconnected.

Jacob:                                11:02                   How do you find ways to create more connection between them and so did you immediately go into founding your own company or did you work in that traditional bioinformatics program somewhere.

Jacob:                                11:16                   Yeah it was it was pretty much right from my Ph.D. starting my own thing in part because I had continued while I was at Princeton I started up the student juggling shows on campus while doing my research. And when I got to Vanderbyl I started up the juggling group and shows on campus there. So I'd always been doing a combination of starting up juggling programs and creating social networking for community building and health care. And so there was no one job that equally considered both of them. There might have been one or the other and they said oh yeah you can do that little stuff you do on the side with you can't do this while doing that. And so. So it really wasn't it wasn't something that I really purposely went into. It's just continuing what I've always been doing really organically growing and so just kept going and applying a lot of my research work more on consulting or project-based work and then starting up a touring juggling performing company.

Jacob:                                12:23                   At the same time that's a social enterprise. So we use that juggling and just like my research to create connections between nonprofits between companies and local nonprofits. And so it I sometimes describe even from the juggling side and doing more in line with my research than if I stayed in the field in academia doing what most informatics is focused on. Because my research really was combining the informatics work with community based participatory research models ethnography. How do you bring together a local community for collaborative design of an online space so it wasn't just how do we use the online space to us? How do you bring people together to collaboratively design an online space people who aren't social media experts or designers? And how do you make it something that from participating they learn at the same time and can go back to their organizations and enhance the work they're doing online themselves. Have you actually published your dissertation part, not the full dissertation? However many of these are papers but papers out of it. For sure.

Janet:                                13:38                   Okay. And is the word gentling used in near doctoral dissertation?

Jacob:                                13:42                   Well I don't think I have to think I don't think the word juggling ever specifically appears but I will say several of the conferences where I presented that for informatics there was juggling involved in those presentations and in my dissertation defense I believe there was juggling involved.

Janet:                                14:02                   Oh wow okay. So my the really big question is does your mother say my son the juggler or my son the doctor?

Jacob:                                14:11                   I would say sure. It depends on the context. I think mostly she'll say my son the juggling doctor but she actually works in medical informatics as well. That's what got me introduced I'm interested in that field. And so she gets that part of it. But she also has been around since I was a kid so she knows the other half from the juggling side. And again it's from the outside it seems very different. But if you think about it what I'm doing with everything I do is bringing people together and finding ways to connect with people and connect people to one another. And there's a quote I like that came from Victor Borge -

Janet:                                14:58                   I love Victor Borge!

Jacob:                                15:00                   And it's "laughter is the shortest distance between two people." And that applies to what we do with our juggling performances and the outreach we do when we go to children's hospitals and in the community. And it also applies to social media and making real genuine connections on social media. It applies to what we're doing in the community and building real relationships when you facilitate conversations in a community. And so I don't think it's anything that's completely different. They're both two parts of that same mission of bringing people together.

Janet:                                15:39                   When I look at your LinkedIn profile I see that you actually have five concurrent jobs a year there from X to present. So. Oh my gosh, what exactly do you do for a living?

Jacob:                                15:52                   So again the concurrent it's all part of all of the pieces that you see on LinkedIn where they're all the different pieces and programs that we're doing with the companies that I started. So technically there's two company the informatics social media community building consulting and the other is the juggling performance side. But a lot of it weaves together in different ways. And so for example one of the programs that we're doing that we just launched this past year it builds on what we've been doing with our touring performances and outreach and just really quick with that the model as a social enterprise it's kind of like that Toms Shoes model if you know where every pair of shoes you buy they donate a pair of shoes to a child in need with our live performing. Every time our show is brought in to a corporate event we donate a visit to a non-profit in the community and we just launched a program that not just it's not just our visit out in the community that's really and we see the impact it makes but we're able to donate excess of juggling balls as well to the different programs because again the juggling it's the fun as the play.

Jacob:                                17:06                   But it also helps people connect with the mindset going from an I can't do this mindset to oh I can do this. We have a path to success. A message that says try drop, try drop, try drop, over and over down the page. Pause. Breathe. Try. It will succeed. And when people learn to juggle they can connect to that mindset and apply it to other things that they're doing. So that's the that's what do good and juggle is. But all of them are part of the kind of core companies that I've started.

Janet:                                17:48                   So what kind of companies are bringing you in, and do they know what they're getting ahead of time?

Jacob:                                17:54                   Oh yeah, well some companies will bring us in for the entertainment and then as a talking and they realize that I have my Ph.D. in healthcare and technology and also are giving back elements. Then we start talking even more about that piece and then some people are looking more for the community building consulting or corporate training or leadership. I teach a course on community engagement and leadership and end up bringing the juggling and improv comedy techniques and storytelling into that process of the class there and so sometimes people come from one direction and get the other and then it can be flipped depending on who the client is. But we did we do kickoff for a large healthcare companies technology companies conferences and we've been to the White House Madison Square Garden. So from the performing end we do that side and then from the training side we've worked with a lot of some of the major marketing companies, for example, brought us to work with their teams as well as incorporate giving back elements so sometimes companies will bring us in when they're trying to do something that gives back. But there's also a team building or fund program for their employees as well.

Janet:                                19:12                   Oh that sounds like a lot of fun when you were telling me before we started the interview what your schedule is like over the period where the conference is going on. I was sort of mind boggled. You have to have somebody who says Not today if it's Tuesday it must be Belgium.

Jacob:                                19:30                   Right. So yeah we've got at least three possibly four. If I do something locally in Nashville that just came in that week. So basically from Sunday Sunday three different cities which is not always that crazy but it definitely can get a little hectic with that.

Janet:                                19:47                   Now what exactly is an entertainment? What is your show like? I mean no lions no tigers no trapeze. So what exactly are you doing? Is it a circus event?

Jacob:                                19:59                   So at the conference, I'll be I'll be doing some incorporating some of the performance acts from our touring show and more so doing a lot of talking and making that connection to social media and healthcare and community building with our touring show. We also do that by itself where it's an hour to 75 minutes no speaking. It's a three-person show sometimes. And people have compared it almost to Blue Man Group without the crazy makeup. If that makes sense. It's no speaking it's got a lot of musical elements juggling physical comedy but really it's just the three of us having fun onstage together and sharing that with the audience Dave juggles fire. We don't juggle fire in the show. I can and have but are are most of what I do with the performing it's more about the creativity and the teamwork than it is about the danger elements.

Janet:                                20:56                   All right. This is going to be so exciting and it's really going to catch people by surprise. I think this is going to be a great event.

Janet:                                21:04                   And I know that it sounds like you're doing some really amazing things when you go to say do a corporate event you've got this pay it forward model where you're doing something is it hospital visits are you doing fundraising shows?

Jacob:                                21:20                   Some of it's been more into the fundraising style. Most of it is more going out into the community like to the hospital and visiting with the patients doing a show in the lobby for the patients and the families and the staff even which I think that's an important part of wellness for the caregivers and the staff and ignoring that element. And so we'll do that we'll go out into a local school for example. And and so just giving you an example sometimes that if the client really wants to plan a big event that ties into a charity that they're trying to support then we end up doing that if that's what their interest is. But sometimes it might be just visiting, for example, local Ronald McDonald House and there is an example of an event we did. And we went. We went to the local Ronald McDonald House and it was pouring outside.

Jacob:                                22:18                   And so most of the families were stuck in the hospital and couldn't get back to the house. But there was one family. It was the husband and wife whose child was in the hospital but they couldn't get there because of the rain. And so we ended up just doing a short show in the living room for that couple and taught them to juggle. And it wasn't what we planned in terms of how many people were going to be there. But on the way out and we were leaving and the house manager told us that was exactly what they needed at that time. And so we've had other people with our outreach describe how they haven't left together as a family and over a year and that this was a way that they were able to do that and connect us especially if they were in the hospital or dealing with a challenge like that.

Jacob:                                23:10                   So so that's our outreach. It really can be tied into the client wants to focus on health care education and we'll work with them. But we just see the power and impact that it makes. And that's something that came from my work. The first outreach we did was working with a lot of the Cancer Support Programs Gilda's Club here in Nashville is an amazing program and we've worked with them. And I got to know them from when I was doing my research and working with the cancer center at Vanderbilt. And so we've found ways to do programs for them. And so most of it's less about the fundraiser elements and more about really making that personal impact with the families who need it.

Janet:                                23:57                   I love all of this and I love the fact that you're maybe the first person I've ever spoken to that had a passion as a child that they have been able to carry through their whole adult life and into their career. That's awesome and cool.

Jacob:                                24:12                   And I will say it was not planned. If you asked me when I was doing my Ph.D. and doing this student shows at the same time if I plan to be a professional juggler in any way and I wouldn't have said so. Actually, when I first got to Princeton I had no interest in performing I was just juggling I didn't think I had time for it. And then it just gradually evolved. And so it's it's been very organic and not scripted in and how I want to incorporate it and that I've always dreamed of being a professional juggler since I was a kid. But it's been something that's been a solid foundation and core to everything I'm doing.

Janet:                                24:53                   All right so where do you go for professional development?

Jacob:                                24:56                   You know some of the people that I work with for example who do storytelling and storytelling as a way to see different ways to think about things whether it's strategy or opening up connections. And so those kinds of those partners that I work with but also learn from at the same time there's a lot of people that I look up to both from that and then there are people whether it's in the fitness industry and they share advice and messaging around for example. You know trust the process which is a message around their fitness but it's also a message for careers my career for what we're doing with how we teach the juggling.

Jacob:                                25:41                   There's a lot because it's the typical industry where you go and take a professional development community building and juggling and healthcare technology all woven together. I kind of get it piece by piece. I do a lot of reading and listening to podcasts and following people look up to from that an awesome.

Janet:                                26:01                   Well OK. Is there a great circus podcast you'd recommend?

Jacob:                                26:05                   I don't follow too much circus podcasts. I would say more from I would say the marketing. There's a lot of videos that you know keep up with people posting videos from the circus and juggling side through Facebook and you know that network and I follow more of the marketing podcasts and healthcare and those side of things as well.

Janet:                                26:29                   Now you've got to have a guilty pleasure podcast. So is it serial killers or True Crime or history?

Jacob:                                26:37                   No I don't. I haven't really gotten into that side of podcasts listening although I would say that part of everything in terms of what I do free-time wise my wife and I have our 21-month-old at home. So everything's been a blur for the past few years now.

Janet:                                26:57                   I can't imagine. All right so just so you know this is a parent tip here when your child is 22 months old. Measure them double their height and that's how tall they'll be as an adult.

Jacob:                                27:08                   Interesting.

Janet:                                27:09                   Not 24 months.

Jacob:                                27:10                   I will look at that. I will look at that.

Janet:                                27:13                   I did that for my son and lo and behold he did grow up to be 6 feet 4 inches tall. So.

Jacob:                                27:19                   Well my wife's mother is six feet tall and so maybe our daughter will get that side of the family but who knows.

Janet:                                27:26                   There you go. Well I am so looking forward to meeting you in Jacksonville and a hearing watching and sounds like actively participating in your program. It's going to be a great event.

Jacob:                                27:40                   And I'm going to have a lot of fun. And look forward to seeing everyone there and always feel free whether you see me at the conference to come up and say hi and mine. Always happy to connect and look forward to meeting everyone.

Janet:                                27:54                   That's going to be a blast. All right I'll bring my own juggling balls and I will see you in a few months at the Mayo Clinic annual conference of the social media network. It's taking place November 14th and 15th on the Mayo campus in Jacksonville Florida. If you happen to be new to social media and or health care there's also an all day program on the 13th which is called the social media residency. So you can really get up to speed no matter whether you came from the journalism marketing side of the house and need to learn healthcare or you come from the healthcare side of the house and you're not that experienced with marketing and social media. That is a great intensive daylong session that you will walk away from with practical and tactical ways to manage your own social media. So I encourage you to look into that as well. Social media dot Mayo Clinic dot org is the place to find this information. Again Jacob thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Jacob:                                28:52                   Thank you.

Announcer:                      28:52                   And now here's a social media success tip.

Lee Aase:                          28:57                   Hi this is Lee Aase. I'm the director of the Mayo Clinic social media network and happy to share one of my favorite tips and that is to don't overcomplicate things. I know that in some of the early days with the flip camera many of the complaints that people had was an audio quality. And so they would often look for a camera that could have an external microphone and that would sometimes complicate things to the point where they didn't shoot the video that they could otherwise abused. So one of the rules that I live by is that you can't edit what you don't shoot. Wow, I agree it's great to get external microphones. I'd be focusing on some of the shotgun ones the ones that can attach to a bracket with the iPhone or Android phone but not to get overly complicated. Look at what you can do in terms of natural light as well as finding a good quiet place to do the interview so that you don't get hindered from actually shooting the video. That could be really helpful for your communications purposes.

Announcer:                      30:07                   You've been listening to the Get Social Health podcast. The show notes are located at getsocialhealth.com. To join our healthcare social media journey, follow @getsocialhealth on Twitter and start a conversation.

Janet:                                30:22                   Thanks for listening to the Get Social Health podcast, a production of the Healthcare Marketing Network. And a proud member of the Healthcare Podcasters Community. I'd like to take a moment and tell you a bit about the Healthcare Marketing Network. We're a community of freelance healthcare writers. Our organization can match your company or healthcare practice with clinically accurate, specialized, or general health care and medical content, from blogs to white papers to CME, the Healthcare Marketing Network has the writers you need to reach your business audience or patients. To find out more visit healthcaremarketingnetwork.com or contact me via social media or email at janet@healthcaremarketingnetwork.com. Thanks for listening to the Get Social Health podcast.

Marie Ennis-O'Connor is a social media consultant for healthcare and pharma. She visited the Get Social Health podcast to talk about her upcoming presentation for the Annual Meeting of the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network. Marie visited the Get Social Health podcast 3 years about as a "must follow" social media expert and that is still very true. Listen to the podcast here or drop in at the time stamps below.

Janet:                                00:00                   One of my go-to healthcare social media consultants is Marie Ennis O'Connor. She's a wonderful person who's been on the podcast before and is very savvy about how to craft, must read headlines and compelling content for social media and you know that's a challenge we face every day. Find out how she does it on Get Social Health,

Announcer:                      00:22                   welcome to Get Social Health, a conversation about social media and how it's being used to help hospitals, social practices, healthcare practitioners and patients connect and engage via social media. Get Social Health, brings you conversations with professionals, actively working in the field and provides real life examples of healthcare, social media in action. Here is your host, Janet Kennedy. Welcome to the Get Social Health podcast.

Janet:                                00:50                   Yay. I'm excited to have a friend of mine back on the podcast, Marie Ennis-O'Connor was with me a couple of years ago and a lot has happened in social media marketing and the online healthcare world since then, so it's going to be exciting to catch up with her, but even more exciting is that I'm finally going to get to meet her in person because we are both going to be at the annual meeting of the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network. It's going to be taking place at the Jacksonville campus of Mayo Clinic in Florida on the 14th and 15th, and if you are relatively new to healthcare social media, you may want to think about joining the residency that takes place on the 13th the day before, so it's a great three day conference. You're going to meet some amazing people, not the least of whom is Marie O'Connor. Welcome to the podcast, Marie.

Marie:                               01:41                   Thank you, Janet. I think I'll get you to do that introduction for me when I'm in Jacksonville, so that was very nice. Thank you.

Janet:                                01:47                   I might get to because I was asked to be a moderator in one of the rooms, so if I'm near you, I might get to do your interview. However, to folks who may not be familiar with you or haven't had a chance to listen to your previous episode, let's catch up and let me tell a little bit about. Marie is a digital communications strategist and she is an internationally recognized keynote speaker. She's in Ireland, so it's not as far a jaunt from here, but she's going on her fall conference circuit, so by the time you get to the Mayo Clinic event in November, you're going to be well-packed and well traveled.

Marie:                               02:27                   I imagine. You know, I have a suitcase that I keep packed all the time. When you travel like that, you do have to start getting very strategic about what you bring and yeah, so I've got it down to a fine art now. I did have a consultant that used to work with me when I was in the shopping center industry and she always packed 100 percent black everything, so she never had to worry about anything matching. It was just all black, I think a little depressing, but that certainly does simplify your travel. Yeah, no, that's good. And I will, let's not get too much into, into fashion, but I just wear dresses because I just find they roll up nicely and they just always look fine. So that's just my advice.

Janet:                                03:17                   Marie, what have you been up to since we last spoke?

Marie:                               03:21                   I am more than enough with social media than I ever been even the last time we spoke and I love to be able to say that. It's just, we're learning all the time where we're doing new things, we're trying new things, working with new clients. So I'm just more in love with social media than ever. I'm doing a lot of travel, which is wonderful. I get to meet some new people and I'm still loving this. Introducing people to the real power of social media. What's interesting, Janet, I think even. I'm trying to remember back to what we talked about before. I'm still quite amazed that even these several years later we're still having to almost go back to basic principles and explain what is social media, what is digital marketing and there's still a lot of misconceptions around that. So I like to put people straight and I like to.

Marie:                               04:10                   I guess my background is in public relations, so I always go back to a real grounding in real communications and you introduced me as a digital marketing communications. I can't even remember what I said I was and it's because I still think sometimes social media has got this reputation of well we just put up a few tweets or we'll just put up a Facebook page and they're so, so much more to us. So I guess probably one of the challenges that I still face is really getting that across to people is that there is so much more about doing social media or using social media, it's about how to do it strategically. So that's been my life's work and that's what I've been doing for the last couple of years or however long it is since I spoke to you and I'm still finding it fascinating.

Marie:                               04:53                   Well I think what's interesting about your perspective as well is that your in Ireland, so you're kind of halfway between the US and Europe and you have clients across all those continents, correct?

Speaker 3:                        05:06                   That's correct. And the wonderful thing is people don't actually know I'm in Ireland. I always have to start off when people invite me or asked me to go on a call, I always have to start off with, well, you know, I am in Ireland. They go, no, I didn't know that. I thought you were in the US or I thought you were in Australia or I thought you were wherever. But I think that's the amazing thing is that you can be anywhere in the world and you can give that one world class service.

Janet:                                05:27                   Oh absolutely. And it also means that you have to really learn how social media is being used in a lot of different cultural and more importantly governmental situation. So where in the US, you know, we're just starting to feel the GDPR type of situation. You were deep in it this year over in Europe.

Janet:                                05:49                   Yeah. It almost became a Y2K thing. People got very worried about it. But it's basic good governance. If you sign up to a newsletter, if you take somebody email, you follow these steps that people can opt out very easy. I mean it's good practice. So I'm delighted to see GDPR come in, but you know, yeah, I think probably there's a little bit more email spamming coming from the US, but we're all going to start leveling off with that. I think that GDPR is something that's incredibly important and I think we are going to see that as well coming through across the world. Continental.

Janet:                                06:27                   Absolutely. It's just the best practice to follow it regardless of whether you're legally obligated to.

Marie:                               06:35                   Absolutely, absolutely. I would have always practiced it anyway, even before GDPR came in. So it was great to see GDPR coming in. I'm still amazed at the amount of people who didn't comply with this, even though there's a lot of fines and very high. Fine. So we'll see. We'll have to see what's going to happen with that.

Janet:                                06:51                   Now, what type of clients are you working with? Are they health care systems? Are they pharma companies? Are they health tech companies, health tech companies and pharmaceutical industry?

Marie:                               07:01                   So a lot of healthcare startups, and the pharmaceutical industry, the pharmaceutical industry. I'm working more or less in social media marketing and more in terms of patient engagement. So I wear two hats, which I really, really enjoy as well. Well, you know, you're on the board of the patient empowerment foundation and I'm not sure what that is. So tell me a little bit about that. So the patient empowerment foundation is really about empowering patients. It's about giving patients a voice. Let's say there's a conference, we have sessions at the conference where patients can network niche but can really get access to the information that they need, so it's about showing patients that they have this role to play and helping them to get the most out of a conference or get the most out of them out of the healthcare system. So it depends. It depends on what patients need. If it's an individual patients or patient groups and that's the kind of work that we're doing.

Janet:                                07:59                   Are you finding that conferences are more aware of the need to say underwrite scholarships for patients to be able to attend their conferences?

Marie:                               08:08                   You know, yes, but I find it very interesting that there's still so many conferences that aren't, but what I find fascinating is that they're almost being shamed into providing those scholarships. There's the patients included accreditation which conferences can get if they provide that scholarship, if they make it easy for patients to attend on. We're, we're definitely moving towards that. So it's quite interesting sometimes to see, and this is, this is the part of social media that I don't think conferences often get. The organizers now put a Hashtag up there, they'll say come to our conference and if they haven't made it easy for patients to come and it's a natural place for patients to come, they will quickly be called out on social media, particularly on Twitter about it. So it's quite interesting. And they are in, they are shocked to be called out on this.

Janet:                                08:57                   Well a little public shaming. Not that I'm a fan of it, I clearly don't like shaming by parents of their children. That's just so wrong. And that's, that brings up the ugly side of social media, but definitely a respective call out to say, wouldn't it be great if patients could be included in this conference and then see what kind of response you get.

Marie:                               09:21                   Yes, absolutely. And, and you've touched on that there. There is an ugly side to social media and I think that's something that we do need to address and talk about and how do we deal with that? And it's something that's quite interesting and it's very off putting for a lot of organizations. So I agree with you. There's a way to do that. There's a way to open that dialogue rather than jumping in there and saying, I don't see any patients. Where are the patients? And it becomes this, this confrontation.

Janet:                                09:46                   Absolutely. Well, the interesting thing is here we are busily talking all about social media, but it's your writing side that you're going to be featuring as a speaker at the Mayo Clinic annual meeting of the social media network. So let's talk about that a little bit.

Marie:                               10:01                   I was going to say that, you know, it's one of the most exciting things for me. When I was a little girl, I always wanted to grow up to be a writer and it didn't happen for me. And yet through this social media, through communicating, I've rediscovered this love of writing again. And that has been really, really personally fulfilling part of the work that I do. So I'm excited to be sharing with people what I've learned about writing, about how you communicate about how you get more people to read what you've written because it's very disheartening when you've poured your heart and soul into something and you realize that, well, nobody's read it apart from your mom or your best friend. So, you know, there's a little little techniques which I'm looking forward to sharing the annual conference. Well, excellent.

Janet:                                10:45                   Well, I'm going to tell you right now that you're going to have to write the title for this podcast. So let's talk about that because your topic is actually crafting must read headlines and compelling content for social media. So I'm assuming blogs, but also, uh, we're talking about other content as well?

Marie:                               11:02                   You know, blocks primarily. I am such a huge fan of getting quality content out there. So be that blogs, be that, even doing that Facebook live, it's even how you title that. It's the content that you want to share. And really at the bottom of all of this is what do your audience want to hear? And that's the content you should be creating. Open out here, I don't know what to say, and I say, well, what do your audience need to hear from you? What piece of expertise do you have that will be so valuable to share with your audience? So whichever, whether it's a podcast, whether it's a video, whether it's a blog, whether it's part of the Twitter chat, what is that content? So all of that great content begins with discovering what your audience wants to hear.

Marie:                               11:47                   All right, we're going to break this down a little bit. So let's use this specific podcast as an example. I have a Marie Ennis O'Connor, who has a known online social presence. We're talking about the Mayo Clinic's annual meeting of their Social Media Network, and we're talking about a great presentation about crafting must read headlines. Well, gee whiz, which is the most important part? How do I figure out how I should lead with this podcast title?

Speaker 3:                        12:17                   I would do? I love Gdpr. Janet, I'm not sure how much of a Twitter person that you are, but I will often do some preliminary research on Twitter. I will ask people, in fact, the very title when I was debating the title with Dan, him and we were going back and forth and some titles and I said, you know what, why don't I just put the question out there, why don't I ask my followers on Twitter, my Linkedin group, my Facebook group, why don't you just ask them which of these titles would you be most interested in coming to a talk? And they voted and they gave me the title. So I always say ask your audience. And so that's, that's how I will always start with something. I always crowdsource ideas. I'm going to rise pretty in depth article. I'll ask my community what are their best tips and I'll always share them as well. so I'm almost doing the. I'm almost amplifying a know how I'm going to promote what I've written if I start with asking the audience because they will also want to promote that and amplify what I've read.

Janet:                                13:16                   Oh, fascinating. Now, how much does a keyword research play into your decisions on titles?

Marie:                               13:23                   It should play more. It should play more of a role than it is because I teach how important it is and it absolutely is important, but sometimes people get too hung up on that and it can almost stymie them, so there'll be obsessed with putting the right keywords in there, so I always say do that keyword research, but don't get too hung up on this and I find that with the keyword research, I think one of the really interesting things that I've discovered in the last year or so is if you do a google search, it's what people also searched for appears at the end in sentence form in the more natural way. So instead of you would ask maybe how do I write such and such a title? How do I write awesome titles, or how do I write a titles that will attract more readers and so I will build around those rather than just a specific keyword.

Janet:                                14:12                   Oh, okay. That's a great tip. Well, when we talk about what you're going to be talking about at the annual meeting, what kinds of things are you going to be focusing on?

Marie:                               14:23                   I'm very much going to take it back to that basics, what I was saying, which is what are you going to write about? How are you going to find out what your audience wants to read about? So you go and ask your audience and then you do a lot of listening. Maybe you go into Twitter chats and you see what are the topics, what are the questions people are asking in those Twitter chats? If you go into them, what are they asking in Facebook groups? What kind of questions are they asking on blogs? So you can read your favorite industry blogs, shoot down to the questions and see what have they not answered in that? What other questions are people asking? And then you go and create that content? So I'm very much a fan of that, about not just writing something without going and doing your research first, and I always start with that.

Janet:                                15:07                   Well, you know, I'm going to take the devil's advocate viewpoint here as I envision busy hospital because the majority of the folks who are going to be at this program are members of a hospital marketing or communications team. When I envisioned this sometimes very thin team the're, I dunno, what I'm sensing is they are more focused on here are the messages I need to push out as opposed to what do people want to read. So they're coming down with, you know, the people above them saying, I we need to talk about this new doctor. We need to talk about this cardiology procedure. We need to talk about our brand new nursing wing, blah blah blah blah, blah. Do you really feel that hospitals are actually taking the time to do this kind of research and to ask their audience what they want to read or are they just trying to take their agenda and make it as friendly as possible?

Marie:                               16:01                   You know, I think it's even more important that they do take the time to do that research. And where I'm going to come back to what I say, time and time and time again when I work with clients, if you're going to do it, then you need to do it well and you need to do it strategically. So why should somebody care about your new hospital wing? If I. I'll go back and play devil's advocate back to you. You need to say why should they care about it? Just because you have news doesn't necessarily mean that the world wants to hear that news or is interested and how much use do we hear how many hospitals are telling us about their new research or their new hospital wing or their new staff member. We're bombarded with that information so we need to take deeper or that information is only going to interest a very select few. And I guess as well, that's also the dilemma that I find when I'm trying to explain to people what social media is about.

Marie:                               16:55                   It's not about that newsletter that you used to send that with, here is our latest news. It has to go deeper than that. It has to go wider than that. So I'm going to be quite strong about that when I speak about us.

Janet:                                17:08                   Now, how about from the standpoint of developing content calendars? Are you going to walk through some of the basics of a of a content calendar?

Marie:                               17:16                   Yeah, sure I am. I would do that a lot with clients as well. We need to map out in advance because we can start off with social media and everybody's very enthusiastic and then I'm sure as you know Jonathan start petering out and petering out, but if we have that content calendar and I like to go depends on the client, but monthly or quarterly and we've mapped it out, then we know there's always something there that we can draw on. I'm also a big fan of having, when it comes to Twitter, having a tweet bank, having boilerplate tweets that you can draw on. Having it all there documented is hugely powerful and it really focuses you as well. So if you're looking what's coming up in the next month or the next quarter, what are the disease awareness days? Maybe Is it National Doctor Day, is it International Nursing Week and what can we do around that so that that's essential. It's absolutely essential to have that mapped out in advance and have that calendar sewn up.

Janet:                                18:14                   Well, now he's just going to ask you that about, is this heart healthy month? Is that lame? Is that something that, well, everybody's doing it. That doesn't make my content unique or original. How do you work with clients to take it to that next level or to look at the same old same old topics and given new spin to it.

Marie:                               18:34                   You know, I agree and I'm going to go back and say it again. I go back and I will look and see what's everybody doing and what's missing from that. What if people knock covered? What kind of questions are on Reddit or Quora or on Twitter chats? What are patients asking, what are they not already hearing, and that's the content we need to be creating. And then I'm also a big fan. People still love graphics and infographics are still hugely popular. They've got a high high sharing race, so I will do a lot of work around visual content when it comes to that and creating those graphics and those infographics about telling the stories about bringing what's happening within a hospital or within a health care facility. Really bringing that out into the public so that people can really see who are the people that are working in this area. I agree with you that we're almost over-saturated with these awareness days, but we also have to get in there and show that we're part of that as well.

Janet:                                19:34                   One of the things I'm really interested in is this concept of storytelling, and again, I go back to that very stretched thin, lightly staffed content department to tell a story is a lot harder than one would think both from the skills that are necessary to be able to effectively tell a story, but also to find a story in a busy, busy hospital where it's probably hard to get a hold of people. So how do you go about coaching? Finding those good stories and what to do with them.

Marie:                               20:08                   I think if you go out and looking for the stories, that is quite difficult, but if you start early enough, if you start gathering those stories, if you start embedding that idea that we are a storytelling organization and those stories start, you start looking for the stories then in a more natural way and then you collect those stories and an, a story doesn't have to be an interview, it doesn't have to be written piece. I mean really a picture does tell a story. So there's incredible moments where you might be able to take a picture. Obviously we will also need to talk about the, the ethics of that and, and having permission to use pictures. But sometimes that photograph, sometimes, that moment is there. So it's about getting into that mindset of finding those moments, those storytelling moments. but it's almost a cultural change as well.

Marie:                               20:58                   So it's, it's very much about getting people thinking like that, looking for those stories, sharing those stories among themselves and thinking in terms of story. But everyday is a story. My Gosh, I think when we're working in a healthcare organization, I've also worked for some B, two b companies and that's a lot harder, but when you work in healthcare, we are surrounded by stories 24 hours a day.

Janet:                                21:23                   How often do you encourage a healthcare systems to look outside their own walls for stories?

Marie:                               21:30                   That's a great question. And you know, item of tour that I ever have, so if you stumped me with that one, that is such a great question. Yeah, I haven't got an answer to that one. I haven't done it yet. So get ready. I'm going to ask it when you're at the annual conference in November, so I'll be ready for it then.

Speaker 3:                        21:52                   Well, tell me a little bit about, uh, the kind of work you do with clients. Is, uh, is it predominantly strategic? Are you actually doing execution?

Marie:                               22:00                   I am doing execution as well, but I, I love the strategic part and I tend to do the execution part to get people started on, on a good footing, but then I will pull away. I will train somebody up in the organization or I will recommend that they employ somebody who will be the digital marketer, the social media person, and I will interview that person because I'll have a good idea of the company culture as well at that stage and who will fit back company culture. So yeah, I'm much, much prefer that strategic side of it, but I'm also really, really happy to get in there and just do a little bit of execution as well. It's easy for me because I love social media.

Marie:                               22:37                   It's never a chore. But yeah, it's, it's very much about getting that culture of social media started within an organization.

Janet:                                22:45                   I always wonder about the social media strategist who's "do as I say, but not as I do," who doesn't have expertise. Actually posting things, scheduling things and looking at. I'd posted this. It didn't do well. I wonder why,as opposed to being a little bit on the 10,000 foot level. It's easy to preach and it's easy to point fingers, but if you're not in the trenches going, oh my God, I posted something. It's gone now. I have to do it again and again and again and again. You don't really understand how stressful it can be as a social media person to be constantly coming up with new content.

Marie:                               23:25                   Oh my gosh, I agree with you so much and I would never ever recommend a strategy or a platform or anything without having tried it myself and then knowing the organization and often. You know, sometimes Janet often I will work with an organization and at the end I'll say, I don't think that you're ready for social media because I'm aware that you just don't have the time to do this. Even though I've showed you all these time saving tricks. The willingness isn't there or just the passion isn't there and that comes through in what they're doing and it can be quite alarming for them to hear. I don't think you should be doing social media or I think you should just do this one little bit, but it's more important to me that they do it well. Then they just do it half heartedly or that it runs out of steam after two or three months.

Janet:                                24:12                   How about from an advocate standpoint, do you find that you really do need the the C-suite or some higher levels on board with the idea of social to make it really fly or if there's a really passionate marketing group, they can overcome the naysayers internally.

Speaker 3:                        24:29                   You do need that c suite buy in. I really feel that you do, but now that you mentioned a passionate marketing group, they're more powerful than the seat suite, so it really doesn't matter whether it's one or the other, but the main thing is that they. They're willing to do it and that they're committed to it and they can bring others along with them within the organization. So once you have or even just one person that has that little bit of leverage, that little bit of power, then we can get good traction.

Janet:                                24:56                   Now, the last year, really the last two years in the United States, social media has become a very uncomfortable place to be for a lot of folks and we've obviously seen a lot of divisions happen because the old adage of never discuss religion or politics has gone through the window and all we seem to be discussing is religion and politics. From a corporate standpoint, are you getting pushback with people saying, well, I was thinking about social, but now that I see all this happening, I think we'll just pass?

Marie:                               25:30                   Oh my goodness. Yes, absolutely. More so than ever for sure, and I wonder sometimes sometimes I like them to go back to social media content marketing rather than the social media. Going back to the writing, going back to communicating and what is the message that you want to communicate and maybe pulling back a little bit from the social media side, which can be perhaps promoting the content, doing a little less of that, but more about just driving people to your website because remember you have control over your website in the same way that you wouldn't have control if you're on Facebook or in Twitter, you're opening yourself up to a lot, so I would actually take it back to the website into creating great content when it comes to that rather than just abandoning any kind of digital communication.

Janet:                                26:19                   Well, I couldn't agree more, but we're. We're both singing from the same song page because we are both members of the external advisory board for the Mayo Clinic, Social Media Network and are big believers in social and also in the community that social can develop.

Marie:                               26:36                   Absolutely, and it's a wonderful network, Janet. It's a wonderful place. I've been doing this for almost 10 years now and I'm still learning. I still have questions and it's wonderful to know that you have a place of likeminded people, people who are in the trenches with you, who you can just run things past and you can just say, you know, should I, should I go that angle? What should I do? Should I tell my clients maybe not to be on social media without naming names obviously, but just that general, being able to speak to someone else who really gets it is incredible and it's a very friendly group. It's a such a helpful group. It's been incredible to me to be able to turn to that group over the last two years.

Janet:                                27:14                   I couldn't agree more. So here's a little sales pitch for the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network. You can find them at socialmedia.MayoClinic.Org, and please visit. You can learn a lot of things there. There's ongoing education, there's opportunities to connect with your peers. There appears of all levels and there's always somebody willing to both answer questions and answer questions with experience in your specific area, in the healthcare vertical. And now it isn't just hospitals. There are definitely people that are like myself, I guess I qualify as a vendor now, but there are other experts that are in the group as well as physician practices and other related healthcare industries, so don't think it is just about hospitals. It's a much broader than that.

Marie:                               28:05                   Because I'm not in it. I would not work with the hospitals that much, but I work with work with startups. I would work with the pharmaceutical industry so we all bring some new expertise to it. And the other thing about the network, Janet is our member joining and thinking, Oh, if I ever have a very simple question, I'd be almost afraid to ask it, but that's just so not true. People are so willing to share their expertise and to share what's worked for them. And that's incredible. We can read industry reports, we can read the Social Media Examiner is of this world and I do, but there's nothing that beats been able to say, does this actually work? Did it work for you? It doesn't seem to be working for me. What am I doing wrong? So that's incredible to be able to do that.

Janet:                                28:43                   And of course it's a network that is a log in network, so it's a safe place. It's a space where you can ask a question about, hey, is this a HIPPA violation or this patient said this, how should I respond? Uh, you gotta have a place where you can do that, that that's private, insecure and the respect in the group is, is very, very high,

Marie:                               29:04                   Very high and incredibly friendly and welcoming and more so. Now we've done a wonderful sales pitch. No more not on commission. We genuinely mean this.

Janet:                                29:13                   Absolutely. Well, I can't wait to meet you in person, Marie and again, we are both getting together at the annual meeting of the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network coming up November 14th and 15th and then their pre event called the residency, which is really bringing you up to speed on how social media is being used in healthcare. If you are new to healthcare, say for instance a lot of folks come from the news side into healthcare or maybe you've come to marketing and you haven't been exposed to that much social media, that one day intensive is really, really helpful. So I recommend that you look at all of those pieces and we'll have links in the show notes to both the Mayo Clinic event as well as how to find Marie, but in the short term you. What's your Twitter handle?

Marie:                               30:01                   @JBBC, what does that stand for? There's a whole story behind that. I would never do it now, but I just. The whole story behind it is how I got started in social media. Well, 14 years ago I was diagnosed with breast cancer and I started a blog and I got very involved with the whole patient advocacy side, but it broadened out, but the JBBC stood for my blog which was journeying beyond breast cancer, which got shortened to JBBC. I ended up creating a community around that. So I started with that and you know, a lot of people don't even ask why are you JBBC anymore? So I've just decided to just leave it. I'm just JBBC, it doesn't necessarily mean anything apart from the fact that it's, it's still very special and important to me that this journey started for me with wanting to communicate once you define the community. When I was extremely ill and I felt very isolated at the time. So my love for social media really goes back to those roots and that's why I keep up, put her hand.

Janet:                                30:57                   Oh well awesome. I cannot wait to meet you and to make our friendship happen in real life as we say.

Marie:                               31:05                   I'm so excited about that. There's nothing like a digital communication is wonderful. Meeting people online is wonderful, but you know what, there's nothing like meeting people face to face.

Janet:                                31:14                   Absolutely. Well, we'll see you there. Maria and I hope other people who are listening will join us and it is an annual event that moves around the country between the Rochester, Minnesota campus, the Jacksonville and the Arizona campus. So jump on board and come meet your fellow colleagues in healthcare, social media. This has been the Get Social Health podcast and I thank you all for listening today

Announcer:                      31:39                   And now. Here's our social media success tip.

Dan:                                   31:43                   Hi, I'm Dan Hinmon, President of Hive Strategies. More and more hospitals and clinics are considering starting a Facebook support group, and if you are, I have two important tips for you. A successful Facebook support group solves a problem both for the hospital or clinic and for the patient, so start by aligning your group with a key hospital marketing or business objective that will make sure you have the internal support that you need. And secondly, find out if your patients are even interested by interviewing five or 10 potential members of the group. If you find interest and you've aligned the community to your business strategies, then you're on the right foot to start a successful four Facebook support group

Announcer:                      32:31                   You've been listening to. They Get Social Health podcast. The show notes are located@getsocialhealth.com to join healthcare, social media journey. Follow at, Get Social Health on Twitter and start a conversation. Thanks for listening to the Get Social Health podcast, a production of the healthcare marketing network, and a proud member of the healthcare podcasters community.

Janet:                                32:54                  I'd like to take a moment to tell you a bit about the healthcare marketing network. We're a community of freelance healthcare writers. Our Organization can match your company or healthcare practice with clinically accurate, specialized or general healthcare and medical content from blogs to white papers to CME. The healthcare marketing network has the writers you need to reach your business audience or patients to find out more, visit healthcaremarketingnetwork.com, or contact me via social media or email at janet@healthcaremarketingnetwork.com. Thanks for listening to the Get Social Health.

How does the internet impact healthcare?

Susannah Fox, former CTO of the HHS and the Obama White House joins Janet Kennedy on the Get Social Health podcast to discuss research, social media, and online healthcare communities. Listen to the podcast or drop in at the time stamps below.

Interview Transcript:

Janet:                                00:00

Thank you for listening to the Get Social Health podcast, a production of the healthcare marketing network. The HMN is a community of freelance healthcare and medical writers ready to support your business or practice. You can find them@healthcaremarketingnetwork.com. On the podcast today, I had the honor of speaking with Susannah Fox, one of healthcare's leaders in the field of data research and understanding the implications of how the Internet has changed our ability to communicate and connect. She is a fascinating person and I know you'll enjoy our conversation on Get Social Health.

Announcer:                      00:36                   Welcome to Get Social Health, a conversation about social media and how it's being used to help hospitals, social practices, healthcare practitioners and patients connect and engage via social media. Get Social Health brings you conversations with professionals actively working in the field and provides real-life examples of healthcare, social media in action. Here is your host, Janet Kennedy.

Janet:                                01:03                   Today on Get Social Health I have the honor of speaking to somebody that I may stumble a little bit when I ask questions because I'm a true fangirl. Susannah Fox is really a legend to those of us in the digital health and marketing world because she's the person that validates so much of the information that we use in marketing and communications in the healthcare space. Welcome to the Get Social Health podcast, Susannah.

Susannah:                        01:28                   Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here.

Janet:                                01:30                   Well, I want to give people an opportunity to learn a little more about you, but I will say you're one of the few guests that I could literally say and she needs no introduction, so let's lay some groundwork here. The reason I'm talking to Susannah, is that she's actually going to be one of the keynote speakers at the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network annual conference coming up November 14th and 15th at the main campus in Jacksonville, Florida, and so I'm honored to be able to talk to her today and I have so many questions. So first we're going to lay some groundwork and we're going to talk a little bit about Susannah's background leading up to where she is today. Now as I came into healthcare, Susannah Fox, this name was often mentioned regarding the actual data of healthcare and how people were interacting with social media and the Internet. Her work was one of my go-to places as I got up to speed on how social media and marketing and healthcare and the Internet all came together at that time. You were with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, but I'm sure you actually had a job before then. So. what is your real backstory?

Susannah:                        02:43                   Well, my backstory starts way back in the nineties when I like to say dinosaurs roamed the Internet and we were just starting to understand that the Internet was going to have a big impact on all sectors of society, but the nineties, a lot of people really focused on the business.com aspect and I was at that time I worked for a startup company. I helped start the website for US News and World Report magazine. I was building websites and then got pulled towards research and had the opportunity to help start the Pew Internet project, which is a part of the Pew Research Center here in Washington DC. What I loved about the Pew Charitable Trust charge to us, they said, we want data about the social impact of the Internet. A lot of people are looking at the business impact. We want to find out how is the internet affecting Americans lives in terms of their family's education, government and health, and healthcare.

Janet:                                03:47                   Well, I have to say that a very different conversation would've been held a couple of years ago and we can kind of touch base with some of the dramatic changes that have happened online since the 2016 election, but prior to then it really was a very happy and healthy place to be. People were using social to be social and new and fascinating things were happening in the healthcare space with people connecting. Is that what you found? Pre-2016?

Susannah:                        04:16                   Yeah and I still see it today, so I will confess to being like my dad, who his therapist once told him, you are in the rational optimist, you are irrationally optimistic about the world and I tend to share that trait in that I still see reasons for hope even now, especially in healthcare because of the Internet, the power to connect people with the information data and tools that they need to solve problems.

Speaker 1:                        04:47                   Absolutely, and if anything, I think it's health care that shows the greatest opportunity for using social media in a proactive way and when I hear people dis my favorite platform, which is Twitter, I'm like, you have no idea what amazing things are happening in Twitter, particularly in healthcare, so don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Let's figure out how to make this work.

Susannah:                        05:11                   I agree. Sometimes I describe Twitter while I described certain hashtags on Twitter as campfires that if you need it, you can go to a certain Hashtag like you would gather around the campfire and find other people like you exchange stories sort of strengthen your spirit for going back out into the dark. You know, it's not for everybody, but when you find a campfire that works for you, then it really is special. It really is helpful.

Janet:                                05:43                   I can't describe it better myself. That is such a wonderful analogy and I am already visualizing how I'm going to make a cool meme out of this. So you were working with Pew and you were part of a team that developed all of the fascinating insights. Things that we hadn't really realized before how teens were using social media, how young adults were very digitally savvy and they literally would go to the Internet to ask their healthcare questions. Whereas a generation before we always went to our parents.

Susannah:                        06:16                   That's right. Or if we went and books or we only relied on clinicians for advice. What we saw when we were doing our initial research, this is back in the year 2000, 2001. We were looking at how people were using the Internet to gather information. You know, this was really pre-iPhone. It was pre-Google. People were stitching together research and finding ways not only to find information but to find each other. And that was one of the early indicators to me that social media was going to be huge because people were finding a way to be social when it was just bulletin boards, you know, shout out to the old school people who number would a BBS is or Listservs, you know, when it was just email communities.

Susannah:                        07:14                   What we saw even back then is that people are really thirsty for connection and in healthcare. People were starting to trade information and data and I should hasten to say that back then and today when you ask people when you need a diagnosis or you're formulating a treatment plan, who do you turn to for advice? And it's still the case that the vast majority of American adults turn to a clinician, but they will get a second opinion from family and friends. And from what I like to call Dr. Google,

Janet:                                07:54                   Well, you're maybe the only person who likes to call it Dr. Google. So and that's a big pushback from clinicians is they, they really get frustrated when inaccurate information is brought to them. Or a very broad range of information is they feel like they're not being very efficient in having to really allay people's concerns about information they don't like in the first place. So you know, my response to that is then you need to be creating the information that you want your patients to be seeing. That we need clinicians to step up and be producing content at a much higher rate.

Susannah:                        08:31                   Yeah. You know, I have a lot of empathy for people who have not yet gathered around one of those campfires had described. I have empathy for people who were raised and trained in a world where we didn't have access to the resources of the Internet and so one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about research and playing this role of ambassador between the research world and the clinical world and other places, is that we need to convince people with data. We can tell stories, but we also need to have data to show this is the majority of American adults and it's reaching now into populations that a lot of clinicians might not expect. It's reaching into older adult populations. It's reaching into people who are living in lower income households. People with a high school education are now likely to have a smartphone. I'm more often than they did five or 10 years ago, certainly, and so you know, I have empathy for people who feel like the landscape is shifting under their feet.

Susannah:                        09:43                   Oh, I agree totally. Although I will say, and this is going to date me a little bit when I was pregnant with my one and only son, I had the opportunity to potentially be the first person to use the labor delivery something something or where basically it was all done in one room because back in those days it was, you know, you were here for a while and they rolled into the delivery room and so they were just inventing this alternative kind of space and it was the oldest physician in the practice who was over 70 who really was hoping to be the first person to use that room. So I will defend the mature generation and say it isn't just generational regarding whether they're willing to adapt to new things. Because I see, for instance, in the entrepreneurial world, the average entrepreneur is over the age of 40, so we kind of get in our heads that it's all the millennial's in the digital natives, but I see all kinds of people in a more mature segment trying to learn and catch up.

Susannah:                        10:43                   I totally agree. Thank you for saying that. And what I've also heard in my fieldwork and talking to people who are living with life-changing diagnosis and rare conditions, is that the specialists that they go to value when patients have done a lot of homework, they value when patients come and say, well, I'm part of a worldwide network of people with this condition and we've all pooled our data. Here's what we believe, you know, can we investigate this? And so, you know, as we think about the spectrum of who is open to the Internet's impact on health and healthcare, we absolutely can't just talk about age and generational differences. You know, we can talk about specialty differences. You know, how our pediatricians different, for example, from geriatricians. And you know, one thing that I love is I'm really interested in the quality improvement movement as well and when I go to those meetings there so often dominated by pediatricians and I find that so fascinating that pediatricians seem to be really open to the possibility of change in their industry. And it actually dovetails really well with their audience being the moms and dads who are searching online for information that's a team that surrounds a child that's really ready to use all the information available to help that stay healthy.

Janet:                                12:12                   Oh. And I love what's happening over in the American Academy of Pediatrics. They are embracing social media. You can become a tweety attrition and help them share stories. And when I interviewed the president of the AAP a few years ago, one of the things that was said is that had pediatricians been online and active in social media in numbers that many years ago when the whole discussion of vaccines and autism came up, if they had been able to end moss respond authoritatively in social media, it might not have turned into something. But unfortunately, by being more passive about it, they let other people take their voice and really change healthcare for pediatricians. And so I think that part of their response and being open-minded is we can't afford not to be because we can see the devastation that can happen when pupil spread incorrect information.

Susannah:                        13:09                   Yeah, I love that story and think that it is a story that could be told across multiple disciplines. There are going to be other moments when there is misinformation when there is misunderstanding and so it really makes sense for clinicians to be ready and to have, you know, their field marshals out there ready to go on social media.

Speaker 1:                        13:34                   Absolutely. Because the other thing with knowledge comes wisdom and comes confidence and indeed comes hope because if nobody's responding with information that's accurate and correct, then people worry. So if you are there with them, don't worry. Here's what happens. You know, if you can imagine when we had to healthcare providers come to the United States with a confirmed exposure to a bola and how literally the whole country was freaking out. That's a time when we needed healthcare people. And many of them did step up and say, you don't have to worry. Don't panic.

Susannah:                        14:13                   That's right.

Janet:                                14:14                   Well, I think that's absolutely fascinating work now. You also then worked for the US Department of Health and Human Services. So tell me what the transition was like and what kind of projects you worked on when you were a government employee.

Susannah:                        14:27                   I should say that when I left the Pew Research Center it was because I felt that I couldn't write another research paper about the internet and healthcare. I felt like I. I had some answers and I wanted to try and get in the trenches a little bit and try to change things based on all the observational work and data collection that I'd done. And so first I went to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to work because of their entrepreneur in residence. While I was there, I got a call from Brian Civic and Todd Park. Todd was the first CTO at the US Department of Health and Human Services. He was appointed by President Obama to create that office and then had moved up to become the CTO of the White House. And Brian took the spot as HHS CTO and they called and said, we think that you're the third CTO, we think that you should be the next one, and I, I have to tell you, I said, no, no, no, no, you don't understand.

Susannah:                        15:29                   I'm really enjoying my work here at the foundation. Then they started describing what the portfolio does. So the portfolio of the office of the chief technology officer to HHS oversees the open house data initiative. Well, I love that initiative. That's really what I believe is going to unlock well being for a lot of people and that is that data should flow to where it needs to be, whether we're talking about national data in the realm of public health, whether we're talking about improving it at the practice level or whether you're going to give access to an individual. So they caught my attention to that and then the rest of the portfolio is so much about empowering HHS employees, whether they work at NIH or CDC or FDA or Indian health services to try new things, to act like they are entrepreneurs. Well, I couldn't resist the opportunity because I really do believe that a lot of the spirit of the Internet, which some people associate with silicon valley, but I really think now is is everywhere.

Susannah:                        16:45                   This idea that we should be experimented with, new ways to deliver care. I think that shouldn't be limited to startup companies and it was amazing to serve at HHS and to talk with people about how to unlock data, how to unlock the information that the federal government holds to better serve the American people. Now I should pause and say the other part of the role is to serve the leadership, to serve the secretary and the leadership at each of the operating divisions. As sort of a lookout and I sort of think about the role of the chief technology officer as someone who's up in the crow's nest of a ship, scanning the horizon for opportunities and for hazards in the technology landscape. And so that, for example, an opportunity that I saw in the landscape and then I brought to the leadership was this new movement towards not only innovation in software and data but in hardware like medical devices and assistive devices for people living with a disability.

Janet:                                17:57                   Oh, okay. Fascinating. Well, did you see the cybersecurity issues on the horizon?

Susannah:                        18:03                   So, yes. And cybersecurity was something that we discussed quite a bit and that was particularly in terms of how to handle, for example, data security around the blue button initiative. The Centers for Medicare Medicaid services created a way for Medicare beneficiaries to be able to download a simple text file of their claims data and the veteran's administration had done it first. The VA had created the blue button download for veterans. It had been really popular and so cms rolled out a version for Medicare beneficiaries and what my office did was start to work on the creation of an API so that Medicare beneficiaries could not only download the data but directed to an app of their choice. But what's very, very important here is that you need to make sure that it really is that Medicare beneficiary who's downloading the data that, that no one else is getting access to it because it is sensitive data. So that's an example of something that we worked on.

Janet:                                19:18                   Very, very cool. Now you're not necessarily a computer scientist by training, however.

Susannah:                        19:24                   No, I studied anthropology and. Okay.

Janet:                                19:29                   Tell me the correlation between.

Susannah:                        19:32                   Yeah, so when I was in school, so, so first I should say that I'm the daughter of an engineer and a journalist. My Dad was an engineer and my sister's an engineer. My brother's an engineer. And so I was an early Internet user at home because of my dad. He was the kind of person who would, who would read like C++ books at night for fun. And so I was not as manager to technology, but I studied anthropology because I saw it as a really interesting systematic way to understand society, to understand the culture. I use the skills of an anthropologist in my work as a researcher because most of the Pew Research Center's work is based on national surveys. But what I saw is that there was no way for us sitting in an office building in Washington dc we couldn't possibly understand and therefore ask good questions of Americans who are using the Internet for health and healthcare if we didn't get out there and listen if we didn't get out there and do fieldwork in the way that an anthropologist. And so when I was developing questionnaires, I would start by doing online surveys and online listening tours of people who were gathering in communities. And it turned out to be kind of a secret weapon. People would say. How were you able to predict the rise of mobile so early? How were you as the Pew Research Center at able to predict the rise of the importance of health data so early? And it was because of the field work that we did, talking to people, especially as I mentioned, with rare and life-changing diagnoses.

Janet:                                21:22                   And how did you do that exactly?

Susannah:                        21:25                   The first time we did this kind of field work? I was very, very fortunate to have a mentor in Tom and Tom was someone who had graduated from Yale Medical School. But decided that the most important thing for him to do was to find ways to empower people with health information. And by the way, this was in the 19 seventies, so selfies in seventies. Yeah. So in the sixties and seventies, he, for example, was the first medical editor of the whole earth catalog. And as soon as the internet came along, he understood that it was finally the platform that would allow people to connect with information. He really believed that people should get health education in the same way that we get drivers education. And so he became a, an advisor to us at the Pew Internet Project and he became a mentor to me personally and he knew all kinds of wonderful people who ran online communities. For example, John Lester and Dan Hoke Ram, the first online community for people with neurological issues, seizure disorder, traumatic brain injury. And so for example, one of our first pieces of fieldwork was in that community in doing a survey, asking people to tell us stories about what they learned by being part of that community.

Janet:                                22:54                   That is such a good example of go to the source and that I feel like sometimes our information is just rehashed versions of rehashed versions of older data and gee, old and the Internet feels like, you know, if you're more than three years old, your data, that could be a problem.

Susannah:                        23:13                   Absolutely, and what I also have found is that if you want to see the future, you should pay attention to what hackers are doing, what artists are doing, people who really push the edges of whatever field they're in and in healthcare. That is people living with rare and life-changing diagnoses. People who are living with ALS, for example. That was the motivation behind patients like me, which was a very early platform for people to collect and their own data about how they're reacting. For example, two different treatments and medications so that if you can track the progression of your disease, you might be able to see the future a little bit faster and crucially do need that data to the common meaning. It might benefit you, but it will certainly benefit the people who are behind you on the same path. That's again, something that I see as very, very hopeful that the internet can often unlock the ability for altruistic action and I really believed that it is part of human nature to want to help other people, the platforms where I like to hang out, those where people are helping each other.

Janet:                                24:38                   That's definitely one of the things I felt when I came into the healthcare community is that everyone was so willing to share information, to answer questions and to be helpful and I felt like it was a very nonjudgmental space. Now we have newer challenges as more and more people are joining social without necessarily having appropriate social skills, but that's something that as individuals we can aspire to improve.

Susannah:                        25:08                   Absolutely, and there are differences between open platforms where anyone can join and closed platforms where there's a little bit more moderation. There's a gate, if not a wall...

Janet:                                25:21                   and basic guidelines. If you come in here, this is going to be a place of good behavior.

Susannah:                        25:26                   Exactly. As opposed to the wild, wild west, which just now Facebook and Twitter and the other platforms are having to figure out retroactively how do you set rules for an environment that didn't have very many rules? So let me ask about where you are right now. You left the HHS position in January of 17. So what have you been up to? What I decided to do is get back into research because when I finished my service, yes, I looked around and saw that the Pew Research Center had decided not to continue my portfolio of health and technology research and really nobody had picked up that baton.

Janet:                                26:05                   I want to cry now.

Susannah:                        26:08                   Well in some ways our initial findings of how many people look online for health information became old hat. It became something that everyone assumed that everyone knows. And so what I am continually interested in is again, pushing the edges. So where are the new edges? It was edgy back in the year, 2000 to ask people about whether they are looking for a diagnosis online. Now the edges are more in terms of what I call peer to peer healthcare and we hadn't had a fresh measure of that since a survey that I did in 2012 and so I was approached by Hope Lab foundation in San Francisco to create a research project and national research project that asked teens and young adults about how they use social media and other digital health resources. They have a special interest not only in this age group, 40 to 22-year-olds, but they and a partner that came onto the project, the wellbeing trust have a special interest in emotional wellbeing and so in addition to asking traditional questions about how people use the internet to gather, share and create health information, we also ask questions about whether the respondents were experiencing depressive symptoms and so it's through that lens that we were able to do some really interesting analysis about emotional wellbeing.

Janet:                                27:41                   Well, since you're talking to this age group, obviously the topic of online and cyberbullying is really big. Now we know that kids are bullies and have been bullied since kids were kids. So my question is, are you finding comparing offline bullying to online bullying, is it worse?

Susannah:                        28:00                   So we didn't go after the bullying question straight on. What we were interested to find out is whether social media is a platform that makes teens and young adults feel better about themselves or feels worse about themselves, for example. And bullying is one aspect of that. We were also interested in hearing from them directly. So in addition to asking traditional survey questions, we made sure that the survey included five essay questions. This was an online survey. So that's the magic doing an online survey. It allows for an open-end set of questions. And so we ask people, tell us the story about when you've gone online and use social media, did it make you feel bad or did it make you feel good? Tell us the story about those things. And cyberbullying was mentioned, but not as often as other aspects of social media.

Susannah:                        28:59                   The dreaded FOMO, fear of missing out was part of it. People also mentioned that seemed like everybody else was doing better in life, but you know, it was really interesting is that there were more stories about how teens and young adults are using social media to boost their spirits, to find inspiration. You know, there were a lot of stories about people who carry their social media feed to make sure that they really see positive images. They talk about how if I'm feeling low while I go on Instagram and I look at funny cat memes and that cheers me up, or another person wrote about how they follow accounts that share inspirational biblical quotes and that really helps them to feel better. And so I think what's emerging is more of an understanding that social media can be used as a tool and that we have an opportunity to help educate people about how to use it as a tool for positive outcomes. And that that's actually something I'm really excited for. All kinds of people to explore. Whether it's in healthcare, whether it's educators, whether it's policymakers, whether it's technology companies. Looking at this data and seeing that this is already happening. How can we boost the signal on using social media for good?

Janet:                                30:27                   All right, well I. I hate to be a devil's advocate, but I'm going to do it anyway. If everybody is filtering only for the good, now in some cases the good is only what I want to hear, but what you end up is that whole silo or you're in a vacuum and you're just reinforcing. Now I get what I get what you're saying about young adults and wanting to only read positive things, but that means they're reading nothing about politics and if we want to engage them in society, they've got to be getting some information about what's going on in the world around them.

Susannah:                        31:04                   Absolutely. So these questions pertain to when you're feeling low, what do you do so that it wasn't necessarily about how do you gather information about current events? Because actually, the Pew Research Center is continuing to do research about that. They have some new data about how people are using social media to gather information about current events and as you might expect, it's a pretty high level, especially among young adults. So it's not a question of turning away from current events or politics, it's a question of when you yourself are feeling sad, how do you use social media and empowering people to to frankly put down their phone if they know that social media makes them feel bad, then telling people it's okay. You don't have to look at Facebook today. You can put down your phone if it's making you feel sad.

Janet:                                32:06                   See, that was my next question. You already answered it, which is sometimes social media is not the solution and going out for a walk or go and have a coffee with friends. It really is.

Susannah:                        32:18                   Absolutely. And people told stories about that as well. And in our survey that they say, when I'm feeling low, I put down my phone, I go offline, I call somebody and say, you know, can we get together? One aspect which I thought you might be interested in is people who are potentially in a minority group are isolated, are likely to go online and look for other people like them. And I'm thinking here of teens and young adults who are in the LGBTQ population, they were more likely, um, unfortunately, to report that they were experiencing depressive symptoms and more likely to use social media to reach out to other people. We had a question where we asked, have you read, listened to or watched other people share about their health experiences online and LGBTQ youth were more likely than those who you know as, as they say, cisgender and street youth to go online and look for people who were telling their stories online.

Susannah:                        33:29                   And that can be is really important because so often in healthcare social media circles, we talk about the value of sharing stories and here's some data that shows how important it is. If there is an audience out there, what's also important is you never know who's going to watch that story, who's going to watch that video, who's gonna read that blog post and it's really going to make a difference and they might not leave a comment you might not know that you made. And that's why I was so passionate to do this research and what law. Let me just tell you, it's 61 percent of all teens and young adults in the United States say they've read, listened to or watched other people share about their health experiences online, positive or negative, positive or negative.

Janet:                                34:22                   Oh Wow. That's huge. That's a huge number. And particularly when we talk about how hard or younger demographics are to reach, put the information out there, make it available. They'll find it obviously.

Susannah:                        34:35                   Well that's what we're finding out is especially video.

Speaker 1:                        34:38                   Oh, that's interesting. So what about the level of anonymity that some people in the communities, the communities that are concerned about exposure? Are they finding that it's literally going on camera and being seen is what helps?

Susannah:                        34:54                   So we didn't ask the question. This survey specifically about data security or anonymity. What my friends who study privacy and security tell me is that younger people are quite savvy about cloaking their identity if they want to. They are able to create throwaway emails to register for a site under a pseudonym, for example, and it's actually older adults, baby boomers who are less likely to be as savvy about cloaking their identity online. So that's one aspect of that I think is an opportunity across the board for education. If you want to remain anonymous, what are the ways that you can do that?

Janet:                                35:42                   And what is going to be the end result of all this information that you've been gathering through Hope Lab?

Susannah:                        35:48                   We published a report at the end of July that goes into detail about how teens and young adults use digital health tools and then we had a whole chapter specifically about looking at it through the lens of the teens and young adults who are living with depressive symptoms versus those who are not. And so that report is available for free on the Hope Lab website.

Janet:                                36:14                   Great. Well to those folks listening, I will have a link in the show notes so that you can get right to that and take a look at this. Well, that's fascinating. Now you've taken 15 years of research, in particular, your most recent research and you're going to be speaking at the Mayo Clinic, social media networks annual meeting, which as a reminder is going to be November 14 and 15 of 2018 in Jacksonville, Florida. At the Mayo campus and your topic is to share, connect, engage social media as a platform for hope. Now we've talked about hope and I think you and I are singing to the choir here that we definitely believe that social media has many, many positive things going for it. Uh, and that we shouldn't be turning our backs on it just because we hear things that we don't necessarily want to hear. That said, what is your topic going to address?

Susannah:                        37:06                   What I hope to do with this talk is give the choir some data. So often when I'm talking to people, whether it's an audience, as you say, of preaching to the choir or it's an audience of skeptics. I like to come with data that shows that the facts are on the ground. This is how many people are using these tools in various demographic groups across, you know, income and education groups. And so if you want to reach people, then you need to reach people through social media. What I'm also going to do is tell some of the stories that I've collected in my fieldwork of examples of how people have been able to connect to each other to find the clinical trial that they needed to find the doctor for their child or for their loved one, and to say to this audience, use this data to convince your colleagues to convince your funders, whoever it is that controls the information silos in your organization or who controls the budget.

Susannah:                        38:22                   Make sure that they know how many people, for example, are using their phones to look for information and use that data to help them to see how important it is to make every healthcare website mobile first. Not just mobile friendly, and that once you make your information find-able and shareable, that's how we're really going to help unlock well-being because you'll have agents you don't even know about who is out there ready to collect information and share it in their neighborhoods. Whether it's a virtual neighborhood or a real neighborhood, an offline neighborhood. There are so many people who want to connect to science who want to connect to fact-based information and who then want to be able to share it. So how do we empower those people to be part of healthcare?

Janet:                                39:24                   You know, one of the statistics from Pew that I often quoted my teaching is that a 10 percent of mobile users, their phone is their computer is their only access to the internet, so it's not like they're glancing here and then they're going to go home and open up the laptop. That's their only source of access to the Internet.

Susannah:                        39:46                   That is true and, and something that's, that's important to know is that that's often the lower socioeconomic status folks who are mobile only and so sometimes I'll speak to, for example, a group of hospital CEOs and there'll be from a whole range of communities, some serve a safety net population, some sort of a higher income population. And what I always tell them is, is that by making sure your information is mobile friendly and even better mobile first you are serving all populations. You're serving that mobile-only safety net population as well as the higher income folks who are also using their smartphones to gather health.

Janet:                                40:34                   Fascinating. Now, this project ended in July. Does that mean you're now getting new clients for your, for your practice?

Susannah:                        40:42                   Yeah. I got permission from the Pew Research Center to take the portfolio that I created there and republish it as an Ebook, so I'm working on that project and we'll be writing new introductions to that material because what I find is that some of the material is evergreen. You know, we, we need to update some of the numbers, but in looking back at what I published in 2012 and 2013, it really is salient today's population. So I'm working on that and yeah, I'm actually looking for partners to work on a survey of the adult population in the US since the Hope Lab and well-being trust survey focused on teens and young adults. I now really to do a survey that renews our data about older adults.

Janet:                                41:39                   Absolutely. I mean, my eyes were opened this morning listening to an NPR story about medical cannabis clinics, getting buses and going to senior centers and picking people up and bringing them over to go shopping or learn about cannabis and who'd have thought?

Susannah:                        41:57                   Yeah, and we're really just at the beginning, hopefully of a whole range of possibilities and innovations for older adults. You know, it's a passion of mine because I see such an opportunity. That's one of those things, you know, being up in the crow's nest, we're looking at across the landscape, it's both an iceberg and potential paradise island of opportunity. We're going to have a population of older adults that I'm not sure that we're really ready for in terms of our caregiver population and so wow, we really need to think about how to care for older adults and there's great innovation to be had.

Janet:                                42:39                   Absolutely. Well, Susannah, I'm thrilled that you joined the podcast today and I really look forward to meeting you in person at the Mayo Clinic, social media networks annual conference coming up November 14th and 15th in Jacksonville, Florida. It's going to be easy to find when you Google online, but socialmedia.MayoClinic.Org. We'll get you to the right place and I so, so appreciate your time today. Fascinating. As always, I have pages of notes and I'm definitely going to be looking into some of the things that you referenced today, particularly Hope Lab and the well-being trust. Thank you so much for joining me.

Susannah:                        43:17                   Thank you.

Announcer:                      43:19                   And now here's a social media success tip.

Farris Timimi:                   43:22                   Hi, I'm Ferris Timimi with the Get Social Health podcast. My social media tip would be for healthcare providers. Consider social media strategy's not as a broadcast medium, but rather as a listening strategy to truly understand the lived experience of a patient as they progress through their disease to recovery. There can be no better avenue for gathering real-world data.

Announcer:                      43:46                   You've been listening to, they Get Social Health podcast. The show notes are located at getsocialhealth.com to join our healthcare social media journey, follow at, Get Social Health on Twitter and start a conversation.

Janet:                                44:03                   Thanks for listening to the Get Social Health podcast. A production of the healthcare marketing network and a proud member of the healthcare podcasters community. I'd like to do to take a moment to tell you a bit about the healthcare marketing network. We're a community of freelance healthcare writers. Our organization can match your company or healthcare practice with clinically accurate, specialized or general healthcare and medical content from blogs to white papers. To see the healthcare marketing network has the writers you need to reach your business audience or patients. To find out more, visit healthcare marketing network.com or contact me via social media or email me at janet@healthcaremarketingnetwork.com. Thanks for listening to the Get Social Health podcast.

Reach out to Susannah Fox:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/susannah-fox-b27450/

Meet Michael Sengbusch

Since leaving Influence Health in 2017, Michael Sengbusch joined ATDC as the CTO-in-Residence. ATDC is Georgia's oldest, largest, and most influential startup incubator. At ATDC he mentors and advises over 40 startups in Atlanta. Michael continues to be actively involved in both healthcare and marketing technology. He will be speaking at Healthbox Studio in October on healthcare marketing topics.

On the Get Social Health podcast, Janet interviews Michael Sengbusch about Facebook and marketing for healthcare systems. Give a listen or review the transcript notes below:

Janet: 00:00 Podcasting is a fun, yet sometimes time-consuming passion. As some of you may have noticed, I took a little hiatus from podcasting so I could focus on the launch of the Healthcare Marketing Network, a company that brings together healthcare companies with healthcare writers. I'll tell you more about the Healthcare Marketing Network at the end of the podcast. However, in taking my little leave of absence, I had previously recorded a few interviews that hadn't been published. Today's conversation is with Michael Sengbusch, a healthcare technology and marketing expert. In my intro, you'll hear that I mentioned where he was working at the time of the interview, but I've got a little update on Michael's career since we recorded this interview.

Janet: 00:42 Michael Sengbusch, left Influence Health in 2017 and joined the advanced technology development center as their CTO in residence. ATDC is Georgia's oldest, largest and most influential startup incubator. Hosted by Georgia Tech at ATDC, Michael mentors and advises over 40 startups in Atlanta. He continues to be actively involved in both healthcare and marketing technology and will be speaking at Healthbox studio in October on healthcare marketing topics.

Janet: 01:14 Now let's jump into our conversation, a Facebook, so needed for marketing yet such a challenge to manage for healthcare. Today I'm speaking with healthcare marketing and technology expert, Michael Sengbusch about Facebook tracking and CRM on Get Social Health.

Announcer: 01:37 Welcome to Get Social Health, a conversation about social media and how it's being used to help hospitals, social practices, healthcare practitioners and patients connect and engage via social media. Get Social Health, brings you conversations with professionals, actively working in the field and provides real-life examples of healthcare, social media in action. Here is your host, Janet Kennedy on Get Social Health.

Janet: 02:05 I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of different people in my field, but occasionally I run across someone who we should have crossed paths ages ago. I don't know how I haven't met or talked to Michael Sengbusch. Yes, but the day is my day. I'm really excited about it. Michael is currently serving as the Influence Health senior VP and GM of Consumer Experience. Michael has established credibility through the healthcare industry as a thought leader in digital healthcare marketing and with expertise in leveraging Facebook as a successful patient acquisition channel. I know my listeners are going to be really excited about how that works. Welcome to Get Social Health, Michael.

Michael: 02:48 Thanks for having me today.

Janet: 02:49 All right. I want to jump right to how does Facebook bring patients in, but I think we need to set a few background stories here to get people up. Speed. So first off, do you mind sharing a little bit about your background and how you got into healthcare and social media?

Michael: 03:07 That's actually kind of an interesting story. So my background is in technology and in computer science, so I've been kind of trained and spent the first half of my career as a software developer as an engineer and it kind of took that path and got more into product development and then sales and startups. And then I was at a startup. I was one of the early members of a company called bright whistle and we were doing digital marketing technology and we were exploring different spaces and we kind of stumbled upon a gap in a healthcare marketing technologies, particularly in the provider space with hospitals and so I don't think when we started that we decided to go attack healthcare marketing for healthcare providers, but we did kind of stumble into that based on some connections that we hadn't realized that it was an underserved area.

Michael: 03:56 There was a lot of opportunity there and we decided to just go heads down and work on digital marketing for healthcare providers and health systems across the country and that's what was created as Bright Whistle which was acquired about two and a half years ago by Influence Health and I've stuck around here for the last couple of years and helped integrate those platforms together and it's really kind of a grown from there.

Janet: 04:20 No, that's exciting. You actually survived an acquisition and ended up coming out on top, so congratulations to you. Tell me a little bit about the award that you won in 2014 at Bright Whistle.

Michael: 04:32 One of the early things that we were doing was experimenting with Social Media Marketing and if you go back to 2000, 10, 2011, social media was new and social media marketing was extremely new and in healthcare it was bleeding edge if not unheard of. And so while we were doing a lot of search marketing and social marketing for, for health systems and hospitals, we were bringing that to the table and one of the reasons why we were able to do that kind of so early was we were one of the early companies that was building software and technology on top of the Facebook marketing API and when we worked with Facebook early on, the different marketing partners that they accepted in program all really had to have something unique and different about them. So you know, what were you going to bring to the table? Now some of these companies brought scale. They brought big advertisers, big dollars. We brought healthcare and that was just kind of a weird. It was, it was kind of weird for Facebook at the time. What are you guys doing in healthcare? That seems a little, it seems odd.

Michael: 05:34 but that seems interesting because we know it's important. So we didn't represent a huge market share as it relates to marketing. We didn't drive a whole ton of advertising, but we brought a really interesting story to the table. So working really closely with Facebook to do marketing a technology. We participated in the 2014 Facebook innovation competition and that brings all the Facebook marketing partners together. People submit different case studies and applications from all across the globe. So there's thousands of Facebook marketing partners, and we were awarded the winner and in our category and we were able to win that for some of the really interesting marketing group doing it Facebook, but more importantly, not just the marketing, but what we were doing with the data and how we were actually measuring the results of those marketing campaigns. So, we won that by actually using Facebook targeting Facebook marketing and then tying that to a healthcare CRM to figure out attribution and figure out what type of marketing campaigns actually generated results in a clinical setting.

Janet: 06:42 So that's really, really exciting. Now, is that still an operation? Is that part of the Influence Health program?

Michael: 06:48 Yeah, that was actually the beginning stages of what we would call kind of our next generation CRM solution and CRM and healthcare has been something that's been changing a lot over the last few years and one of the key components to any kind of CRM system is being able to use that not just for the outbound targeting but also that consumer experience which happens after somebody responded to a marketing campaign. So how do I learn more about that person, how do I personalize that information and then how do I use the data that I have in the CRM system, clinical information, claims information, diagnosis information in order to learn more about how that person made the healthcare decision that they made and then which channels can I better communicate to them through that?

Michael: 07:34 So that was kind of the early stages of what we call a healthcare CRM and that makes up a big portion of what we do here at Influence Health.

Janet: 07:42 Well, I do want to ask you a question about CRM and crossover. So when you talk about CRM, you literally are talking about patient information, not a marketing database or the email lists that's used by the marketing team to send out the newsletter for the hospital.

Michael: 08:00 Yeah, I think those start to bleed together. So in a sense, depending on who you're talking about, sometimes it could be two different things and sometimes it is the same thing and that's kind of where I think you've seen marketing bleed into what you would call, you know, either CRM or into data to analytics to population health, customer service, patient satisfaction. All those things start to come together. The more you centralize that data source.

Janet: 08:27 Although I am confused or concerned at what point does a patient's HIPAA information become a problem? I know you're obviously not looking at individual patient records and you don't have access at that level, but at what point is it reasonable to assume that if I am a patient of a particular hospital and you have this information about me that you have tied together, the fact that I like your Facebook page and I click on these links, is that what you're saying you're able to do?

Michael: 08:59 It's a little bit more decoupled than that. So we do deal with a clinical information and patient records and that makes kind of the bulk of a healthcare CRM. So a healthcare CRM is really a combination of the clinical record combined with demographic and socioeconomic information. We use that information to run analytics, to do outbound campaigns, to pull an email list.

Michael: 09:21 That's a very simple example when it comes to the Facebook side of things. What we're using is the native Facebook targeting capabilities and then we are using the conversions that we're getting through a target audience that we maybe have identified inside the Facebook and any conversions that happened through that. Whether it's somebody making a phone call, you know, maybe somebody's talking to a call center, somebody filling out a form or registering for an event. That information does make its way into the healthcare CRM database and that can be used for marketing standpoint, in which case none of the PHI has revealed or it can be used from an analytic standpoint in which case you mind into the clinical data to look at things like procedure codes and diagnosis codes and contribution margins and that type of more detailed clinical information.

Janet: 10:10 I didn't even realize that this magical ability to combine social data and patient information actually existed.

Janet: 10:20 So for instance, with your tool, you can create an advertising campaign on Facebook and say, I want to target prediabetic diabetes patients and I know I need to be including these kinds of demographics. Or is that an oversimplification?

Michael: 10:40 Facebook opens up literally thousands of different demographic and socioeconomic targeting attributes directly in Facebook. So that's probably something that anybody who's new to Facebook marketing probably doesn't understand about how Facebook actually makes money. I think most people think about Facebook marketing to in terms of I'm going to go after my fan base, you know, and targeting your fans is what we would call organic social and you have a relationship with your fans and that's a way in which you can communicate to them, I would say kind of the first generation of Facebook. That's kind of what people did, right? That was kind of the standard way to do any type of marketing.

Michael: 11:22 There's a lot of limitations to that. Couple ones are your fan base is limited. I'm your fan base is not necessarily made up of people that you want to market to. Especially with the health system. You'll find that a lot of people who are fans of a health systems Facebook page aren't usually patients. A lot of times their friends and family of people who work there, so it's not really a great targeting pool. So then it opens up the rest of kind of Facebook marketing and what people don't usually understand about how Facebook actually makes money and how they sell ad space to marketers is Facebook is buying, you know, millions upon millions of consumer records. So Facebook will partner with folks like Experian data logics, Axiom, Bluekai, who are the same type of consumer companies that you use to do any type of consumer analysis, right? Wherever you could do direct mail or, or whatever. Facebook buys all that data and then they match it to your record inside of Facebook. they do a cross reference and they make all of those hundreds and hundreds of attributes available back to marketers who are doing marketing. And that's how you get access to things like demographic, socioeconomic, income, education, ethnicity, all those types of targeting parameters become available via Facebook, through their acquisition of third-party consumer data.

Janet: 12:43 Okay. I have actually purchased ads on behalf of some healthcare clients and we're doing things generally with demography, but more targeting who likes this page, who likes this association, who has an interest in this, a healthcare organization or this health issue. So, because I'm usually with my clients doing B to b business to business tracking. But what you're saying is the hospital could be actually looking for patient profiles in.

Michael: 13:18 Yeah and the best analogy for that is healthcare CRM has existed for healthcare for probably the last seven, eight, nine years. Those types of marketing databases, the same type of queries that you would run on those, you can find good substitutes for those just querying directly into Facebook. So that's a real easy way to open up Facebook audiences to be much bigger than just your fan base. You know, Facebook really about four years ago, five years ago, really turned their ecosystem into a pay for play kind of environment where there was not a lot of free marketing left inside of Facebook. You had to go pay, you had to run ads. It was inserting suggested content in newsfeed posts and sponsored stories directly into the newsfeed, was the way in which to actually reach your audience that you wanted to get to. so from a healthcare standpoint, that opens up a couple things.

Michael: 14:12 The first thing that opens up is it's the largest audience that you can reach at any given point in time, online period, end of story, right? So if you had to pick one channel, if you are going to focus your dollars on Facebook's going to be the channel that you're going to want to spend those dollars. It's the largest and most engaged audience that you can find online. Certainly in North America. And you can spend $5. Yeah. And it's very cost effective where if you try to compare that to what you might do in Google, so the Google would be the other primary paid channel. Google is also highly effective and most health systems are very familiar with how to do Google ad words into how to use google to identify and capture demand. The thing with healthcare in Google though is that it can be very expensive because medical related keywords and Google can have a pretty high price tag, so highly effective, but it could be less efficient with your marketing dollars because it can be very expensive.

Michael: 15:13 Facebook has a wider reach and a more engaged audience, so that was the first part. Second part is that it also opens up mobile where most of the traffic that you're going to see on Facebook is mobile. If you're going to do a mobile first web strategy, you should have a mobile first marketing strategy and for us we think that that's a Facebook strategy. I think the stat is something like one out of every five minutes spent on a mobile device is spent within Facebook, which is just an insane number. Very embarrassing for me to admit that that's true. I get to say I do this for a living, so I have a reason to keep opening Facebook. Exactly, and it cuts across. You know, if you're, if you're going to go mobile, right? If, if, if that's your strategy. The reason why I think it's effective is I think mobile's the one medium that kind of cuts across demographic and socioeconomic boundaries where you know, mobile, you can reach a urban audience in a rural audience, you can reach an older and a younger population.

Michael: 16:11 You can reach a affluent and a middleclass and a poor population. Everybody has a smartphone, and this wasn't true five years ago, six years ago, but now the numbers are astounding about where people choose to use their dollars and that first purchase really from a technology standpoint, is to have a smartphone where that, you know, that technology barrier they used to talk about was, you know, there's homes in households that couldn't afford a computer, you know, and that's still true, but they can afford a smartphone and you really capture everybody in that medium and Facebook is the way to do it. So Facebook's the way you're actually going to have the paid channel to go open up that audience on mobile. So that's the other reason. In addition to the targeting capabilities, which I mentioned earlier, when you talk about doing Facebook marketing and advertising, obviously I assume you you're working with the marketing channel, but do you find the clinical side of the house is interested in this data as well?

Michael: 17:10 I think the clinical side of the house is more interested in understanding the data, less about the marketing. What I hear when we talk to marketing departments is the difference between the clinical folks, the marketing folks, the population health financial folks. I think the thing that they all have in common is they all want to see some type of results and they want to see some type of measurement. That's where I really like to focus on the data side of it and that's why the CRM side of things is, is pretty interesting. Social for me starts to become kind of that second pillar of a two pronged kind of paid digital strategy and I think everybody is comfortable with using social as a channel just for engagement but also for acquisition and that wasn't always the case when we were doing this kind of five or six years ago.

Michael: 17:55 We got a lot of blank stares around how we were going to use that channel. I'm not just for communication but also for for acquisition. I think everybody's really comfortable with that now to the point where they actually expect it and I think the users have come to expect it as well and health systems have caught up to the point where they're very comfortable working in that medium where it was. That wasn't the case three or four or five years ago.

Janet: 18:21 What would you say healthcare is still uncomfortable with?

Michael: 18:25 That's a good question. I have this discussion a lot with marketing departments in. It's usually the difference between what I call, you know, HIPAA and PHI versus their privacy policy and I think these two things get conflated quite a bit in the healthcare marketing environment where what is usually a limitation of a privacy policy is kinda confused with legal guidelines and recommendations under HIPAA because they're two totally different things.

Michael: 18:55 Right? So how you choose to communicate to a patient or prospective patient is usually covered under a privacy policy and what you see for most health systems and a privacy policy are very old, very antiquated privacy policies that were put together by an overly conservative compliance and legal department and those type of rules and restrictions usually have to deal with. If somebody has given me their information online or through the patient portal or through a form or from an inquiry, what am I limited in doing with that information and that has nothing to do with HIPAA. That has to do with the privacy policy and the website says, if you fill out some information here, we're not going to use it for marketing. Well, plenty of health systems have more liberal policies and their privacy policies, which then gives them the ability to do standard type marketing communication such as send me an email, but respect if I opt out, you can communicate to me in many different channels, but respect if I opt out or tune out that message.

Michael: 20:03 Those things are applicable and available depending on the privacy policy. All that says is if a patient is providing information, how do you treat that information? Do you keep it secure, then mitigate risk, how do you choose to use that information based on what they've authorized you to use it for? So it's usually two different things and I talked to kind of compliance departments and marketing teams about understanding the difference and what necessarily is legal versus what is allowed under your own guidelines.

Janet: 20:39 Okay. So in the Facebook world, and if I am a small business or even a healthcare organization, I have an email list of marketing email list. I can upload the email addresses only, no other information whatsoever. Facebook will try to match them and they'll say, oh, guess what? We found about a third of your patients or customers we have now matched and we've created this magical file that we have tagged who your customers are. We now are going to destroy your email list. We don't keep it, we don't use it, we promise, we promise, and then you, you, you can use that to build your own custom audience. And then you can tell Facebook, okay, now find people who look like my people but who are not my people. Sounds great. But somewhere along the line, because this is patient information, is there an approval process necessary?

Michael: 21:34 Yeah. And that again goes back to your privacy policy. So a couple things on the process that you just walked through which is in line with what we've, what we do with some health systems. If their privacy policy and their compliance officers approve it. So a couple things on that. First thing is you never send an email address to Facebook. So that's kind of a misconception is the email just never gets to Facebook. On our own servers, we do what's called a hash encryption and that information is sent to Facebook, so the email address has never sent and the information that you send to Facebook can never be unhappy, so it's completely like a one-way encryption essentially of that information. So because of that, there's absolutely no way to ever have a breach. Would that information and the HIPAA and privacy guidelines, the intent of them is to mitigate risks, risk to make sure that you don't have some type of inexperience or an Equifax breach and there's absolutely no way in the protocol that's used to send that information to Facebook that you could ever have a breach.

Michael: 22:35 So that's the first thing. The second thing is when they do identify those people, they never tell you what people are actually identified. So if you send a thousand people that's been hashed information, Facebook, they matched 700 of them. You never actually know which 700 and neither does Facebook. So it sits in a way in which it's a one-way mapping which can never be downloaded or breached or have any type of intelligence about who that person is. So that scenario, we've worked with many kinds of compliance departments and legal folks at health systems and that's usually sufficient once you walk through that and explain to them how it works, they're cool. In fact, what I find, what happens more often is people use the same email addresses and they're sending them to Mailchimp or constant contact or other far less secure places than sending it to Facebook.

Janet: 23:28 Okay. I'm glad you said all of that because that was obviously the one disconnect that I needed to have clarified and that little five minutes is now going to be the piece I share with everyone because I have talked to lawyers about it and they do fall back to the privacy policy, but for most part they're not really aware of the ins and outs of how data a gets to a location b. all right. So I feel really good about that. So I'm going to encourage a lot of people to consider doing that. but tell me about where you want to take all this fascinating data and intelligence. Are you doing anything with data visualization and, and looking at a bigger picture about trends about how people are, are using a Facebook and, and is that actually triggering visits to a healthcare provider?

Michael: 24:20 Yeah. So I think as it relates specifically to Facebook, I'm a couple of years ago when I would talk about Facebook, I kind of changed how we frame Facebook. So it used to be kind of framed as hey are you doing social media marketing? And then a couple of years ago I kinda changed our approach and that kind of stopped calling it social media marketing and just lumped it in with digital marketing because it's less about the social side of it and more about this is just the dominant place to reach people online. And the fact that it happens to be social in nature is kind of besides the point now where, you know, Facebook is. I mean it hasn't gone anywhere. It's been around for over 10 years, continues to grow their numbers, look, continue to look strong. Their revenue numbers are strong.

Michael: 25:09 Other competition that comes up like an Instagram, they buy Instagram, Snapchat comes up and they just replicate all of Snapchat's features. So they buy Whatsapp, you know, they create messenger so they're kind of here to stay. So it's Kinda like, you know, rather than saying, do, do you do search marketing? It's like it's google, you know, google is kind of like Google one, right? Facebook kind of one this side of it. And when it comes to digital ad spend, there's two dominant players. It's Google and then Facebook and everybody else behind that are niche players at best when it comes to the ad dollars that they consume. So it's really less than it being social because there's lots of cool social things about it. And almost anything you do online today has some type of a social component, right? Is plugged into some type of a social graph.

Michael: 26:07 It has some type of engagement or commentary or some network effects in place. So everything's kind of social. So treating Facebook as a social media marketing I think is kind of besides the point, and I think of it as I have a limited number of channels that I can go out to with my limited marketing dollars because we deal with health systems and in the grand scheme of things, health system is still kind of a small business when it comes to the amount of marketing dollars that they spend. You know it's not IBM. It's not Coca-Cola, you know they don't. They don't have a ton of money and so you have to be really careful about what channels you use because your marketing dollars are limited and you want to make sure that they're going to the most efficient channels. And to me, the top two are going to be Google and Facebook and everything else. You have to make a really strong case to want to spend money in those channels after you've saturated Google and Facebook.

Janet: 27:02 When you work with clients, you're coming in because you have a lot of answers and capabilities in the digital space and the online space. But the way I hear you're talking, I'm hearing that while there shouldn't be social media marketing or digital marketing, now I'm wondering is, is it all just marketing now and at what point are we going to stop having a digital online budget and a traditional budget and it's all just one budget?

Michael: 27:31 That's exactly the way people should be thinking about it. And I think what I've learned from doing this over the last six or seven years is people used to ask, you know, they would say, well, what channel is better or what's better should I use this or that? And what I've learned is, you know, it depends, you know, different service lines have different calls to action, different, goals. And you know, running an orthopedic campaign is a lot different than running a pediatrics campaign or a breast cancer awareness campaign. You know, we're running a bariatric surgery, campaign and all those things have different nuances about who's the audience, how do you want to engage them, where do they respond, what are the costs in the individual channels that you could use? And I think they're all kind of different and you do them enough and you start to figure out that there's a different combination that works and all those combinations of channels and budget levels are really just kind of starting points and then you figure out what's working in that individual market for that specific health system and then you go from there.

Michael: 28:34 So I think that's a long way of saying, yeah, it should be treated as all one budget and then you figure out what's my most efficient allocation that are the channels that are going to drive the best results. And then you go from there. I don't think it's one hard fast rule about what you should use or shouldn't use, let alone do I carve out different budgets for your digital versus offline. I think it should all be looked at together and then you make a decision based on what you believe is gonna be the most efficient allocation.

Janet: 29:02 Now one of the things I'm hearing from you is really an evangelism for understanding the holistic role of marketing and of digital in the whole. And I understand that in the sense you are a thought leader and you're going out to share this evangelism, you're really on a speaking tour, are hitting a lot of conferences. So where are you going to be going in the next few months to tell people about, these new ideas.

Michael: 29:31 Thanks for mentioning that. I try to stay engaged with the healthcare marketing community as best I can. We were at SHSMD a couple of weeks ago and coming up here October 23rd through the 25th is going to be HCIC healthcare Internet conference that's going to be an Austin, Texas and I'll be doing a panel discussion there, which I'm really looking forward to. It's going to be on the role of healthcare CRM and what does that mean moving forward. And like I was saying before, you know, CRM is a big piece of what I've been working on recently and marketing is a huge component to a, to a CRM system. So if anybody is going to be in Austin, Texas, October 23rd to 24th will be at the HCIC, a healthcare Internet conference that center since it's, since we brought it up that they actually, the health care conference I think has always been the best, for the customers and for the industries and the products that I work with lately.

Michael: 30:34 I think it's always the right mix of people. It's not too big. It's not too small. Always has a pretty good sense of what is trying to accomplish. The speakers are usually pretty good at the conference is not too long and again, it's not too short. so hci is coming up and then also in 2018 I will be speaking at HIMSS this year and looking forward to that hymns. For anybody who's not aware is enough. That's going to be March fifth through March ninth in Las Vegas and I'll be doing a speaking session there with Christus health. Christus health is a health system in Texas, actually much larger than that, but their headquarters in Texas. And we're going to be talking about how to leverage healthcare CRM beyond marketing and since we're talking primarily about kind of social and social media marketing on this call today on this podcast, I really start to see marketing bleed into a lot of different areas and marketing I think has got a lot of attention over the last five years in healthcare, but I think they're taking on more and more responsibilities and various departments are starting to kind of bleed together.

Michael: 31:50 Is it a patient satisfaction? Is it customer service? Is it population health? All of these things start to converge and marketing's, they're converging with it as, as well. with how do you actually manage a patient population? How do I communicate with the community? How do I know more about my healthcare consumers so that I can better not just better market to them, but then how can I better engage with them once they come in to the health system. And that's something that healthcare, particularly the healthcare providers are learning how to do. And as compared to other industries, they're really not very good at it, you know, and they're, they're getting a lot better.

Janet: 32:26 Well, let me ask you to put your prognosticators hat on and as you are a little bit on cutting edge here, when we talk about CRM and things happening in the digital space, what you see as big changes coming down the pike, either that we can avoid the, might as well embrace it or that really could be game changers from a standpoint of healthcare marketing and slash or social media.

Michael: 32:52 Let me touch on the last point there first. So as it relates to healthcare and social media, first of all, Facebook isn't going anywhere. I think after four years or five years of Facebook, people are like, oh, is this a fad? Is this going to be my space? Or something like that. Nope. Facebook one, it's dominant. It's a platform for the next 15 to 20 years. Easily. Facebook is not going anywhere. Twitter's kind of a dud when it comes to marketing. So I was really positive on Twitter about two or three years ago and have not seen any of the campaigns that we've run in Twitter, provide a meaningful challenge to what we're seeing in Facebook or google. So I think Twitter is kind of missed the boat when it comes to a paid marketing channel. Like I said before, Instagram is part of Facebook and I see a lot of great things in Instagram.

Michael: 33:43 So Facebook makes it pretty easy to extend your marketing campaigns into Instagram now. So I think that's big. Snapchat I think is you're kind of number three player in the social space. I dunno if it's great for health systems yet they haven't really figured out how to turn it into a direct response or a conversion channel. It's more for brands, you know. So it's getting big branding dollars from national and international advertisers don't see it being a big channel for, for health systems yet. I'm one of the channels I'm more interested in from a marketing side is actually next door. So I don't know if any of the listeners have used next door. Next door is a neighborhood social network and as far as an ideal audience for health systems, I think next door could be really interesting, so that's something to be on the lookout for.

Janet: 34:33 I actually joined my organization that I've been living in my neighborhood for 15 years and next door has been around actually for quite a while, but I finally bit the bullet and joined I know six or eight months ago and I now actually no my neighbors all days. You take cookies next door you'd meet, people know everybody stays inside, but I feel like I know them virtually through next door and the amount of recommendations and or questions for services is amazing. Plus people give away a lot of great free stuff.

Michael: 35:06 Yup, Yup. It's highly trusted. They're starting to open up from a marketing standpoint, I think it's to be determined how health systems could use it, but it seems a natural fit for community interaction for a health system, for a physician practice, for an urgent care to be nearby. Highly, highly relevant. I think for healthcare, I don't know if it's going to pay dividends from a marketing standpoint, but I would keep my eye on that. When it comes to kind of new and innovative things to look out for kind of coming up in the kind of the healthcare or the marketing technology space, I've had this question a lot and it's not a really sexy, interesting answer. It's really actually kind of boring if I think it's things like call center. So the front lines of patient communication is who answers the phone when somebody responds to a marketing campaign, it's kind of an overlooked but really critical thing that health systems do really poorly and as they get marketing sorted out, whether it's search or social or digital or offline or email or direct mail, they're getting those things figured out and they have their own problems and that's getting sorted out. But the problem that persists is, hey, that's great. You did a great marketing campaign. What happens when the person signs up for something or when they make a phone call? It's a highly broken process from an operational standpoint, which requires a lot of technology to integrate to things like scheduling a two callbacks to follow-ups and that all connects directly to marketing if you ever want to figure out what's happening.

Michael: 36:45 So it's not a very interesting kind of, you know, high tech answer. It's kind of fixed the call center.

Janet: 36:50 Well, and that's the challenge, right? Nobody wants to work on the boring everyday stuff. They all work on the sexy new things, but I understand your title is a Senior VP and GM of Consumer Experience. That's unique. Yeah, and I think you're going to see that trend a lot. Even in health marketing. Our marketing teams are moving away from the marketing term and it's kind of becoming more a patient experience. Consumer experience. When I talk and when I do, I'm a collateral or presentations. I tend to downplay words like patient because I think in healthcare now I think patient implies somebody's sick and so much of what we're doing is about wellness and preventative and being involved and taking care of your health and if you're taking care of your health, I don't think you're a patient.

Michael: 37:40 Right. And then things when it comes to, you know, terms like acquisition rather than acquisition, things like experience where the health system is now trying to engage with the community to be able to influence the healthcare decisions that they're making. And that crosses a wide gamut of is it preventative, is it wellness, is it child care, is it pediatricians or is what we normally think of kind of acute care, right? I'm hurt, I'm sick, I need to go to the doctor. So I think you're seeing a lot of terminology change there and that's happening because health systems are, are growing in their responsibilities and also that's why you see marketing kind of bleeding into other groups and it's becoming more about consumer healthcare, consumer experience rather than particularly how do we treat or find sick patients?

Janet: 38:31 Well, everything you're saying is so exciting because it sounds, if not easy, doable.

Speaker 3: 38:38 Yeah. I think a lot of this stuff is pretty like I said, I think marketing's been getting better. it's come light years in the last four or five years. I think now they're struggling with data and making sense of the data because there's a lot of data from a lot of different disparate systems within the health system and then how do I actually close that middle layer? Some of it is kind of basic blocking and tackling and it's kind of the boring stuff sometimes. But you know, a lot of successful companies, a lot of successful people got that way by solving kind of the boring problems, ones that no one else wants to tackle.

Janet: 39:14 Exactly. And make them seem fun on the front end because they weren't focused on user experience.

Michael: 39:20 If you had asked me 20 years ago if I was going to be doing healthcare marketing and talking about a healthcare call center, I would've told you you're crazy, but there's a lot of stuff that you can do there. And I think it's a hugely kind of overlooked, a niche in the industry and I've been happy to be a part of it over the last six or seven years. Well, that is exciting and I look forward to reading your posts and social and following your talks at coming up events. I think you've got a really great solution and I expect even better things coming from you all in 2018 and forward.

Michael: 39:51 Well, thanks again, Janet. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for being here. No problem. Talk to you soon.

Announcer: 39:57 And now here's our social media success tip.

Jeff Callaway: 40:01 Hi, this is Jeff Callaway. I'm the Senior Content Specialist at Cook Children's Healthcare system based in Fort Worth, Texas. My advice would be to not be too PR, which sounds weird because I work in PR and I know a lot of you listening do as well, but we try very hard to write as journalistic as possible to make the stories interesting and to make what we do appointment viewing and to create a trust with our audience that when they read it, it's going to be real and accurate journalism.

Announcer: 40:34 You've been listening to the Get Social Health podcast. The show notes are located@getsocialhealth.com To join our healthcare social media journey, follow at, Get Social Health on Twitter and start a conversation.

Janet: 40:50 Thanks for listening to the Get Social Health podcast, a production of the healthcare marketing network, and a proud member of the healthcare podcasters community.

Janet: 40:58 I like to take a moment to tell you a bit about the healthcare marketing network. We're a community of freelance healthcare writers. Our Organization can match your company or a healthcare practice with clinically accurate, specialized or general health care and medical content from blogs to white papers to Cmi. The healthcare marketing network has the writers that you need to reach your business audience or patients to find out more, visit healthcare marketing network.com, or contact me via social media, or you can email me, Janet@healthcaremarketingnetwork.com. Thanks again for listening to the Get Social Health podcast.

I'm happy to be back behind the microphone after a hiatus to focus on building the Healthcare Marketing Network with my business partner Carol Bush. We'll be covering what's happening with our company in an upcoming episode.

Today's conversation is with Jim Higgins, the CEO of Solutionreach. We were introduced by Lea Chatham,  a healthcare writer and editor and the Director of Content Marketing for Solutionreach. Knowing my interested in healthcare communications, Lea suggested I speak with Jim about their platform and the need physicians practices have for intelligent patient communications.

Listen to the episode:

00:56 Intro: Meet Jim Higgins, CEO of Solutionreach
01:41 Solutionreach launched 17 years
02:21 About the Solutionreach platform
05:18 A patient portal: yes or no?
06:51 Comparative experience with other platforms
11:01 Managing your life as a healthcare worker
14:13 Keeping up with patient communication
17:32 Is this a clinical tool or marketing tool?
20:26 The need for content curating for healthcare practices
21:57 Describing the platform layout
25:01 Patient portal usage rates
26:56 Add-on or independent platform?
29:57 Millennial communications
33:36 Patient feedback on practices
36:01 Applying it to Facebook
39:46 Encouraging
43:45 Social Media Tip, Todd Eury, The Pharmacy Podcast. Twitter & the power of the Hashtag
44:39 Closing message: Healthcare Marketing Network - connecting healthcare and medical writers to companies and practices.

Connect with Solutionreach

• Website
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn company page

Connect with Jeff:

They say that we learn by our mistakes but wouldn't we rather learn by other's mistakes? Jess Columbo of MedEd Digital joins the podcast to share her tips on "How NOT to launch the biggest social campaign of your career: Lessons from the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute $1 Billion Challenge." That's also the topic of her presentation at the Annual Conference of the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network. The Annual Conference will be held on the Mayo campus in Scottsdale, Arizona on December 11-12, 2017.

Jess brings more than a decade of experience developing award-winning digital media strategies for clients in regulated industries. She holds a Masters in Digital Journalism and teaches part-time at Portland State University's Center for Executive and Professional Education.

Listen to the podcast or drop in at the time stamps below:

00:56 Intro

02:21 About Jess

05:02 Why go it alone?

05:58 Médecins Sans Social Media

06:51 Are they trying to social?

07:54 How Jess became a keynote

09:12 Dan Hinman shout out

10:12 How not to launch...

12:22 Bringing them up to speed

13:53 About those haters...

14:35 Apologizing on social media

16:10 "Fighter," a misnomer

17:55 Support and investment

18:30 What did work?

19:46 Watchdogs

21:20 Work at Meded Digital

23:01 Balancing sales with communication

25:27 Updating outmoded professionals

27:09 Pharma and social media

28:32 Ignite movement

32:01 Mayo Clinic Social Media Network Annual Conference

34:36 Changing mindsets regarding social media

36:06 End

36:31 Social Media Tip: Darla Brown

37:30 Closing

Find Jess

Twitter

LinkedIn

MedEdDigital  

Jess's Ignite Talk

More about the Mayo Clinic Social Media Annual Conference:

Join us for two days packed with four inspirational keynotes, six compelling case studies and presentations, three expert consultation sessions, and an evening taco reception complete with mariachi band!

You don't need to belong to the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network to attend. Your registration includes a full year membership in the Network.

We’re capping attendance at 125 so you'll have plenty of opportunities to contribute, interact, and connect with your peers. You’ll leave energized with more knowledge and enthusiasm to tackle, analyze, and solve the biggest social media problems you face today.

You may want to join us on December 13 for our Social Media Residency, too!

Mari Smith - "The Queen of Facebook"

Out of all the social media platforms utilized today, Facebook ranks at the top with over 70% of online adults engaging on the platform.  My guest on the Get Social Health podcast is the "Queen of Facebook", Mari Smith who will be the keynote speaker at the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network Annual Conference. She will be presenting a keynote titled "Facebook Success Strategies: Proven Ways To Increase Your Reach, Engagement & Results."

The Annual Conference is being held December 11th & 12th at the Mayo Clinic campus in Scottsdale, Arizona. Click this link for more information and to register. 

Listen to our conversation or drop in at the timestamps below:

01:00  Introduction

02:52  When Mari met Facebook

04:29  Mastery of changing media

06:23  Does Facebook tell us what we're interested in?

08:51  Your experience vs everyone else's

10:58  Break free from apps

11:42  Being careful in Facebook

15:36  Disclaimers in Facebook marketing

17:16  Facebook national tour

19:45  Full Facebook marketing potential

21:41  The importance of local to SEO

25:20  Facebook live vs uploading - which is better?

28:29  Blue checkmarks vs gray check marks

30:36  Meet Mari Smith at the Social Media Network Annual Conference

31:51  End

32:32  Social Media Tip from David Harlow (David is also speaking at the MCSMN Annual Conference)

33:56  Closing

Find Mari Smith in social media

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn

Link to Mari's upcoming course combo:

Facebook Live Video Success Secrets + FAST (Facebook Ads Strategy Training)
How to review your Facebook app privacy settings

Additional recommended resources Mari rounded up for you as related to our discussion:

Facebook Video Engagement: What We Learned From Analyzing 100 Million Videos
Introducing Watch, a New Platform For Shows On Facebook
How Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Works (and What’s Coming Next)
Facebook Ad Custom Audiences: Everything You Need To Know – 2017 UPDATE

Nightingale Apps - Simplifying a nurses workload

01:02  Introduction

02:18  Kelley's healthcare career

Innovation to drive results - in 48 hours

Joining me on the Get Social Health podcast is my friend and colleague, K. Melissa Kennedy. Melissa and I worked together on the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association and Startup Weekend.  We have a lively and educational conversation about bringing an innovation mindset and experience to healthcare through 48 Innovate.

K. Melissa Kennedy parlayed many years of experience working for and building successful companies into a unique process for harnessing hidden assets inside organizations and turning them into big-idea-generating, $1-billion-revenue-producing resources. (Spoiler alert: It’s the people.) She’s an internationally acclaimed expert, happy to share the not-so-secret actions that have led to impressive outcomes for Fortune 100 corporations, start-up companies, and entrepreneurs. Melissa’s first book The Innovation Revolution: Discover the Genius Hiding in Plain Sight published in March 2017. It’s the essential guide for 21st-century leaders to deliver rapid results within the enterprise through INTRApreneurship – entrepreneurship on the inside.

Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below:

01:00  Introduction

08:52  Tracking early programs

Putting it all together - Connect the Docs

Today on Get Social Health my guest is Dr. Ruth Carlos.  She's the Deputy Editor of the Journal of the American College of Radiology, as well as a professor of radiology at the University of Michigan.  In 2016 she led a team of researchers to win the Stanford Medicine X / Symplur Signals "Everyone Included Research Challenge."  We'll talk about her work getting patients engaged in healthcare via social media on Get Social Health.

Listen to the podcast or drop in at the time stamps below:

01:13  Introduction

02:53  Patient access

03:57  Patient comprehension of said access

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

• C Matthew Hawkins MD - @MattHawkinsMD
• Edith Mitchell MD - @EdithMitchellMD
• Andrea Borondy Kitts, Patient advocate - @findlungcancer
• Bruce Hillman MD, Editor in chief of jacr - @BruceJHillmanMD

As the chief evangelist and co-founder of Aloha Health, Mandi Bishop is disrupting healthcare by making life actionable, helping healthcare systems make sense of the way invisible influences should shape personalized care plans, interventions, and engagements. She believes that patients must be partners in healthcare design and that there is no value-based care without recognizable value delivered to the very people healthcare exists to serve.

Prior to Aloha, Mandi led Dell Healthcare and Life Science's Global Analytics Innovation and Consulting practice, driving solutions that touched the lives of over 100 million patients. In 2016, she was recognized as one of the "Most Powerful Women in Healthcare IT" by Health Data Management magazine. She was #1 on the crowdsourced #HIT100 list of top healthcare IT industry influencers, and #3 on Healthagen’s “Top 10 Healthcare Leaders to Follow on Twitter”. In 2015, she was included in Rock Health's "State of Women in Healthcare" report as a "Role Model".

She is @MandiBPro on Twitter, co-chair for nationwide HealthIMPACT Forum events, an advisory board member for the Society for Participatory Medicine and #STEMPrincess, a contributor to the American Journal of Accountable Care and Tincture, and co-host of the Managed Care podcast series.

- Social media handles:
@MandiBPro (Twitter and Instagram)
@Aloha_Health (Twitter)
@Aloha.Health (Instagram)
LinkedIn
LinkedIn company page
Facebook page

- Links we discussed:
Aloha Health website
Humana's Bold Goal program
Health Data Management

You should know by now that I am dedicated to the idea of teaching and sharing. Today's guest is Manny Oliverez, President of Capture Billing. He's both a client and active social media user who has taught me a number of ways to promote healthcare online. I asked him about the specific things he did to promote his business and their universal application to online marketing. Find out why Manny suggests getting your collections under control can have a huge impact for your business on today's Get Social Health podcast.

Listen to the podcast or drop in at the time stamps below:

01:22 Start
02:14 Capture Billing?
03:56 A Foundation of Money
04:54 Money from Patients of Insurance?
06:02 Money Mismanagement
06:48 About Your Clients
07:20 Affordable Collections
08:40 Quantified Collections
09:21 You Like This?
10:02 Charges v Earnings
10:24 Debunking for Patients
11:34 Pain to Cost Ratios
12:40 Growing Your Own Company
13:55 Where to Start
15:27 You Can Do It!
16:31 Marketing Discipline
17:01 About a Blog
19:06 What's In a Blog?
19:33 Blog-a-Rhythm
20:37 One Thing Leads to Another
22:59 If You Build It Right, They Will Come
24:26 Social Media
27:15 A Hashtag for Every Occasion
27:59 Pinterest? Seriously?
31:16 Visual Content?
32:58 Need to Know
33:33 Enlisting
33:59 Healthcare Writer's Network
34:53 End
35:14 Social Media Tip: @TheDocSmitty
35:43 Social Content Solutions

The National Inclusion Project opens doors for all kids to be included together and experience all that life has to offer. They conduct programs with community partners to teach others how to be inclusive so that kids with and without disabilities can experience lifelong benefits. Founded by Clay Aiken and Diane Bubel, the National Inclusion Project supports the belief that no one should sit on the sidelines. Executive Director, Nick Leisey, who was a volunteer since the founding of NIP in 2003 joins me on the podcast. 

In our conversation, Nick and I talk about helping kids with disabilities join in the fun by helping "able" kids and parents understand how to create inclusive play opportunities. Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below:

00:00 Introduction
00:50 National Inclusion Project: Nick Leisey
03:50 Founded by Clay Aiken, a former Special Education teacher & parent, Diane Bubel
05:35 How did Clay Aiken launch the project?
09:45 What does the National Inclusion Project do?
13:20 Do you provide programs for adults or kids?
15:48 What is the "Science of Friendship"?
18:24 What prevents "privileged" kids from interacting with kids with disabilities?
24:45 What about parents?
28:35 How to find National Inclusion Project
29:43 Social Media Tip: Michelle Podlesni - Social Media can drive business leads
30:53 Please share the podcast to your social networks!

Contact John:

LinkedIn  |  Twitter

THREAD

Website 

3 ways to engage in remote patient research

Connect With Thread:  LinkedIn  |  Twitter  |  Facebook

Something very exciting is going on in the nursing community today. We’re seeing many nurses recognize their “inner entrepreneur” and start a small business both in and outside of healthcare. That’s where the NNBA comes in. The National Nurses in Business Association (NNBA) is a professional nursing association and springboard for nurses transitioning from traditional nursing to small business ownership and self-employment.  Lead by CEO & President Michelle Podlesni, the NNBA is a membership organization offering resources, training and a robust community focused on helping nurses become business owners. Join me for a lively conversation with Michelle or drop in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
01:05 Meet Michelle Podlesni,
03:53 Nurse Nurds
04:15 Tech-savvy & nursing
05:05 Need for Nurses to work in software
06:20 National Nurses in Business Association
07:05 "Unconventional Nurse, Going from Burnout to Bliss"
08:18 Becoming CEO & President of NNBA
09:05 Annual meeting
10:05 Hands-on learning experiences
11:02 Members have a variety of business interests and experience
12:09 Nurses are born innovators
14:43 Members are not all health care businesses
20:22 Questions to ask before you start a business
24:00 Making a business out of the best part of your job
25:30 Healthcare expertise does not mean you have to remain in healthcare
29:00 NNBA in 2017
33:05 NNBA has active event calendar
35:00 Carol Bush, The Social Nurse & webinars in 2017
34:40 Social Media Tip: Carol Bush, The Social Nurse. Where to start blogging.

Join us for a free webinar!

Carol Bush and Janet Kennedy with special Guest Michelle Podlesni and Janine Kelbach join forces to help you "Launch Your Career as a Healthcare Writer in 2017" on December 14th at 6:00pm. To register for the webinar or the replay, click this link.

One concern regarding social media that I hear from doctors, nurses, and administrators is the perceived lack of gravitas and sincerity such platforms can provide.  My guest today is Doctor Ed Mariano, professor of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine.  He is also the Associate Chief of Staff for Inpatient Surgical Services at Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System.  We’ll talk about tweeting live at meetings and how best to get accurate, transparent information to patients.  I love healthcare providers that tweet, especially the ones that make the effort to encourage their colleagues to jump into social media.

Listen to the podcast or drop in at the time stamps below:

00:00 Introduction
00:50 Meet Ed Mariano, MD
02:27 Twitter making conversations happen
03:55 The Scientific Method & Twitter
05:37 Tools are necessary to manage Twitter content
08:24 Social media can be organized
10:00 "Why Doctors Should Be On Twitter"
12:35 Twitter Journal Clubs
16:22 Tweet Chats
20:22 Using Twitter to connect at a conference
21:31 Your "voice" will be heard in social media
22:55 Patient community in pain management
26:25 Spelling & social media searches
33:56 Social media and opiod epidemic
41:27 15th Annual ASRA Pain Management Conference
43:25 Free Course "Conference Success with Twitter"
44:28 Samantha Pierce "Get your leaders on social media"
44:58 I'd love to hear from you! janet@getsocialhealth.com

More Links!

Ed Mariano, MD

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Website
• Why All Doctors Should Be On Twitter

Dr. Hatten's My Knee Guide site  

Dr. Hatten on Twitter @MyKneeGuide 

Dr. Ankeet Udnani on Twitter

Duke Medical Center Anesthesia Department Twitter 

American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine (ASRA)

• Twitter
• Website

Social Check-up for Pharma

In 2015 I interviewed Becky Canvin and Rick Evans of Ogilvy Healthworld about the state of Pharma and Social Media. The results reflected an industry that was cautious, risk-adverse and a little stiff. A lot has changed in the Pharma Social Media world with more Pharma companies embracing social media. In light of this growth in the use of social media, the team at Ogilvy Healthworld joined me for a conversation about what has changed and what additional factors they examined.

Joining my original guests, Becky and Rick are Philippa McClure, Sr. Account Manager with Ogilvy Healthworld and from Pulsar, Sameer (Sam) Shah.

Join our conversation and be sure to check out the report via the links below.

• Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/OgilvyCommonHealth/the-social-checkup
• Ogilvy Healthworld: TheSocialCheckup@Ogilvy.com
• Pulsar: James.Cuthbertson@pulsarplatform.com
• Hashtag: #SocialCheckUp

About the Social Check-up

The Social Check-up is a thought-leadership series, brought to you by Ogilvy Healthworld in partnership with Pulsar. Combining Ogilvy’s strategic expertise with Pulsar’s cutting edge data platform, The Social Check-up explores the latest trends in healthcare and pharmaceutical social media.

About Ogilvy Healthworld

Ogilvy Healthworld is an expert health communications community. We build social strategies and programmes to change health behaviors; ultimately inspiring better health outcomes based on our strong scientific, social media and healthcare expertise.

• Website: www.ogilvychww.com
• Instagram: @Ogilvyuk
• Twitter: @OgilvyHWUK

About Pulsar

Pulsar’s software platform allows you to understand any audience, market, trend or conversation in great detail. An incredibly powerful tool that helps you solve a wide range of marketing challenges. Pulsar is available as a subscription to set up your own searches, or through our experienced team of researchers who can deliver the insights for you.

• Website: www.pulsarplatform.com
• Email: info@pulsarplatform.com
• Facebook: Pulsar Social
• Twitter: @Pulsar_Social

Virtual Reality for Healthcare Education

Digital health has gone beyond simple smartphone apps into virtual reality for healthcare education. A leader in the world of augmented and virtual reality for healthcare, Andrea Bielecki, President of INVIVO Communications joins me for a discussion of this exciting technology. INVIVO is a digital healthcare agency pioneering the integration of science, art, and technology into communication that changes the way people learn about medical science.

Listen to our conversation or drop in at the conversation points below:

https://twitter.com/EdBennett

Find Andrea Bielecki

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• INVIVO Website
• The Enlightened League of Bone Builders and the Osseous Enigma 

Article on Virtual Reality used for patients by Salutem Digital Health

Where does innovation get inspiration?

Ask RelyMD Telemedicine Co-Founder and emergency department physician Bobby Park, MD and you'll find that necessity is the mother of invention. Seventy-one percent of emergency department visits are unnecessary or could have been avoided, according to a study by Truven Health Analytics. Realizing that patient overload could be alleviated more efficiently and economically through the use of telemedicine, Dr. Park and his partners at Wake Emergency Physicians, PA invested in building a platform to service emergency care. 

In our conversation, we discussed the challenges faced by over-crowded emergency departments and the need to triage cases before reaching the hospital.

Listen to the podcast or drop in at the time stamp below.

 00:00 Introduction
00:45 Bobby Park, MD Co-Founder RelyMD
01:37 Physician Entrepreneurs
03:15 Is a trip to the ER always needed?
04:30 Can Telemedicine always work?
07:24 What's the difference between urgent care and emergency room care?
09:22 Order of service in an ED
11:02 Why did you launch a Telemedicine service?
14:00 Who owns RelyMD
14:18 What is the tech platform?
15:40 When is the platform utilized?
16:20 How are you staffing RelyMD
17:08 HIPAA compliant environment
17:43 Works for part-time physicians?
19:15 How is the business model set up?
21:37 Who is your target client?
23:20 Telemedicine lobbying
24:12 Who is marketing if you're all physicians?
25:27 Social Media Tip: Carol Bush, The Social Nurse. Tips for new bloggers
26:40 Thanks for listening! I'd love to hear from you! 

Halee Fischer-Wright is a nationally respected healthcare executive and physician leader whose work focuses on medical management innovation and creating cultures of excellence. She has served as a Physician Practice President, hospital system CMO and now is the President and CEO of the MGMA. In our conversation, we discussed the challenges of running a medical practice including dealing with changes in technology, stress, and the time physicians spend on administration. The MGMA's mission is providing the training, resources, and community to support healthcare practices. At their annual meeting, Oct 31- Nov 2 the MGMA celebrates their 90th Anniversary.

Listen to our conversation or jump in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:45 Meet Halee Fischer-Wright, MD
83% of Physicians would not choose to go into medicine
03:05 Solo Vs Multi-Specialty
04:25 Is an MBA needed to run a better practice?
07:10 How much of a physician's time is spent on administration?
08:30 How much of the administrative role can be delegated?
09:40 Checklists getting in the way?
12:25 Should EHR companies have physicians/nurses on staff?
13:25 Halee Fischer-Wright's story
16:10 Experience on both sides of the fence
16:50 Tell me about the members of the MGMA
17:38 National and state MGMA Associations
18:15 What are the big issues facing MGMA members
19:12 MGMA is about the business of medicine
21:03 Are annual meeting sessions different depending on practice size
22:08 What is the MGMA doing with social media?
23:40 State MGMA Boards are a not keeping up with social media
25:55 Patients crowdsourcing physician choice
26:45 You can't turn the clock back
27:31 Does the MGMA have a social media policy for members?
29:02 Hospital employees posting racist comments
32:10 Ignorance is not an excuse
32:25 Thought leaders can be found anywhere
34:14 What's coming up for the MGMA in 2017?
35:10 A look at the 2016 MGMA Annual Meeting.
35:35 Why did you pick Jim Gaffigan as a speaker?
37:15 Is there a certificate program to be a practice Manager?
38:25 What would you say to people who are not members of the MGMA?
39:00 Social Media Tip: Shahid Shah: Ask the deeper question
40:35 Social Content Solutions

What does the future hold for mobile health?

That was the question posed by Rick Smith, Editor of the WRAL TechWire to some of the most innovative and visionary digital health companies in the Triangle. From individuals monitoring their daily steps via a wearable device to scientists gaining the ability to harness the power of big data on a massive scale, advances in mobile health are both exciting and a bit unnerving.

On September 27, 2016, WRAL TechWire invited senior executives of Axial Health, Valencell, Validic, MobileSmith, Medfusion and RelyMD the Executive Exchange to share their thoughts. During the second panel on data security and legal issues, we heard from executives from Parker Poe, MCNC, Wyrick Robbins and Duke Health.

I had the pleasure of live-Tweeting the program and also captured some audio from some of the speakers and attendees. Give a listen to the voice of The Future of Mobile Health.

Podcast Guests (in order of appearance):

Brent Anthony, Practimage

Kim Labow, Medfusion

Chris Beal,

Chris Edwards, Validic

Elizabeth Johnson, Wyrick Robbins

Rob Leandro, Parker Poe

Rick Smith, WRAL TechWire

John Lynn, aka @TechGuy is well known in the healthcare IT world. He has developed a series of websites to support the industry. His website Healthcare Scene hosts 10 healthcare blogs that have generated over 11,000 blog posts, half of which John wrote himself! He's the co-founder of #HITMC Conference, supports numerous Twitter handles and provides a valuable resource for job seekers in the industry.

Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below:

00:00 Introduction
00:50 #HIT100
01:15 Healthcare - people with personal passions
02:38 What is your "Why"?
03:40 Difference between professional and passion-driven participants
05:17 Disconnect in C-Suite not being exposed to social media discussions?
06:48 Social determinants of health
07:27 Patient stories - not hearing enough "good" stories
10:47 Empowered patients
13:41 People want to do good. Problems are a result of faulty workflow or process
16:18 The power of social media
17:10 Entrepreneurial spirit is suppressed in healthcare
18:56 Acquired EHRs, now we need healthcare analysts
20:22 John's digital properties: Healthcare Scene, Healthcare IT Jobs, #HITMC
23:47 Open Sharing among healthcare marketers
26:29 HITMC Conference - Marketing automation hot topic
28:21 Networking is a valuable aspect of HITMC
29:15 Call for speakers for Spring HITMC Conference
31:24 Topic suggestions: Success/Failure stories and Creative or Innovative Problem Solving
31:04 Hamilton Rap from Stacey Gobel of Studio 9
32:07 Where will the conference be held? SLS Las Vegas
35:30 Find #HITMC - LinkedIn Group, Website, TwitterChat
36:40 "Local" meetups around the country
38:03 Social Media Tip: Stacy Goebel with Studio North "Try Live Video"

Find John Lynn:

• LinkedIn
• Patient Stories blog

HITMC Call for Speakers

Twitter:

• @EHRandHIT
• @TechGuy
• @HealthcareScene
• @HealthcareITJob
• @HospitalEHR

Websites:

• Health IT Blog Network
• Healthcare IT Jobs
• HIT Marketing Community 

Meet @wareFLO - Chuck Webster, MD... and MSIE, MSIS and workflow evangelist. Sometimes called the "King of all Workflow in Healthcare" (mostly by himself) Chuck is the undisputed champion of workflow process. He has worked with healthcare systems to study, design and implement process improvement through workflow development. Chuck is also a workflow technology expert and helps his clients use business process management software to capture and analyze workflow.

I admit it - I'm a marketing and social media evangelist. As such I have encountered Chuck dozens of times in TweetChats, Blab sessions and throughout the social media spectrum. I know that Chuck has an affinity for social media. I was not going to promise the same about workflow. Our interview ended up being really interesting and I learn a lot - painlessly. I hope you enjoy the podcast. Give a listen to our conversation or drop into our conversation at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:55 Meet Chuck Webster MD
01:57 @wareFLO
02:52 His alphabet soup of degrees
05:00 How does all that education overlap?
05:57 He's a Venn Diagram!
06:22 He's an octopus - he said so!
07:27 Medical training by Disney?
07:38 C-Suite education - are they onboard?
09:48 Mind Mapping vs. Workflow
11:31 How does workflow technology work?
13:44 Interoperability in workflow process design
15:34 Example of a workflow process
16:45 Why would workflow matter to me, the patient?
20:50 Workflow enabling seniors living at home
23:50 What would this position be called?
26:20 Opportunity for physicians to transition their knowledge
29:09 Should digital innovation come from the medical side of the house?
30:32 How often should a workflow process be re-evaluated?
32:32 Are EHR vendors working with clients to improve workflow?
35:10 Bringing non-healthcare vendors to healthcare
39:38 Getting published
40:05 FireTalk - the new Blab?
Social Media Tip: Sarah Bramblette - Spell your medical condition right
42:55 Social Content Solutions - Ready-to-post content for healthcare

Chuck Webster's contact information:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Website
• FireTalk

Nurses are born to be innovators

Tim Raderstorf is the first Chief Innovation Officer at The Ohio State University College of Nursing. He is also a Clinical Instructor of Practice. Tim has studied and focused on neurosurgical research on Tethered Spinal Cord Syndrome, designed clinical spaces, and improved patient throughput in the pediatric hematology/oncology ambulatory settings.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Tim’s passion lies in connecting great thinkers and fostering ideation through the innovation and commercialization process. He helped design an innovation and entrepreneurship program for healthcare at the Ohio State University College of Nursing. This fall, he’ll be speaking at the Advancing Nurses Through Innovation Conference hosted by the National Nurses Business Association Conference in Las Vegas and the Nursing Innovation Summit at the Cleveland Clinic.

Listen to Tim’s ideas on nurses, entrepreneurship, and innovation on the Get Social Health podcast.
The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Workshop for Health Professionals

Laurel Van Dromme

Bernadette Melnyk

designRoom Creative (dRC) began more than twenty years ago. Kelly Farrell, designer and founder, left the big agency world with a mission — deliver strategic, impeccable design with responsive, personal client service. Since then she’s moved dRC into the national market while developing a specialty in creating healthy brands, especially healthcare related brands including Signature Health and the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers. In the podcast, we talk about getting the C-Suite and Board behind a new brand process, even when the brand is over 100 years old! Listen to the podcast and let me know what you think

Find out more about designRoom Creative.

• Website
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Facebook

Connect with Kelly Farrell:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Many physicians have discovered a passion for health technology, but not many have taken an 180-degree turn into the digital health field right out of residency. John O'Donnell did and has found his unique medical perspective to be an asset to the programs he has joined like Startup Weekend Health, iScribes and the design thinking workshop he co-lead with Katie Donohue McMillan. In our conversation, Jon and I discussed his medical school training at Duke University and how he "caught the digital health bug." Listen to our conversation or catch the time stamps below.

Introduction, Startup Weekend Health
Joyce Lee, Design Thinking advocate
Duke Medical School
Duke CRI - Clinical Research Institute
Are you a digital early adopter
What vision does your memory bring?
Design thinking
Medical School + Innovative Thinking

Dell Medical School
IBM Watson
Digital health relieving mundane processes
Everyone is creative
Smashing Boxes
Design Disruptors

Katie Donohue McMillian

Amy Abernathy, MD

Jon O'Donnell, MD

Social Media Tip: Kenny Brooks - Use team LinkedIn profiles as a sales resource

What IS engaging content? (Free Webinar)

Ever wish you could just skip the whole social media thing?

If you’re not 100% thrilled about all the time you’ve been plugging away on social media, you are not alone.  I hear practice managers and physician owners stressed out over details of social media & blog content.

Tuesday, August 23rd at 12:00pm EST Hosted by Srini Kolathur of EHR2.0

Wednesday, August 24th at 12:00pm EST Hosted by Get Social Health and The Social Nurse

Wednesday, August 24th at 3:00pm EST Hosted by Manny Oliverez of Capture Billing

Thursday, August 25th at 12:00pm EST Hosted by Mary Pat Whaley of Manage My Practice

A few episodes ago I had the pleasure of speaking with Sue Bohle about the Serious Play Conference. The conference in its sixth year was hosted at UNC Kenan-Flagler business school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The conference moves around every year so I was very excited that it was in my own backyard this year. While the conference wasn’t exclusively about creating serious games for healthcare there were a number of speakers there talking about the games they were developing.

In today’s podcast, I have an interview with for brilliant minds who are using gamification, a term will be discussing shortly, to help individuals with learning, education, engaging, and managing health and behavioral challenges. My four guests are Doug Watley with breakaway games, Lynn Fiellin with the Yale Center for Health and Learning, Dan shirtless with the "Breathe Free" game, and Randy Brown of Virtual Heroes.

This is just a small selection of the many speakers and attendees present at this conference. I encourage you to find out more about "serious play" and "serious games" Give a listen to my interview with Sue Bohle.

My first interview is with Doug Watley the CEO of breakaway games. His game "Vital Signs", was just awarded one of two best in show awards. 

One of the sessions that fascinated me was the discussion of how a 2-D player game was created to help at-risk middle school-aged children work through scenarios of behavior choices and what the consequences would be. Let’s learn about Lynn Fiellin's Play2Protect game.

I had a really interesting conversation with Dan Scherlis he is both a professional game developer and now a health games executive producer. It’s very interesting thoughts on the word game of vacation and told me about a game he’s working on "Breath Free" to help smokers try to quit. We even talked about good versus evil.

My last interview is with Randy Brown of virtual heroes is a fascinating spinoff of Epic Games Unreal Engine creating virtual worlds to help teach and connect individuals in a variety of professions from the military to public service to healthcare. His company, Virtual Heroes is working with the Duke School of Nursing on an IRB study for Type II diabetes support in a virtual world. Let’s hear what Randy has to say.

Thank you for listening to get social health I hope you found serious games for healthcare as interesting as I did. As a reminder go give a listen to my other podcast with Sue Bolla the executive director of the Serious Play Conference.

I’ve published over hundred episodes of Get Social Health. There have been a lot of fascinating, fun and interesting conversations with healthcare practitioners, digital health thought leaders, physicians nurses and healthcare professionals who are actively using social media to further their healthcare messages. When you visit the get social health.com website you’ll find on the right-hand side a search bar so type in a topic and will be able to find some really great interviews.

If you have a suggestion for an interview either a topic or an individual I’d love to hear about it please reach out to me via Janet@getsocialhealth.com one thing I would ask is for you to take the time to give me a review or rating it helps other individuals find the podcast and we could always use a few more listeners. I appreciate your listening today have a great week.

Dr Marketing Tips - Healthcare Marketing Explained

Inbound marketing continues to be a theme on Get Social Health as we welcome Corey Gehrold to the podcast. Corey is the Vice President of Client Strategy at Insight Marketing Group and is one of the hosts of the Dr Marketing Tips podcast. He has close to a decade of experience successfully marketing medical practices via traditional, virtual and inbound marketing methods. He has co-authored two books with Insight Marketing Group founder Jennifer Thompson. We have a great conversation about online marketing for the independent healthcare practice.

Reference Links:

Digital Marketing and Inbound Sales

If I said "inbound sales for healthcare practices" would you know what I meant? Digital marketing has provided many new ways for physicians to attract new patients but with dozens of platforms and hundreds of choices to embrace online marketing is not for the faint of heart. Garett Smith, founder of the digital startup InboundMD knows the struggles of trying to tackle inbound marketing for healthcare. As a startup entrepreneur, his team has created a platform to help the independent healthcare practice manage the complex process of online digital marketing and inbound sales. Find out more by listening to the podcast or dropping in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:55 Meet Garrett Smith - Founder of InboundMD
01:25 Too many choices in marketing, not enough time
02:54 Independent Healthcare - 25% of medical practices still don't have a website?
05:24 Old websites are just a billboard
07:01 Physicians just want to be physicians - Resistance is futile
09:40 Negative reviews are driving experience
12:30 How do you help the "digitally clueless"?
19:22 Is this an "all-in" platform? InboundMD
20:32 Is InboundMD a social management platform?
22:35 How do you teach social media? "Smart Hands"
24:53 If clients are not in social media, how are you reaching them?
26:57 How does your Startup weekend experience impact your platform?
31:21 Patty Enrado, HIMSS Media "Use Multiple platforms"
31:59 Please leave a review!

Find Garrett Smith

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Find InboundMD

• Website
• Twitter

Physician, Innovator, and Entrepreneur

Meet Dr. Tom Giannulli; Chief Medical Officer for Kareo and independent practice innovator. As both a physician and an entrepreneur, Dr. Giannulli is something of a modern-day Edison - creating, developing and testing digital health innovations in his own healthcare practice. As an independent practitioner, he offers a unique perspective and the capability to de real-time testing of the innovative ideas at Kareo. During our interview, we talked about innovation, the needs of the small healthcare practice and, of course, social media. Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below:

Podcast Time Stamps:

00:00 Introduction
00:55 Meet Dr. Tom Giannaulli, CMIO, Kareo
01:25 Kareo's use of social media
01:55 Leadership team at Kareo is active in social media
02:21 Was social media part of your pre-Kareo career?
02:41 How did you manage to be a physician and an entrepreneur?
03:40 Technology an interest early on
04:22 Do your kids love technology?
04:48 Kareo's history
05:50 What's the difference between the marketing platform and Doctor Base?
07:05 Difference between patient portal and physician review site
08:10 Where are you allowed to post content?
08:32 Tracking review sites - as many as 60-80
09:22 Review sites - Are all reviews published?
10:43 Need more review to balance all opinions
11:30 It's like trying to get podcast reviews! (Shameless plug - Review here!)
12:16 What is a "small" healthcare practice?
12:54 How are your services offered?
13:25 How labor intensive is the ongoing training and support for Kareo?
14:25 Are your new clients new to EHR or transfering from another platform
14:42 How do you manage to be the CMIO for Kareo and a practicing physician?
15:57 Is Kareo a virtual company?
16:17 Who wins the arguments - the Physician or the Entrepreneur?
17:35 Physician's time spent with EHR - is it better than the "good old days"?
19:35 Heads Up Medicine - Training to use tablet and remain engaged with patient
21:00 Gesture-based software
21:56 Digital Health & Snake Oil
24:05 Vetting medial apps
24:44 How does the Kareo platform help the small healthcare practice do marketing
26:00 Claim your space - how does the Kareo platform update online information?
27:03 What are you developing now?
27:40 KareoChat - Who's participating?
28:15 Crafting blog posts and subject matter expert to lead
29:28 Why is social media important to an independent practice?
31:41 Social Media Tip: Hannah Prince. "Use interactive content"

Storify of April 28th TweetChat led by Janet Kennedy of Get Social Health (that's me!)

Dr. Tom Giannulli

• Twitter @drtom_kareo
  LinkedIn 

Kareo

• Website
• YouTube
• Twitter
• Google+

Healthcare has many serious challenges that serious play can help solve. The Serious Games Association (SGA), lead by Executive Director Sue Bohle,  is an international trade organization serving the entire serious games industry. Members include developers, publishers, technology providers, analysts, authors, consultants, faculty and other professionals. Their members are involved in the making of games and sims for education or at home learning, corporate training and marketing, government and military uses, healthcare and medical training and games that are designed to create positive change in our society. The association produces educational conferences (notably, the Serious Play Conference) does research and provides support to special interest groups (SIGs) and committees studying how to move the industry ahead. The 2016 conference will be co-hosted by the UNC Computer Science Department at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, July 26-28.

What is serious play? Accor5ding to the event website it's a gathering where creators can have critical conversations about game design and share their knowledge with peers. The focus of the conference is exploring opportunities, challenges and the potential of game-based learning. At Serious Play, attendees listen, share and participate actively in informal sessions dedicated to the discussion of the future of serious games. We are a leadership conference for people who design, manage and implement serious game programs. Their goal is to provide a forum for visionary educators, chief learning officers and heads of training programs in health care, government/military or other fields that want to learn how to improve the effectiveness of their program, and use the data collected to do even better.

Listen to the podcast or drop in at the time stamps below:

00:00 Introduction
00:51 Meet Sue Bohle & the Serious Play Conference
03:55 What's the difference between Serious Games and Serious Play?
04:40 Phaedra Boinodiris of IBM
05:15 How is healthcare using serious games?
06:54 Serious cognitive brain games
08:00 Children very comfortable with technology. What about seniors and technology?
09:45 My parents are addicted to Solitare on the computer
11:00 Gamifying lessons about serious asthma for children
11:54 Teaching at-risk teens, social-emotional intelligence
12:42 Adults need emotional intelligence games as well!
14:04 The Serious Play Conference
15:00 Who will be attending the conference?
16:08 What other business verticals are addressed at the conference?
18:00 What is a "Game Jam"?
19:15 Are serious games all digital?
21:05 How are these games being funded?
22:28 Startup Weekend style pitch events?
23:21 Find out more about the Serious Play Conference
24:05 Get a discount for listening to this podcast!
24:36 Follow the action in Twitter
25:15 Playing games while learning
26:00 Social Media Tip Erin Wold - "Be a real person"
26:25 "Social Media Ambassadors" - Capitalize on social media during a conference or event

Find Sue:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter (Serious Play Conference)
• Serious Play Conference
• Email Sue for your discount to the conference!

Digital Snake Oil, the Meeker Report, and a ChatBot chat with Klick Health's Michael Spitz. This episode of Get Social Health digs into digital trends with Spitz, VP of Digital Strategy for Klick Health. Spitz (that's what he goes by) really  knows his stuff! Join us for a far-ranging conversation about Digital Health on Get Social Health. Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:38 Meet Michael Spitz, VP Strategy for Klick Health
01:15 Damnit Janet and Spitz
01:55 The Klick Wire
04:35 Meterologist of Digital Health
05:50 Digital Strategy or Traditional Strategy
07:09 B2C or B2B?
08:07 Klick Health
09:48 Deep bench at Klick Health?
10:47 Consumer - Patient - Population Health
16:28 Snake Oil and Digital Health
21:33 Young people excited about digital health
22:48 Digital trends - when are they client ready? Klick Labs
25:27 Geofencing in healthcare
26:21 C-Suite, Digital Technology and implementing new ideas
28:23 Trust
30:49 ChatBots (finally!)
36:26 Where is the medical info coming from that's being served? Healthtap
43:40 Mary Meeker's Internet Report
46:31 Pharma - If it ain't broke...
47:44 Innovators lead the way
50:38 Digital health is transformative
51:35 Links to content are in the show notes
52:12 Social Media Tip: Samantha Pierce - Get your leaders in social media
52:42 Subscribe to the podcast!

Mary Meeker: Blog post by Michael Spitz

ChatBots: "I, Healthtbot" blog post by Michael Spitz

Find Michael Spitz:

LinkedIn

Twitter

Klick website

Andy Sernovitz, socialmedia.org Health is one of social media's earliest voices. From "Damn, I wish I'd Thought of That!" to socialmedia.org, Andy has been at the forefront of online and social media innovation. His company, GasPedal, builds peer-to-peer communities for people leading meaningful change at the world’s biggest companies. GasPedal runs SocialMedia.org and SocialMedia.org Health, and is creating communities for people leading sustainability, wellness, and other mission-driven initiatives. Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:52 Solution to Pollution
02:45 Doctors are scientists
03:10 Meet Andy Sernovitz, community builder
04:25 Gaspedal.com
04:45 SocialMedia.org Health
05:10 Membership for senior hospital social media only
05:50 "Circle of Trust" for Hospital social media marketers
06:30 What are Hospitals concerned about?
07:35 Actions you can take
08:50 Community building among peers
09:41 Sharing about internal issues
11:08 Managing multiple social media presences
12:48 Is there any master tool to update all online sites?
14:28 Discussing emergency response
16:36 Who is in the community?
17:45 Diversity of backgrounds in the community
19:19 How many hospitals in the community?
19:45 How many people can join socialmedia.org Health?
20:15 Peer Backup network
20:40 Formerly known as The Blog Council
21:25 What other verticals need a community?
21:31 Do you hire a subject matter expert to moderate?
22:18 Jeff Casale - Community Leader for Healthcare
22:59 Community wrangler
23:43 We love to tell our member stories
24:24 "Damn, I wish I'd thought of that!"
24:56 Didn't drink the cool-aid?
25:55 Are there discussion of tactics
27:09 Talking about marketing getting to the C-suite table?
27:39 Reviews, ratings, and word-of-mouth
29:52 HCAPS and Consumer reviews
31:22 Who should respond to a review - Physician or Admin?
32:32 Jay Baer "Hug Your Haters"
34:15 Mayo Clinic Social Media Summit
35:52 Social media to express joy and pain
37:25 Social Media Tip: Watch out for Political statements
37:57 Social Content Solutions and other Services for healthcare

Ed Bennett is a healthcare and hospital website consultant. He has recently left corporate and university life where he was the Website/Digital presence guru at the University of Maryland Medical Center for 17 years to become a consultant. He is a Platinum Fellow in the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network, founder of the Hospital Social Media list (now residing with Mayo) and curator of the Physician Transparency list that tracks hospitals that are posting their HCAPS scores on their websites. Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:46 Meet Ed Bennett, Mayo Platinum Fellow & entrepreneur
02:00 Internet earliest adopter
04:09 Hospital website for University of Maryland
05:15 What didn't work well?
06:40 Content marketing (before it was cool)
08:03 Does a website belong to IT or Marketing?
09:25 Chief Cook & Bottle Washer
10:20 WordPress or enterprise CMS
12:35 Knowing how to understand vendor landscape
13:45 The difference between a slick website and a good vendor
17:00 How much god a project run?
18:28 C-Suite explanations needed?
21:00 Physician Transparency Project
25:35 Hospitals in Social Media list
26:55 Reputation leads to business
28:25 Preparing for the death of digital advertising
33:55 Is the website the hub of marketing
34:47 How does digital and online presence impact population health?
36:16 Advising on digital and social media presence
37:21 Company goals & the healthcare vendor space
39:25 Healthcare: Slow decision making?
40:45 Market Vue Partners and Population Health
40:15 Hospital marketing tactics slow to change
43:33 Social Media Tip: Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson "When you've had a bad day..."
44:50 Social Media Ambassadors - Social Media support for Trade Shows and Conferences

Jean Eaton lives north of the border and consults with physicians and healthcare providers on Canadian healthcare practice management. While there are differences in how the Canadian national health system is set up, practices are still businesses and often need help. Information Managers, lead by Jean Eaton is the go-to resource for small healthcare practices in Canada. In our interviews, Jean and I discuss the differences and similarities between US and Canadian practice management. Catch our conversation and get to know Jean at her social media properties listed below.

Social Media sites for Information Managers:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Information Managers Website
• Pinterest

Founder of Perfectly Afflicted, singer Chris Hendricks discovered he had Cerebral Palsy when he was four years old, at the same time Chris discovered his fascination and love for music. Having a health condition that will be with you for your whole life can either define you or inspire you. Chris Hendricks chose inspiration. He is a singer, songwriter, personal coach and the co-founder of a business. PerfectlyAfflicted.com is a company that focuses on reducing teen suicide through motivational speaking and positive fundraising.

I know you will be as inspired as I was hearing Chris. Listen to his interview or drop in on the time stamps below on Get Social Health.

00:00 Introduction
00:52 Meet Chris Hendricks
01:30 Cerebral Palsy and music
03:25 How does CP impact you?
03:54 Singing starting at 4 years old
05:34 What was it like having CP?
08:30 Self-Fulfilling prophecy
10:00 Did you ever consider suicide?
11:40 Has music made you what you are today?
14:26 How did the music career go down with the family?
16:18 Pushed out of the nest
16:58 Perfectly Afflicted - Impacting Teen Suicide - Hope Line
18:35 Fundraising through empowerment T-Shirts
20:13 What are the school programs like?
22:14 Facing hundreds in a school assembly
24:55 Saving one life - an impactful story
26:45 "Join the Movement - Save a Life"
27:50 CastleWild Band with Andre Dimuzio
31:05 Empowerment coach and motivational business speaker
33:25 Social Media Tip: Nicole Burdette "Limit Tweeting your booth number"
34:06 Social Content Solutions

Find out more about Chris Hendricks and his work and music:

Perfectly Afflicted

• Website
• Facebook
• Twitter 
• Instagram 
• YouTube 

HopeLine website

CastleWild

• CastleWild website
• CastleWild Twitter 
• CastleWild Facebook 
• CastleWild Instagram

Meet Greg Van Borssum and Joe Williams. They don't just talk about suicide prevention, they live it. Every day.

In March of 2016, I had the opportunity to serve as a Social Media Ambassador for the National Council on Behavioral Health at their annual conference. NatCon16 brought together almost 5,000 mental and behavioral health specialists for dozens of talks, presentations, poster displays and, most importantly, the chance to connect. As a Social Media Ambassador, my job was to capture my unique perspective on the event and share it via social media. As I wandered through the exhibition halls I met dozens of software companies, pharma representatives, educational training firms and workplace wellness programs.

Turning down an aisle I heard voices with "not from around here" accents belonging to Australians Greg Van Borssum and Joe Williams. When you meet Greg and Joe it's easy to make a false assumption. What you see are strong, chipper, intelligent men who were successful professional athletes. What you don't see is their struggle with mental illness and suicidal thoughts.  Being at #NatCon16 gave them the opportunity to take their suicide prevention through inspiration message to a larger audience.

This podcast episode took place in the Exhibition Hall of NatCon16, a very lively space with lots of great conversations happening all around us. Our interview competes with a bit of background noise but both Greg and Joe were very eloquent in their thoughts so I'm sure you would mind a bit of hubbub.

To learn more about Greg's work, click on his sites below:

• Greg's website
• Greg in LinkedIn
• Greg in Twitter
• "GVB Mind Warrior" in GVB in Facebook

To learn more about Joe's work, click on his sites below:

• Joe's website
• Joe in Twitter
• The Enemy Within Facebook page

To learn more about The Ripple Effect Film, click on the sites below:

• The Ripple Effect website
• The Ripple Effect in Twitter 
• Kevin Hines in Twitter

On this podcast, I found myself answering questions about Social Content Solutions for Healthcare with Dr. Mike Sevilla. One of my early podcast guests, Mike Sevilla, is a dedicated Family Practice Physician, and social media early adopter. We talked about our convention travels, have a debate about SnapChat and explore the challenges of social media for the small healthcare practice. Mike was interested in learning more about the Get Social Health Academy, the monthly subscription service Social Content Solutions and the Membership site scheduled to launch early this summer. Give a listen to the podcast or drop in at the timestamps below.

The Interview

00:00 Introduction
01:08 Welcome back Dr. Mike Sevilla
01:50 Where have you been traveling?
03:56 SnapChat
07:16 Building a network for each platform
09:39 First the "selfie" next the Video channel
10:26 Social Media Marketing World
11:30 Blab CEO shout out to Mike & Janet for the Mayo Blab
13:44 Social Media is a force to be reckoned with
14:01 Have vetted sources for health information
16:35: Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson
17:05 Dr. Jeff Livingston @MacarthurGYN
18:02 Serving Salem, Ohio as an active Family Practice Physician
19:55 "Let's Do This America"
20:56 Helping the small practice physician
22:18 Get Social Health Academy courses created to support small healthcare practices
25:11 Reputation is very important
27:30 Seek help where needed: Social Content Solutions
29:47 What kind of sources are you using?
30:30 "Janet Kennedy Day"!
31:00 How to use event calendars to generate blog ideas.
33:17 How can a practice find the time to do social media
34:30 Custom content with Carol Bush of The Social Nurse
35:00 Social Content Solutions pricing
37:31 New website: GetSocialHealthAcademy.com
38:13 Member site launching June 2016
39:34 Mayo Clinic Social Media Network
40:27 Marketing plan? Affiliates are primary sales channel
Mary Pat Whaley, Barbara Phillips, Jean Eaton, Carol Bush, NCMS
43:02 Thanks for the support, Mike!
43:30 Independent practices need support
46:332 Social Medi Tip: Stacy Goebel, Customer Engagement & Social Marketing at StudioNorth "Tell a Story"

We haven talked about dental digital marketing in a long time so I reached out to Heather King, Social Media Director at Infinity Dental Web. Heather manages everything digital from strategy to social media execution. I promised at the beginning of the year I would bring more small practice marketing experts to the podcast. Heather was full of great tips and suggestions and we had an enjoyable conversation. Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below:

00:00 Introduction
01:15 Meet Heather King, Social Media Director, Infinity Dental Web
02:00 Dentists "get" marketing
03:20 Dentists tend to be "social IRL"
04:02 Dr. David Hall, Founder of Infinity Dental Web
05:20 Tech savvy healthcare entrepreneurs
07:00 Mobile friendly websites
09:00 What happened to m.website addresses?
09:28 Hard-coded websites send an "outdated" image
10:00 Are you proud of your website?
11:01 What does a high-converting website have?
12:40 How often should a dental practice be blogging?
14:27 Not every post has to be clinical
15:21 Sharing an "inside look" into the practice is interesting
17:55 Dental practices are more informal in social media

The Zombie Apocoalypse

20:00 Patients in social media
21:43 HIPAA and patient posted photos
22:55 What platforms are dentists using?
24:55 Using video (Shoutout to Dr. Isaac Porter)
27:00 Facebook Live - with video tips!
28:48 Advice for social media
29:50 Don't post cartoons. Watch for copyrighted material.
30:40 Social Media Tip: Jared Johnson of the Health IT Marketer Podcast - Share the social love
31:15 Social Content Solutions - Social Media content for the small healthcare practice. A new program from Get Social Health Academy.

Find Heather:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

What fun to celebrate my 100th episode with pediatrician and podcaster, Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson a.k.a. @SeattleMamaDoc in Twitter! I should say "almost" podcaster. At the time of this episode release the podcast is about two weeks away from launching. We have a fun conversation about podcasting (surprise!) and the kind of information and guests Wendy Sue plans to have on her show. We also discuss her work at Seattle Children's Hospital and the fact that she stills sees patients one day a week!

In honor of my 100th episode I have a couple of podcasting friends and former guests share a greeting  (Thanks, Dr. Mike Sevilla and Joe LaValle).

I also announced he launch of "Social Content Solutions" - a monthly social media content service providing content calendars, blog templates, social media news, and over 25 social media posts to fill a month-long calendar for a healthcare practice.  For more details or to order go to http://www.getsocialhealthacademy.com/social-content-solutions.

Listen in to my conversation with Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson or drop in at the time stamps below.

00:00 100 Episodes!
01:14 Joe LaVelle Intrepid Now
01:30 Dr. Mike Sevilla
01:51 Introduction
02:40 Meet Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson @SeattleMamaDoc
03:22 She's a Podcaster!
04:18 Growth of healthcare podcasts
05:27 Get the audience hooked on podcasts
07:23 Sleep! Everyone needs it
11:12 Was that a sneak preview of your podcast?
12:11 Segmenting podcast content?
14:08 Controversial topics are OK
15:35 What happens if you leave Seattle? Support from Seattle Children's
16:30 It's a podcast AND a blog
18:46 Any social platform you haven't tried?
21:46 Managing the overwhelm
25:35 Transgender bathroom debates in the Carolinas
26:38 Soapbox, Silent Listeners, and misinformation?
29:23 Are you seeing patients?
30:43 Variety in your work week
31:22 Counseling about social media as a pediatrician
34:36 Invitation to join the Healthcare Podcasters in Blab
35:00 Seattle Mama Doc Podcast
36:14 Introducing "Social Content Solutions"

Find Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Blog

00:00 Introduction
00:45 Meet Nathan Clendenin - StoryDriven
01:21 He's got an Emmy!
01:36 Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine
02:00 Studying AIDS, Poverty & Faith in South Africa
02:51 Twitter and Cats (Pippy & Champ) - of course!
03:37 Using cats to ease the learning curve
04:15 Twitter is not business only: Shout out to @LilyPad
04:57 It's not about you
05:20 Video skills - broke with a baby on the way
06:47 Awesome sales pitch! "Real Doctors - Real People"
07:53 A 360-degree view of the physician
10:00 How was this video used?
11:15 StoryDriven is founded
12:25 How do you get real people to "relax"
14:47 "Physician - Heal Thyself!"
16:45 Story Renaissance
20:15 Storyboarding a diagnostic odyssey
22:50 Complex health stories
24:30 What is unique about telling a healthcare story
25:25 HIPAA Tip from Nathan
26:56 Release forms are your friend
27:07 Logistics of working with Doctors
28:30 "Talk nerdy to me" - TED Talk
29:50 Everyone needs to learn to communicate via video
31:59 "Black Men in White Coats"
34:19 Advice for video storytelling
37:15 Stories of triumph
37:41 Todd Eury, Pharmacy Podcast "Try an online search in Twitter

• http://wearestorydriven.com
• @strydrvn
• @nathanclendenin
• @pippyandchamp
• Donald Miller's Podcast
• Talk Nerdy to Me TED Talk

In this episode of Get Social Health my guest, Kathy Holoman and I discuss the art of technology marketing.  Kathy is an exceptional storyteller who connects real-life business challenges with breakthrough technology solutions for Citrix Solutions for Healthcare. She started her career as a painter but transitioned to tech where she found her right brain perspective very helpful in translating left-brain concepts. Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:40 Meet Kathy Holoman, Citrix Solutions for Healthcare
01:38 From painter to technology company
02:40 Citrix location
03:15 Citrix Solutions for Healthcare
04:03 Security of data
05:32 Evangelists & the team
07:33 Deep skill set in marketing
08:15 Where does Citrix come into the sales process?
10:26 What do you do at Citrix?
11:51 What is Everyone Social? 
13:38 Do you have the freedom to publish without editing?
14:52 Is Citrix using Video for promotion?
15:35 Attending trade shows?
17:00 Who is your target customer?
17:46 CEO & C-Suite - Can you reach them via social media?
19:45 Translation of Tech to Social Media
21:24 Complicated messaging for a long-term sale
21:24 How does the social media team plan content?
24:18 Thought leadership
24:36 How hard is it to present a technology that's not visible?
26:20 Is healthcare tech harder to communicate than other verticals?
28:31 Using social media to open a door
29:04 Art to relax - Home renovation and photography
30:35 Race cars and technology
31:48 Providing authentic content
33:43 Social Media Tip: Carol Bush - Advice to Nurses who want to blog

Find Kathy Holoman:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Todd Eury is the host of the Pharmacy Podcast and the 4th Musketeer of the Healthcare Podcasters - a team that brings you a weekly healthcare Blab. Todd wants to enable conversations about pharmacists and the patient experience through his podcast and website. He has brought together multiple voices and conversations about the business of running a pharmacy and seriving their patient communities. It was a great pleasure having him as a guest on Get Social Health and learning about his business and his exciting plans to bring even more voices to The Pharmacy Podcast. Tune in or drop in at the time stanps below:

00:00 Introduction
00:50 Entering the pharmacy space
03:58 The launch of the podcast
05:16 Podcast numbers, Partnering with Pharmacy Times
06:49 How to name a podcast episode
08:12 Podcast Hosts
10:28 Podcast Tech
12:00 Don't let the tech stop you from Podcasting
13:25 How often are you publishing?
14:16 Independant Pharmacies
16:55 CVS & Tobacco ban
18:29 Are Pharmacists in social media
24:57 E-Proscribing
28:53 Sally Okun and Patients Like Me
31:48 Patients and social media
35:21 How does The Pharmacy Podcast make money
36:39 Consulting - WellMed Rx
37:46 Ritesh Patel - Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide
39:40 Pharmacists - important point of contact
45:31 Social Media Tip: Erin Wold - Be a real Person

Co-Hosts of the Pharmacy Podcast Show --- http://pharmacypodcast.com/about/ 

Twitter

The Pharmacy Podcast

Today we're talking about Pharma and Social Media with Ritesh Patel, EVP and Chief Digital Officer of Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide. During our conversation we discussed handling a PR crisis, being a digital evangelist and getting the C-Suite on board with social media. Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:55 Meet Ritesh Patel
01:55 David Ogilvy & Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide
04:15 What kind of health are you serving?
05:45 Do you have a group that specializes in Crisis Management?
06:38 Industry response to bad PR
08:58 Hard to "put the brakes on"
10:11 Can you BE a digital evangelist in pharma?
13:31 Patients need information and Fair balance
15:58 COPD Foundation - Is pharma focusing on disease states?
19:00 Mayo Clinic - Must educate because so much information is bad
21:02 Patient communities
23:33 Are you doing more client work in open or closed communities?
25:15 Storyvine for telling patient stories
25:55 Why would a patient give a pharma testimonial?
28:00 How does the app get paid for?
29:16 Are you evangelizing to the C-Suite?
30:58 Is it "They don't get it" or "They are afraid of it"?
32:09 Are digital budgets growing?
33:48 What about other health verticals? Are they using social media?
35:27 Are you doing work in health startups?
36:14 Are all the Ogilvy Health employees wearing wearables?
36:54 If you could wave a magic wand, what would you change?
40:41 Patient centricity model
42:19 Is the FDA active in social media?
44:41 Social Media Tip: Carol Bush, RN - Tip for Nurse Bloggers

45:50 Physicians - Nurses - Practice Managers - I need your feedback! Take this survey!

Digital Musings for Pharma: Rethinking Social Media Engagement by Ritesh Patel

Find Ritesh Patel

LinkedIn

Twitter

About Me

As an aside - Ritesh is a DJ too! https://www.spreaker.com/user/ritters90

Can a spirituality Tweet Chat really cover deep topics like spiritually, faith and religion? In part two of my conversation with Meredith Gould, we pick up our conversation with a discussion of Tweet Chats, particularly the Health and Spirituality Tweet Chat (@hlthsp). This Tweet Chat happens on the 3rd Tuesday of every month at 9:00 pm EST.Meredith Gould is well-known as a healthcare communications thought-leader. But many may not realize she is an author and has been published multiple times

Meredith Gould is well-known as a healthcare communications thought-leader. But many may not realize she is an author and has been published multiple times about social media and communications use for churches. Her most recently published book is "Desperately Seeking Spirituality" which we discussed on Part I of our

Meredith Gould is well-known as a healthcare communications thought-leader. But many may not realize she is an author and has been published multiple times about social media and communications use for churches. Her most recently published book is "Desperately Seeking Spirituality" which we discussed on Part I of our podcast interview.

Join me for the second half of our conversation as we discuss her new book “Desperately Seeking Spirituality” as well as social media, healthcare, and religion on Get Social Health. Follow the conversation or jump in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:45 #hlthsp Tweet Chat @ReckShow
Symplur.com03:51 Tracking the TweetChat - Yea for Symplur.com!
05:15 Who attends the chat?
05:48 What do you chat about?
06:13 How do you handle such "heavy" topics in Twitter?
08:55 "Winning a Tweet Chat"
09:42 Is there a similarity between Healthcare professionals and Priests/Ministers
13:02 The Pope is Tweeting, right?
15:11 It's not about the why, it's the who.
16:10 Social media or online digital network.
16:45 Kudos to Dr. Matthew Katz, @SubAtomicDoc
18:35 "Desperately Seeking Spirituality"
19:00 Book in the works: "Bridging the Gap: A Field Guide to Generations" (working title)
21:50 "My Wisdom, Your Energy. Let's Change the World."
22:40 Rick Evans, Ogilvy Worldwide, Match the conversation to the platform.

You can find Meredith Gould in…

• Twitter
• Twitter: Church Social Media
• Twitter: Health & Spiritually Chat
• LinkedIn
• Meredith’s books
• Facebook

One of healthcare’s strongest communications advocates is Meredith Gould. Author, instigator, and inspiration, she calls ‘em like she sees ‘em. As a member of the team at the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network, Meredith is a thought leader in using social media and communications to build communities, share ideas and push the envelope in online discussions. While well known in the healthcare community, Meredith also has a deep sociological appreciation for the individual's personal search for spiritual truth and has authored 10 books on digital communications and spiritually.

In "Desperately Seeking Spirituality", sacred spelunker and sociologist Meredith Gould combines practical wisdom with lived experience to explain why and when traditional practices don't work for today's seeker and then how to choose ones that will. In short, easy-to-read chapters and with characteristic wit, Gould provides counsel for reframing perception to discover the sacred in everyday life. This guide is for self-identified seekers who have tried some, many, or even all the classic spiritual practices and then given up on them when they stop working.

In "Desperately Seeking Spirituality", Gould invites readers to embrace a broader definition of practice that shifts focus from doing to being. Meredith Gould, PhD, is a sociologist with well over a decade of hands-on experience with communications at all levels of church across denominations. She's the author of nine books about faith and everyday life. Dr. Gould is the founder and lead moderator of the weekly ecumenical Twitter-based chat about church social media (#chsocm), founder and co-moderator of the monthly Health & Spirituality chat (#hlthsp), Platinum Fellow of the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network, and nationally known for her passionate advocacy of using online tools for ministry and to encourage practical spirituality.

Join me for the first part of a two-part conversation with Meredith Gould as we discuss her new book “Desperately Seeking Spirituality” as well as social media, healthcare, and religion on Get Social Health. Follow the conversation or jump in at the time stamps below.

Carol Bush. She's an Oncology Nurse and entrepreneur who uses her social media skills to help other nurses start up their businesses. She has taken her "intrapreneur" skills developed as a Nurse Navigator for the Midwest Cancer Alliance to create a business helping nursing associations and nurse entrepreneurs.  Carol has provided training to nursing organizations on social media and personal consulting for nurses who have a business idea get launched. Listen in to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below:

Carol Bush's online profiles:

• StartUp Weekend
• Joni Watson - @joniwatson -  Nursetopia
• Oncology Nursing Society - @OncologyNursing - Oncology Nursing Society
• Midwest Cancer Alliance - @MidwestCancer  - Midwest Cancer Alliance
• Harold Freeman - @HPFreemanPNI -  Harold Freeman Patient Navigation Institute
• Erica MacDonald  Nurse Born Products - @NurseBorn

When you have a conference that brings together more than 40,000 health IT professionals clinicians vendors executives patients and speakers you to pull out the social media big guns. I have the pleasure of talking to Steve Sisko known as @shimcode in twitter about being a Social Media Ambassador for HIMSS 16 on Get Social Health.

Being a Social Media Ambassador for the largest healthcare conference is a privilege and an honor and a lot of work. If you can't attend a conference look up the hashtag for the event, follow the action and participate. You'll be amazed at how engaged you can be even from afar.

Steve Sisko on LinkedIn

Steve Sisko's Blog

Steve Sisko on Twitter

HIMSS16 Social Media Ambassadors

Steve Sisko on the @HCPodcasters Blab February 29, 2016

Steve's Compendium of Twitter Lists

#NatCon16 is the Annual Conference of the National Council on Behavioral Health. For the second time, the conference will include invited Social Media Ambassadors to help share the story of #NatCon16 far and wide. I’m joined on the podcast by Communications team members Hannah Cohen and Allie Siemianowski of the National Council on Behavioral Health to talk about why they developed the social media ambassador program and what they hope to achieve. Listen to our conversation originally recorded via Blab or drop in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction to #NatCon16
00:50 Meet Ali Siemianowski and Hannah Coen
02:00 National Council on Behavioral Health
02:30 Conference attendance ~ 5,000
03:15 Kudos on the NatCon's social media presence
04:12 Social media track includes @KevinMD
05:00 Social Media Ambassadors
05:51 Asking the "dumb" questions
06:43 Who are the other Social Media Ambassadors
07:23 Are there specific tracks?
08:59 Active in TweetChats as National Council? #StampOutStigma
09:40 How do you organize your TweetChats?
11:10 What are the social media activities during the conference?
12:23 Invasive social media
15:24 Janet's first conference at Ceasars
16:45 Quiet interview place (for Jaet?)
17:02 Will you have National press coverage?
17:29 How can conference attendees prepare to engage in social media?
18:48 Will you create a twitter list?
19:12 Sean Erreger, @StuckonSW & Dana Lewis #hcsm
20:40 Details on the conference
21:12 NO HEELS
22:06 Social Media Success Tip: Ahmanielle Hall, Yuma Medical Center "There are people to help you"

How do you take healthcare innovation into business as usual practices? Joining me on Get Social Health is Andre Blackman, a member of the Jump Foundry team and Producer for Health:Further. This program that brings healthcare innovators together with healthcare professionals to figure out how to implement innovative products, services, and ideas in real-world businesses.

Health:Further

You know, healthcare innovation is a lot like the weather, everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. That may be stretching the metaphor a bit but, seriously doesn’t it seem that awful lot of innovation never quite gets into practice in a healthcare setting? In our conversation Andre and I start with his

You know, healthcare innovation is a lot like the weather, everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. That may be stretching the metaphor a bit but, seriously doesn’t it seem that awful lot of innovation never quite gets into practice in a healthcare setting? In our conversation Andre and I start with his previous podcast topic, the Sustain or Die Manifesto. Andre developed this idea a few years ago to inspire others to think about taking healthcare innovation into practice. In his new role with Health:Further, Andre is responsible for creating events that bring together digital health innovators and the healthcare see suite to talk about how you can use innovations in a practical real world setting.

Listen to our conversation on the podcast or jump in at the timestamps below.

00:00 Introduction: Agent of Change - Andre Blackman
02:19 The Sustain or Die Manifesto
04:52 Wearables gaining interest for health tracking
07:20 Manifesto
13:58 Brand new project - Health:Further
18:10 Med help to those without
23:04 Producing Quarterly events
24:24 Jumpstart Foundry
25:11 Are you targeting just Healthcare Systems?
25:57 Health innovation - Where's the impact?
28:09 What core competencies does the health entrepreneur need?
30:54 Looking for the small healthcare solutions
32:29 Room for individuals?
33:56 Levels of involvement
35:26 What is your role with Health:Further?
36:40 Dana Lewis, #hcsm Moderator, "Jump in!"

Becky Sansbury is a former hospice chaplain who is now a speaker and consultant to professionals who want practical ways to help their clients get through crises. Becky’s resilience-building model organizes realistic, repeatable steps people can take to regain stability, and then move forward. She is the author of After the Shock: Getting You Back On The Road to Resilience When Crisis Hits You Head On.

When you hear the word crisis what do you think? A dramatic car wreck. A critical medical diagnosis. Divorce. Job loss. Natural disaster. Death. What about the mini-shocks within those crises or the smaller events that disrupt our lives more frequently? A fender bender in rush-hour traffic. Personal information getting hacked. Being overlooked for a promotion.
When crisis hits, large or small, we are thrown off balance.

In After the Shock: Getting You Back On The Road To Resilience When Crisis Hits You Head On, Becky Sansbury introduces a sustainable model to help you stabilize and move toward resilience.

After decades of working with people in crisis, she determined that four factors give us balance, strength, and support throughout our lives, but especially in shocking times. Like the four tires of a car, comfort, control, community, and connection to something bigger than self-provide both a base and a cushion for navigating the ruts and potholes of life. But that is not enough to move us on to resilience.

In the overwhelming confusion of crisis, we crave a space safe for focusing on our current experience, strengthened by crucial lessons from the past. We make both casual and far-reaching decisions based on assumptions that may no longer be authentic or lead to our desired future. We grasp for resources, often unsure of what we need.
Expanding the car metaphor, in After the Shock the reader learns effective ways to use the frame of experience, the steering capacity of assumptions, and the fuel of resources to lead toward more resilient responses in a variety of crises.

Social Media Tip: Andy DeLao, @CancerGeek 

Becky on LinkedIn

After The Shock on Twitter  (Yes, the “e” is missing in After. The correct spelling was not available.)

After the Shock on Facebook

Becky's website 

Purchase the book 

Andy DeLao is a man with an important mission, one that we should all share. Known as @CancerGeek in social media, Andy believes that you should challenge the status quo and be the change you want to see. From his day job impacting cancer center design to his new initiative, "My Ideal Patient Experience", @CancerGeek has a commitment to understanding the patient's experience and making it better. The global founding team of My Ideal Patient Experience includes two former Get Social Health podcast guests, Dr. Gia Sison and Marie Ennis-O'Conner.

00:00 Introduction
00:45 Meet Andy DeLao @CancerGeek
01:50 Building cancer centers
02:27 Hard to jump between country's rules?
03:54 What was your role in building cancer centers?
06:50 Did you have to educate the architects?
07:45 Mayo Clinic and the design of patient space
09:18 Pro or Con "plush Robes"?
09:33 Worried about icing when the cake is lopsided
11:30 What's an example of the patient improvement process?
12:50 Genesis of @CancerGeek
13:40 What is your role in social media?
15:18 "My Ideal Patient Experience"
16:15 Founding members of My Ideal Patient Experience
17:35 Global team
18:15 When can you actually have a virtual meeting?

19:12 Former Get Social Health podcast guests
Dr. Gia Sison, Marie Ennis-O'Conner
Time, Trust, Transparency & Transition
22:21 What's the social media response?
23:45 Podcasting! @CancerGeek joins the club
24:28 Commitment to podcasting
25:20 "The Patient Scene" - Remove the curtain of OZ
26:13 Patients & Stories
27:56 What is a "Ruckus Maker"?
29:09 "It's Your Turn" Seth Godin
29:48 You have to be part of the change
31:06 Where to find @CancerGeek
32:09 Closing
32:36 Social Media Tip: Alice Ackerman, Carilion Clinic Children's Hospital,"Don't be afraid of it."
33:15 Social Media Training for Healthcare Professionals, Get Social Health Academy

#myidealptexp

Being early to social media and blogging has an advantage when you are a physician and a content producer. Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Howard Luks began writing his blog to answer questions from his patients. After a number of years of producing content that addressed real patient concerns he now sees over 4 million visitors to his website annually. Dr. Luks is a social media early adopter and has tried most social media platforms some of which he has dropped after not getting the results he wanted. Aside from continuing his active blogging, Dr. Luks is now live-streaming messages to his audience via Periscope. Listen in to my conversation with social media pioneer Dr. Howard Luks or drop in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:51 Meet Dr. Howard Luks, Orthopedic Surgeon
01:34 Evolution of Social Media
03:57 Medical Journals
04:50 Is it a problem that social media is slow in adoption?
05:26 Pioneers have led the way
06:34 Physicians as content providers
08:00 Communicating patient education - "one man show"
09:36 Online presence is your reputation
10:42 Reviews on ZocDoc
11:49 What do your colleagues think of social media?
12:20 What drew you to social media
14:32 Have you thought about writing a book?
15:27 Use of video
17:00 Live or recorded video?
18:28 Tracking questions and comments
19:14 Age of patients and social savvy
21:30 Involved in Startup community
23:40 mHealth & Digital Health
28:41 Is that a future you're excited about?
29:49 #TweetChats #HIT
31:10 When are you live in Twitter?
31:48 Is it harder to have conversations in Twitter?
34:30 Social Media Tip: Dr. Bryan Vartabedian "Find a Social Media Mentor"

Howard Lucks Social Media Profiles:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Blog
• YouTube

My guest today on the Get Social Health podcast is Sean Dent. He’s an acute care Nurse Practitioner and the host of the Change of Shift podcast. He’s also one of the early social media adopters in the healthcare space giving a voice to nursing. The role of the nurse has many contradictions. On the one hand, it is the most respected profession in our nation based on a recent survey, however, when you hear and read what nurses are saying and printing online, it presents a story of frustration, of challenges, of lack of respect, and even danger.  Let’s hear what he has to say on Get Social Health. Listen to the full podcast or drop in at the time stamps below:

Podcast Time Stamps

00:00 Introduction
01:08 Acute Care Nurse Practitioner
1:57 Hard to talk about yourself "imposter syndrome"
02:50 Early Blogging experience
05:00 Early Adoptors: Dr. Mike Sevilla, Dr. Kevin Pho
05:50 Are you supporting nurses or advocating for change?
07:12 Dealing with negativity
09:45 Are Nurses active in social media?
12:00 Nursing is the most trusted profession
12:51 Are Nurses leaving their careers early?
14:28 Shout-out to Janet's Mom, an early Nurse Practioner
15:00 Is the American Nursing Association supporting Nurses online?
16:56 Media-Preneur. Scrubs Magazine.
20:48 Do you own your own content?
24:20 Crossfit is for everyone
29:50 How do you plan to make a business from your podcast?
30:45 You're considered an expert at 10k hours
33:20 "Change of shift"
38:29 Podcast structure
41:55 Social Media Tip: Greg Chang, for[MD] "Give before you ask"

The Get Social Health Academy

Thank you for joining me for Get Social Health. As you may know, I recently launched the Get Social Health Academy, an online learning space for healthcare practitioners. If you handle social media for a physician’s or other healthcare practice, check out the website for courses that can help you achieve your goals in social media. The website is Get Social Health Academy.com. If you have any questions please reach out to me at Janet@getsocialhealth.com or in Twitter @GetSocialHealth. Thanks for listening.

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2016. I’m really happy we’ve reached 2016 for a number of reasons. 2015 was a year of a lot of work for me. I decided at about this time last year that I wanted to take the information I had been learning from the Get Social Health podcast and figure out a way to share that knowledge with the wider community.

In particular, I was very interested in applying the lessons I learned from my podcast guests to helping the small healthcare practice. In speaking with my guests, one of the things I learned was how hard it was to get up to speed on social media once they decided to engage. I began to ask questions of other healthcare professionals, including my own physicians and asked them what they thought of social media. Many were still very focused on the day-to-day operations of their practices. However, they also recognized that social media was a force to be reckoned with.

As a career marketer, I have always been very engaged with local business owners. Through my work with Get Social Health, it became clear that physicians, health care professionals, allied health fields, and other professionals were really small businesses. The problem is they don’t have traditional business training and very little marketing expertise. If marketing were the same as it was 20 or even 10 years ago that might not be such a big problem because any number of people could help the healthcare practice market their businesses.

Unfortunately, with the rise of digital marketing, there’s a new set of skills and knowledge that are needed to successfully present any business, let alone a healthcare business, online. Just as I would never dream of giving medical advice, I recommend the same to healthcare providers when it comes to the nuances of digital and social media. Indeed, there’s so much to learn and to know that I don’t even try to know it all. What I do try to know is who to ask when I have a question.

The Get Social Health podcast has been an immeasurably valuable tool for me and I hope my listeners to learn new concepts in digital marketing, social media trends, and tactical ways to take advantage of all of this knowledge for the local practice or hospital.

To prepare for this podcast, I updated my spreadsheet of guests and categorized them because I assumed that I had an imbalance in the variety of content that I was presenting or at least not enough information in some of the areas I would really like to focus on in 2016. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the podcast topics and guests were extremely well-balanced. If you’ve been a listener from the beginning or went back and listened to all of the previous episodes (and I only recommend you do so if you have a long plane ride so you can get some rest), you would hear a nice balance of subject matter.

When I started the podcast in June 2014 through the end of 2015 my guests fell into about six categories; physicians or nurses who are active in social media, entrepreneurs, digital strategists or medical futurists, agencies that specialize in healthcare clients, and very tactical programs on how to use specific social media platforms. That’s very similar to what I would like to present in 2016.

My goal for this year is to provide content in for subject areas. First, “The Big Picture”. These podcasts would feature guests who have their eye on the 20,000-foot level perspective of healthcare and/or social media. I’ll be inviting guests who are looking farther down the road than we might be. They could be innovators, entrepreneurs, digital strategists, physicians, or medical futurists. I’ll be asking them what they see in the future of healthcare and how social media may play a part. Now, in healthcare long-term might be the end of the year, or it could be farther down the road. We’re looking for new ideas, innovation, and disruption. It’s always good to take a look up from the grindstone every now and then and get a sense of where we're headed.

The biggest objection I hear most frequently for healthcare providers entering social media is either lack of time or concern about violating HIPAA. The first is something that can be managed and I’ll be talking about that in just a moment. With regard to HIPAA compliance, it has more to do with education, training, and providing the tools necessary so the mystery of HIPAA is abated. Yes, we may be talking about some negative news regarding HIPAA compliance. And there are unfortunate things that happen every day that impact privacy laws and patient confidentiality. But when you consider the millions of patients who are seeking care every day, the actual HIPAA violations are relatively rare, therefore, we’ll be facing those discussions straight on and providing information so you can be forewarned and forearmed.

The next subject we’re going to cover is very tactical. I’ll make sure that we have a series of podcast guests who know and understand how to use social media in everyday use. Strategy is all well and good, and essential, however once the strategy is set the real challenge of social media is keeping up with the changes and making sure that the content you spend the time and to create or buy is effective. Our guests may represent ad agencies that work in the healthcare space, practicing physicians, nurses, or other health professionals or social media strategists managing current healthcare social media accounts.

Since I’m the podcast host I reserve the right to change my mind adding anything else I feel like and otherwise present content I think you’d be as interested in as much as I am. (I wouldn’t be a marketer if I didn’t have a disclaimer.) While I’m very honest about using the podcast to find guests to educate me I also want to provide you with great discussions and interesting educational opportunities. Therefore, I need to hear from you. Please reach out to me at Janet@getsocialhealth.com or visit my website getsocialhealth.com where you can send me a contact form or even leave an audio message via the speakpipe app on the right side of the home page.

To give you a flavor of what’s coming up in 2016 I’ve gone back to some previous podcast interviews and pulled out a few selections. In addition, I’ve been taking social media tips from conferences podcast guests and social media get-togethers and will also present some of those in this episode.

I also encourage you to visit the website to review the show notes for every episode. My guests would be happy if you would follow them in their social media profiles or connect via LinkedIn. Just tell them I sent you. So without any further ado let’s get some great healthcare social media advice from the guests on Get Social Health.

My guests on this podcast are:

• Sara McFarland
• Srini Kolathur
• Dr. Justin Smith
• Dr. Jeff Livingston
• Dr. Mike Sevilla
• Mary Pat Whaley
• Jason Pratt
• Susan Woolner
• Tal Givoly
• Chris Nelson
• Mark Traphagen
• Dr. Ferris Timimi

So, there you have it. A little sample of what 2016 has in store for you. We’re going to focus on the big picture, marketing and social media strategy, content for your social media sites, blogging, and the tactical execution of social media. Plus a few treats thrown in.

At the beginning of the podcast, I mentioned that 2015 was a year of hard work. And I’ll admit it, it wasn’t easy. But I will admit it actually was fun. What I created in 2015 was a new platform called the Get Social Health Academy. During 2015, I learned a lot of new things myself. I learned about website development, online learning programs, how to develop online courses, photography, videography, editing, and much more in order to create an online learning platform. The Get Social Health Academy is a series of online courses in social media for healthcare specifically designed to help the small healthcare practice or healthcare professional who wants to get up to speed in social media. I’ve been delivering webinars and workshops for a number of years and through that experience created five courses of core content for social media in healthcare.

In addition, I’ll be launching a new course every month in 2016 that will go deeper into some of these general topics. I could talk all day about these subjects, however, that’s not what you’re here for so I just invite you to visit getsocialhealthacademy.com and take a look around. I also invite you to contact me if you have any questions or have specific subjects that you’d like me to cover in future courses.

I would also like to mention that the courses have been designed for individuals or for Healthcare Associations or advertising agencies to use as member or client education. If you’d like information on how to become an affiliate of Get Social Health Academy or to purchase the courses in bulk I’d love to hear from you.

I can’t thank you enough for listening to the podcast, tweeting out the episode information, commenting or sharing in LinkedIn and all the other ways that you have shown support for the podcast. I look forward to bringing you a lot more interesting and informative and engaging conversations in 2016.

Christoph Trappe is a content marketer who has spoken world-wide on the topic. What he wants you to think about is being "authentic" to communicate your organization's mission. In our conversation on Get Social Health we discuss the importance of building your brand with smart, consistent content (that does not have to be exclusively yours). Christoph offers some excellent advice on the timing and longevity of posts plus how to re-purpose blog content to give them more exposure without tiring the others. Listen in to our conversation or drop in to the time-stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:41 An unrealized sports reporter
03:30 MedTouch
04:21 Storytelling across industries
07:08 Content consulting - where does MedTouch come into play? "Silos are only good on farms"
10:18 Published his Book "Get Real: Telling Authentic Stories for Long-Term Success"
11:20 How many ways can you re-purpose content?
13:30 Scheduling and longevity of content
14:00 Follow 60/30/10 Rule (60% sharing, 30% Responding/Re-Tweeting, 10% Linking to your blog)
13 day interval
16:50 Being popular drives more placement
19:35 Tweet Chats: #hcsm content marketing
20:05 Have you been a guest as a Tweet Chat Q&A?
21:23 Periscope & Facebook Live
24:58 How can healthcare use Periscope
26:55 Managing Periscope & Blab with tri-focals
29:14 Alternate format: Appear.in
29:35 What do you mean by "Authentic"?
32:31 Authentic storytelling is not always positive
35:58 Everyone has stories to tell
36:35 How do you engage with 45,000 followers in Twitter?
38:55 Social Media Tip: Dr. Jeff Livingston "Be authentic"
You're invited to the Healthcare Podcasters weekly Blab

I really appreciate your listenting to Get Social Health.
If you are looking for more conversations about healthcare, marketing, social media and communications, I invite you to visit the Get Social Health website and click on the "Live" tab for an archive of the Healthcare Podcasters Blab.
Even better, join us live at noon EST on Mondays for a new conversation. I'm joined as host by Joe Lavelle of the Interpid Now Healthcare podcast, Todd Eury of the Pharmacy Podcast and Jared Johnson of the Health IT Marketer Podcast.
I'd also love suggestions for topics or podcast guests so please reach out via social media -
that's @GetSocialHealth or email me at janet@GetSocialHealth.com.

There are many healthcare providers who dread hearing "Dr. Google" quoted in the exam room. From inaccurate or misleading information to downright "malpractice" (says Tanya Feke, MD in a blog posted on KevinMD.com ), Dr. Google is a challenge when dealing with patient education. I asked Google expert (actually, Guru) Mark Traphagen of Stone Temple Consulting to join me in a conversation about the "Good News/Bad News" regarding health information online and what a healthcare practitioner can do to become a trusted voice in their community. Listen to our conversation or drop in at the discussion topics below.

00:00 Intro
00:45 Mark Traphagen - Guru
03:30 "Dr. Google Should be Sued for Malpractice"
04:50 Healthy skepticism for online health information
05:55 Google is part of the solution, Google's ranking algorithm
07:00 Up to 20% of Google searches are health related
07:30 Google's Direct Answers
08:18 "How do I boil and egg"
08:40 Google Highlights one answer from one source
09:12 Google partnering with trusted healthcare organizations
09:52 Re-purposing existing content or producing new content?
10:30 Pre-approving content
12:30 Competition between large healthcare brands for providing content
14:01 Do we care about anything other than Google?
14:24 "Google's Mission is to organize the information of the world and diseminate it."
14:58 You've got to be more creative than ever.
15:38 Can Bing or Yahoo compete with Google?
16:00 "The User doesn't give a hoot about you. They just want the answer."
16:44 How many trusted sources do you need for information?
18:13 Google's Truth Algorithm "Knowledge-Based Trust"
20:15 Become a reliable and trusted source, and you could gain a "truth rank" from Google
20:50 Local emphasis may become more important
22:00 Does linking a blog post to a highly regarded website help with ranking?
24:34 If you are building a good content site - cross link to other content on your site
25:00 Create reasons to link content from other places on your website or blog
25:35 Pogo-Sticking
26:30 Google measures time spent on your website?
28:00 Google wants "useful' information - not just "good."
29:23 Google Search Quality Guidelines - Human evaluation of content
30:17 Google wants to provide more than the answer to the question
31:00 Don't write for Google - write for your audience
31:35 Serve as a Physician online and offline but still need technical expertise
33:05 Next time: Mark shares his own patient experience
34:32 Social Media Tip: Mary Pat Whaley - Content ideas for your blog

Links and Resources:

The Stone Temple Consulting blog archive

"We have nothing to fear except fear itself." While the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt may be perfectly appropriate for a discussion of HIPAA and data security, that does not stop healthcare organizations from being very, very concerned. Sadly, many healthcare organizations are not entering social media because of concerns about violating HIPAA. I am joined on the podcast by Srini Kolathur, HIPAA Compliance Coach at EHR2.0, a compliance, training and education consultancy. Srini and I know each other through social media training via webinars (disclosure: Get Social Health is a trainer and content author for EHR2.0). I realized that I had never had an HIPAA compliance expert on the podcast so I put on my curiosity hat and asked a lot of questions. Give a listen to the podcast or drop in at the time stamps below:

00:00 Introduction
00:47 Meet Srini Kolathur of EHR2.0
02:06 EHR2.0 - Web 2.0
02:50 What do you do as a Coach for EHR2.0?
03:17 Do you have to follow HIPAA if you don't have EMR?
05:25 Does HIPAA apply to every company, not just healthcare?
06:28 HIPAA and photography example?
07:51 Photography Consent Form
08:58 How do you get a HIPAA Certification?
16:56 Once and done?
18:10 Do I need a HIPAA compliance company on retainer?
20:45 Does a BAA protect the vendor or the physician?
22:12 Do vendors need to be trained in HIPAA compliance?
23:38 What happens with the reports when they are completed?
24:55 Would completing the forms protect a practice in the case of a breech?
27:30 "Wilful Neglect"
29:28 Is it the same process for a small practice versus a hospital?
31:18 How long does a HIPAA assessment take?
32:00 Worth the time and effort
32:30 "Ounce of prevention"
32:44 Social media not being taken seriously
34:55 Don't let HIPAA hold you back from being in social media
35:18 Launch of Get Social Health Academy courses!
37:07 Laura Klarman - "Friday Funny"
37:37 Tell us what you would like to hear!
Visit get Social Health Academy for social media courses on social media for the healthcare practice.

Dr. Jeff Livingston is a healthcare social media pioneer. Like fellow physicians Mike Sevilla, Kevin Pho and Bryan Vartabedian, Jeff was early to try, successfully, blend social media into his practice marketing. After getting national (and International) coverage in WIRED, USA Today and Voice of America Jeff re-evaluated his social media strategy to go hyper-local. My favorite quote from the interview was that "marketing benefit should be accidental and secondary." During our conversation we discussed HIPAA, the "wild, wild west" days of social media and how he manages to actively participate in social media between delivering babies. Listen to the podcast or drop in at the time stamps below:

00:00 Introduction
01:40 HIPAA Violations & OBGYN
03:55 Photo policies during birth
06:08 Fun practice Facebook page
06:50 Meet Jeff Livingston, MD
7:30 Teen pregnancy - MySpace - Patient contact
10:35 #hcsm Tweet Chat 9:00 pm EST every Sunday
12:00 The Wild, Wild West
13:15 Facebook content - fun and interesting
14:40 Marketing benefit should be accidental and secondary
15:20 ROE Vs ROI
16:40 Authenticity - Best Post Ever!
19:02 Always educating
22:13 Candy Crush and STD education
22:47 Personal social media evolution
28:07 Multiple social media platforms
32:20 Serving the hyper-local community through social media
34:16 Social Media Tip: Chris Nelson, University of Utah. Tag the right person in Twitter

Janet announced the launch of Get Social Health Academy - online learning in social media for the healthcare practice. 

Macarthur OB-GYN Social Media Sites:

• Website
• Pinterest
• Twitter
• YouTube
• HealthTap

Ricardo Ibarria is the founder of Hygeia Health, a start up that has developed the Hygeia Health Station. Its not your typical health startup idea. It's not an app, a wearable or a SaaS. It's an actual, Made-in-America, telehealth product. Hygeia is currently piloting the Hygeia Health Station which increases engagement and adoption in telehealth services in large covered population settings such as employers or schools. The potential for the Hygeia Health station extends as far as developing countries. As long as electricity is available, telehealth services can be delivered.

Hygeia Health featured in Venture Beat

Ricardo Ibarria's Background

Founded Hygeia Health

What is the Hygeia Health System?

Can you explain how it works?

What skills or credentials does the operator need?

Can you get training at a Community College?

Where are you doing the beta test? Retail or Employers?

Will this work in a developing country?

Social Media Tip: Mary Pat Whaley of Manage My Practice "Blog Content Ideas"

Get Social Health Announcement: The Healthcare Podcasters Blab every Monday at noon EST featuring Janet Kennedy of Get Social Health, Jared Johnson of the Healthcare IT Marketers Podcast, Joe Lavelle of the Intrepid Now podcast and Todd Eury of the Pharmacy Podcast.

Hygeia Health

Ricardo in LinkedIn 

Hygeia Health in Twitter

Hygeia Health in Facebook

Meet Joe Lavelle. He's the host of the IntrepidNow Healthcare podcast. He is also the co-founder of a healthcare media empire, IntrepidNow. What I love about his exciting new venture is the reason he started this business - so he could get off the road as a healthcare consultant and coach his son's ball team. Now he is focused on using the medium of podcasting to create marketing content and sales opportunities for his clients.

As a result of reaching out to other healthcare podcasters, Joe is also one of the founders of a new weekly Blab, the Healthcare Podcasters. He will be joined by Jared Johnson of the "Healthcare IT Marketer Podcast," Todd Eury of the "Pharmacy Podcast" and me, on behalf of the "Get Social Health" podcast in a weekly Blab every Monday at noon EST.

My guest today on Get Social Health is Mary Pat Whaley, a writer and blogger with a focus on helping small, independent businesses remain viable through her business Manage My Practice. Mary is also an excellent case of small world syndrome - she practically lives right around the corner! Today we'll talk about her business, Manage My Practice, and how she got her start blogging during the first wave of the internet. We dive into what kinds of clients independent or solo practices can expect and how such practices engage in social media.

00:00 Introduction
01:37 It's a small world
02:15 Manage My Practice
03:17 Early adoption of blogging
04:18 Blog content: Technology and Healthcare
05:22 Tech? Websites or EHR?
06:10 Dr. Bill Kroutz 
06:49 What is Manage My Practice?
10:11 Marriage Counselor on the side?
11:03 What kind of healthcare clients?
12:22 What's it like coming out of Med school?
14:27 Who is the typical client?
16:21 Concierge medicine
19:43 Can a solo doc negotiate?
22:07 Do your services vary based on the medical specialty?
26:42 What is your background, Mary Pat?
29:13 How does an individual engage in social medai?
32:39 Costs for marketing a new practice
35:23 Do you often have practices with ad budgets?
37:11 Words of wisdom for starting a new practice?

Social Media Tip: Tal Givoly of Medivizor - Vet your sources

Mary Pat Whaley on LinkedIn

Manage My Practice

Even podcasters can be fan-girls (or boys). When I came into healthcare social media there were a Twitter handles that were obviously well respected in the community if you follow the authors who are retweeted or shared. Marie Ennis-O'Conner is a member of the "must follow" healthcare marketing club. She writes and curates excellent content for the healthcare marketer. The fact that she lives in Ireland and is at least 5 hours difference from the east coast of the US does not seem to impact when she chooses to appear. Marie shares content generously too. Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below.

Introduction
A world view
Marie's back story
How did patients engage before social media?
Is Irish healthcare nationalized?
What kind of clients do you have?
Do US Pharma companies follow US privacy laws or European?
Mayo Clinic Social Media Summit in OZ
What was your talk about?
People are people
Dr. Gia Sisson
Health 2.0 Dublin

Visit our resources page for more valuable (and free!) resources on social media and digital health.

http://hcsmmonitor.com

http://www.scoop.it/t/social-media-for-healthcare

http://www.slideshare.net/ennoconn

https://www.pinterest.com/ennoconn/healthcare-social-media

Meet Makala Johnson, Mayo Clinic's social media data geek. She was the first hire of the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media. After listening to her, you'll understand why. She is the a lover of all things data and demonstrates a great skill at understanding the data metrics that should be tied to social media. She also lives the mission of the Mayo Clinic and is engaging, friendly and helpful. Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below:

Introduction
Mayo Clinic believes in engagement
Metrics and analytics
How did the Center for Social Media get founded
How many team members in the social media effort at the Mayo Clinic?
Content submission guidelines
Ideas for content come from the whole system
Dr. Chuck Rosen - Celebrating moments at Mayo
Coordination and Cooperation
Reviewing content submission
Training for all employees
How many social accounts were active when the MCCSM was founded?
How are you keeping track of all your content
What management tool are you using?
Tool selection process?
Did you select an "off the shelf" tool or was it customized for MCCSM?
When do you need a management tool? Number of people using social media or the number of social media sites you're managing?
Did you work with social media management tools before the creation of the CSM?
How do you differentiate between your personal and professional profiles?
How many social media accounts are there for the Mayo Clinic?
Who is the head of social media for all of Mayo Clinic? Lee Aase of course!
Have you had any rogue accounts?
She's a data geek!
What are considered the "essential" metrics?
Can you track "save for later" posts?
Are you using Facebook tracking pixels?
Are you downloading the Facebook analytics report?
What are the benefits of using a social media management tool?
Standard response time to comments?
Did you get a demo of the social media platform?

Social Media Tip: Keith Boswell "Create a Content Library"

ANNOUNCEMENT! Get in on a pilot of the Get Social Health Academy

Visit our resources page for more valuable (and free!) resources on social media and digital health.

https://www.sprinklr.com/

https://hootsuite.com/

One of the biggest challenges in fighting a chronic or serious illness is wading through thousands of articles, posts and research that can be found online. Medivizor answers that problem by providing personalized health research curation based on a detailed questionnaire completed by a subscriber. On Get Social Health, I have a conversation with Medivizor CEO Tal Givoly about providing patients with research that is vetted for accuracy and relevancy. Catch our conversation or drop in at time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:55 Tal Givoly, CEO of Medivizor
01:55 "Chronic web researcher"
03:49 How does the Medivizor search work?
05:04 How is relevancy determined?
07:50 Needle in the wrong haystack
08:31 Delivering any information or only currently usable information?
09:42 Midivizor is not focused on preventive or diagnosis information
12:55 Physician's response to bad information from patients
15:10 How does the physician get copies of the information
16:30 The family physician

17:08 What is the business model for Medivizor
20:35 Standard of care/treatment protocols
20:35 How many patients are in Medivizor?
21:08 Does this data reflect population health?
23:40 Who is vetting all the information?
24:41 Is there a community for Medivizor members?
26:15 #PatientChat
29:16 Why did you start Medivizor?
32:55 How many members are caregivers vs patients?
33:55 linking to content online.
34:00 Where am I going to get enough content
Putting labels and roles on people
35:25 How does social media play into Medivizor
37:20 Is your platform in English only?
37:55 What are your financial goals?
38:40 How is the information provided?
40:16 Social Media Tip: Jared Johnson - Be thankful
40:56 A special Announcement! Launching the Get Social Health Academy pilot course launch!

Visit our resources page for more valuable (and free!) resources on social media and digital health.

Transitioning into the realm of digital marketing and new media has been a challenge for many healthcare institutions. Often senior leadership has little experience utilizing social media channels and is managing a number of different marketing agencies. Keith Boswell BooksEnter Keith Boswell, Chief Digital Officer for hire. Keith Boswell is the President of Perceptint, a consulting firm that specializes in helping health systems and other companies bridge the gap when creating or managing a digital marketing strategy. Keith is also an author of two e-Books, "Digital Marketing for Healthcare" and "Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy." If that's not enough, he is a fellow podcaster, host of the "CDO -Chief Digital Officer Podcast." Listen in to our conversation about digital strategies and healthcare or drop in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:45 So may ways to connect
01:37 Patients are not patient
02:52 Social Listening
03:35 Who is Keith Boswell - Chief Digital Officer?
04:35 Kaiser-Permanente Digital Strategy
06:10 Agency models don't always translate to healthcare
09:37 Digital decisions by people who don't use digital
11:23 Educating the C-Suite - Where are the conversations taking place?
12:40 Dialiang for your lawyer reputation management
13:39 The reputation stages of grief
16:38 A Rose (or Review) by any other name
18:46 A hospital is not a restaurant
19:21 Trusting the agency to lead digital
22:38 Does digital carry a higher expectation for ROI than traditional media?
25:05 Risk adverse to digital
25:49 Author of an eBook "Digital Marketing for Healthcare"
27:43 Yelp! Pilot
30:02 Claim your local space - Weighted toward places with more reviews
33:15 He's a podcaster too! "CDO-Cheif Digital Officer Podcast"
36:04 Social Media Tip: Amanda Changuris, "Making it right"

Your CDO Radio subscription link
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/your-cdo-radio-marketing-operations/id988427935?mt=2

Visit our resources page for more valuable (and free!) resources on social media and digital health.

It's not often I get to have a fellow podcaster on the podcast, primarily because there aren't very many of us producing podcasts on healthcare and social media. That's why I was excited to have Jared Johnson, founder of Ultera Digital and the host of "The Health IT Marketer Podcast" come on my podcast to "talk shop." Before we got started talking about podcasts we had a lively discussion about reaching the first anniversary of his new entrepreneurial venture, Ultera Digital. Jared's company provides digital marketing services to healthcare practices and hospitals.

In August of 2015 Jared launched the "Health IT Marketer Podcast" which focuses on the marketing trends that drive the technologies and information systems behind health care. Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:41 Founding Ultera Digital
02:12 Need experience outside healthcare
04:15 No ulterior motives here!
05:00 Patient.Co - Josh Silver and Bird Blitch
07:14 Patient user experience
09:15 How do you onboard a client
12:18 "Mobilegeddeon"
15:38 Content
17:35 Iceburg Effect
18:18 App development
23:14 "Orcs and Storm Troopers on request"
24:06 Loosen up healthcare!
26:52 David Harlow @HealthBlawg Don't worry about social media
31:19 Health IT Marketer Podcast
32:44 Get Social Health and Health IT Not just EHR/EMR
35:20 Jon Lin
37:10 Joe Pulizzi - Content Marketing Institute
39:35 Learning opportunities
40:10 Share your thoughts
40:44 The Favorite Podcast list
42:49 Future Blabs
44:55 Social Media Tip: Colin Hung

Visit our resources page for more valuable (and free!) resources on social media and digital health.

Managing social media complaints for a health system can be terrible and no fun. Unless you're Amanda Changuris who thrives on the personal contact and knowing she is helping people. In our conversation Amanda relates her process for being engaged with patients and her community via Twitter. She also shares a few stories of patients (or their friends and families) who were very unhappy and how she and the social media team at Highmark Health resolved those concerns. Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction to Amanda Changuris
00:43 Amanda's background in TV news
03:21 Social Media at Highmark
04:37 Who does the writing?
05:13 Highmark's social media presence & team
06:20 What's the procedure for managing social media complaints?
08:05 Your response time is WHAT? Are you married to social media?
10:28 What should normal people expect for response time?
11:48 Does speed of response impact others?
13:20 No Scripts! Honor their time
13:38 The ChaCha Response
16:20 Schedule Content timing to maximize engagement time
17:43 Personal vs. Personal
19:05 When is the handoff from social?
21:30 What if a family member releases HIPAA info?
24:31 Coordinated complaints: #DontDenyKevin
30:01 Who are you reaching?
31:00 Flies - Vinegar - Honey
31:45 Twitter and 10,000 words
34:00 140 characters and balancing the length of response
35:21 "Won over with Fancy Cupcakes"
39:35 Takeaways: Suggested responses
42:20 Sneak Peek: Flying Solo
43:15 Social Media Tip: Dr. Elizabeth Murray

Managing healthcare reviews, especially for hospitals can be an overwhelming task. Cynthia Newton of HCCG is back on the Get Social Health podcast to finish our conversation about Yellow Pages, Healthgrades, reputation management, review sites and how to coordinate hundreds of phone numbers (spoiler alert: the old fashioned way - in Excel!) Listen to the podcast or drop in at the time stamps below.

1st step visibility
Reviews
Healthgrades
Where should Hospitals be encouraging patients to give reviews?
"I just Googled myself"
University of Utah - 1st to publish CAP scores
Patients not used to reviewing physicians
Can reviews be controlled?
Social Media Tip: Emily Solecki "Have a game plan"

http://www.getsocialhealth.com/googlemybusiness

New Date for FREE Webinar: October 7th at 12:00pm EST

What's the missing link in helping patients manage their healthcare? For Darla Brown, cancer survivor and Co-Founder of Intake.me it's being able to easily access health records between different healthcare providers. The problem? Interoperability between EHR providers and the ease of accessing medical records.  In looking at the problem from the patient's perspective Darla and her co-founder Dr. Emily Lu joined forces to develop a platform that is easy to access, intuitive and free to the patient. The beta version of Intake.me launches in October 2015. Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below:

00:00 Introduction
01:33 Products developed are not from a patient's perspective.
02:54 What was your experience?
03:50 Entertainment and Media experience
05:27 Banks and interoperability
06:18 What is intake.me
07:39 How have you integrated with EMR platforms?
08:54 What drove this? Patients or Physicians?
09:54 Patient portals or Intake.Me?
00:58 Regina Holliday
13:27 What does the platform look like?
14:54 Signing up - as patient or through physican office
15:15 Beta launch
16:00 Pricing model
16:42 Frequent flyers and low digital use
17:57 Dr. Emily Lu - Co-Founder
19:07 Intake.Me and Stanford
20:54 New digitally savvy physician
21:54 Replacing EMR platforms?
22:50 Development Team
23:33 Empowered Patient Tweet Chat: #PatientChat Christina Lizaso @btrfly12
25:40 Conflict of interest?
27:20 What have you talked about?
29:00 Schedule for #PatientChat
29:47 Presence of Physicians in Tweet Chats
30:24 Signing up for Intake.me
30:50 How does the data entry work?
32:22 Social Media Tip: Paul Levy - "Be Personal"

Intake.Me website

Darla Brown 

Dr. Emily Lu

If leadership comes from the top, why are so many healthcare CEOs hesitant to be active in social media? To get a first hand perspective I asked Paul Levy, former hospital CEO and C-suite leader to join me in a conversation about social media, healthcare and why CEOs shouldn't be so hesitant to jump in. Listen in to our conversation or jump in at the time stamps below:

00:00 Introduction
00:45 Social Media and the CEO
01:50 What is the role of the CEO?
02:50 Journalist coverage of a story
06:12 CEO's engaging
07:00 Train staff in social Media?
08:30 Using social media to tell what you think?
09:25 Paul's Blog
10:25 What topics did you cover?
11:50 What did he post today?
12:38 Blogging about patient care
14:54 Posting infection rate - push back?
16:40 Insurance company on board?
17:35 Social media as a tool to set goals.
18:50 Facebook and Twitter
21:00 Tweetchats? Matching consumption schedules
21:48 Twitter at conferences
22:48 Tweeting & Twitter Fountains
24:38 Tone and emoticons
25:07 Have you evangelized social media participation?
26:07 How many Hospitals CEOs are using social media
26:58 Frequency of posting developed ideas
28:02 Use analytics to drive content?
28:40 Moderating comments to manage "trolls"
29:30 Words of Wisdom
30:40 New focus - Leadership and negotiation
32:10 Social Media Tip: Dr. Mike Sevilla - Get a personal website

Visit our resources page for more valuable (and free!) resources on social media and digital health.

Healthcare organizations have always had a challenge keeping their location, service and department information accurate and up-to-date in directories, whether it's in the Yellow Pages or Google's search engine. HCCG Inc President Cynthia Newton joins the Get Social Health podcast to bring us up-to-date on why hospitals are still spending many thousands of dollars on their Yellow Pages accounts every year. To compound the challenges, Google local brings a whole new level of complexity to managing their data. Hospitals and large physician practices have so many phone numbers, addresses and physician contact information to manage that it's hard to keep them straight, let alone organized and accurate.

Cynthia's company has served hundreds of healthcare clients is auditing their Yellow Pages accounts and managing their Google listings. She shares an inside look at the nitty-gritty of how to keep up with all the details of online listings. We also spoke about online physician's directories,  ratings, reviews and reputation management but our conversation ran so long I'll bring you the rest in another episode.

Cynthia is also a Board Member of CHPRMS (Carolinas Healthcare PR & Marketing Society) and will be presenting a webinar on September 16, 2015 on this subject. Click this link to sign up. The webinar is free and open to all.

Listen in to the first half of our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below:

Introduction
HCCG Founded
The skinny on Yellow Page, Super Pages
How do the Yellow Page listings work?
What is your process in managing Yellow Page adds for clients?
Directory confusion - 100 Healthcare listings
Why are large YP contracts still a part of Healthcare budgets?
Who pays the bills?
Shifting to online directories & Google
Where do the online listings come from?
Google My Business
Claiming your business listings
Bulk account verification - Minimum of 10 locations
Who owns the location information internally?
Recovery branded search - 75% of Google searches.
Whose information source takes prescedence - Google or the location?
Wikipedia as source description
Google Plus pages - what's up with that?

Social Media Tip: Ron Petrovich of Mayo Clinic - Take 60 seconds.

Visit our resources page for more valuable (and free!) resources on social media and digital health.

Lisa Dougherty is a woman on a mission to help patients with chronic illness and medical conditions connect with allied healthcare professionals find the extra services they need. In helping her father manage four bouts of cancer she realized that personal fitness has a huge impact on his well-being, especially during treatment. As a result of this experience, she became of of the founders of the Medical Fitness Network - a free, volunteer-driven network of allied health professionals with special training and certifications for patients with chronic illness and medical illness as well as pregnancy. Service a wide-variety of conditions the MHN offers including but not limited to: Alzheimer's, Arthritis, Cancer, Diabetes, Fibromyalgia, Heart Disease, Mental Disorders, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson's, Pre & Postnatal Care, Respiratory Disease and Stroke.

The MFN is an online resource for locating well-trained fitness & healthcare professionals that include: acupuncturists, chiropractors, dietitians, fitness, health & wellness coaches, massage therapists, physical therapists, psychologists and yoga professionals, creating a truly unprecedented multidisciplinary network.  This team approach, facilitated through the Medical Fitness Network, will positively impact the care of many individuals with chronic disease.

Listen to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below:

00:00 Introduction
00:40 What is the Medical Fitness Network?
03:27 Pre & Post Natal services
04:41 How many are in the MFN
05:21 Using the internet to connect patients and specialists
06:13 Membership dues in the SMHN
08:30 Types of health conditions served by MFN
09:00 Cancer Exercise Institute
10:00 A little about Lisa's background
13:00 Exercising to help cancer patients
16:35 Matt Cavallo - MFN Advisory Board
17:00 MS Fitness Challenge - David Lyons
18:30 Screening the health professionals
18:54 What professional services are offered?
19:38 It's all about wellness
20:51 How to reach more professionals
22:48 HIPAA or Privacy issues?
29:37 Family impacts decision to serve
26:36 Specific exercises for specific conditions
29:40 Facebook promotion
32:10 Social Media Tip: Susan Woolner - Use Buffer to manage publishing content

The Medical Fitness Network was founded by Lisa Dougherty, Dr. John Heydt & Dr. David Kruse and has over 60 volunteers serving on its Advisory Board, representing all the health categories listed above.

They have over 100 national business partners that promote and support the network by offering members discounts on products, services and continuing education courses. The MHN offers free full page advertising for businesses in exchange for these discounts for our members and the willingness to promote our network and help with our membership drive.

MFN is collaborating with medical and health organizations as their resource network for fitness & healthcare professionals. MFN donates all services and provides a managed database of qualified health and fitness providers, promotes the organization and its work, and offers fundraising platforms from partners like fitRaise.

The network is FREE to the community, FREE for medical & health organizations and FREE for the businesses that support it.

There is nominal fee for professionals ($99) and facilities ($199) who want to be listed as a provider in the professional’s directory and receive member discounts.  All monies paid for dues are invested back into the network for continued growth and allow us to donate our services to medical & health organizations.

The Medical Fitness Network is about everyone coming together to serve the greater good... click to get involved!

Susan Woolner of Mercy Health Hauenstein Neurosciences joins the Get Social Health podcast to talk about telling authentic patient stories. It's not as simple as it sounds. Finding the core of the story and telling it in an empathetic way that is respectful to the patient is a primary goal for Susan. At any given time she has 6 patient stories in development from getting patient questions to working with the team of medical experts to vet out information.

One of the remarkable stories that the team at Mercy Health produced was a four-part program on DBS, Deep Brain Stimulation,  featuring patient Michael Harder. Michael was a United States veteran who served in the Middle East and was diagnosed with Parkinson's at age 35. His patient story took over a year to produce.  With six more patient stories to share, we look forward to hearing them all. 

The Mayo Clinic Social Media Health Network hosted a Social Media Summit June 15-16, 2015 in Rochester, MN.

Dozens of healthcare social media marketers attended to share, learn and experience social media first hand. The event featured a keynote by Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson, aka @SeattleMamaDoc in Twitter which was live streamed by the new social platform, Periscope (@Periscopeco). During the two day event I met and spoke with a large number of the participants and corralled a few to get their social media tips to share on the podcast. Below is a list of all those who contributed to the podcast. To find out more about the Mayo Clinic Social Media Health Network visit here or read the following blog posts:

Social Media Residency and Summit are next week, Lee Aase

June Social Media Summit Reflects the Mayo Model, Lee Aase

Social Media Tips from:
Kristine Austin, Principal, KS Austin Communications
Kristy Jacobson, Public Affairs Specialist at Mayo Clinic Health System
Christina Bokusky, Communications Coordinator at Jackson In Action Community Coalition
Shelby LaCroix, Communications Specialist, Cheyenne Regional Medical Center
Caitlin Hennessay
Dr. John Wald, Medical Director for Marketing at Mayo Clinic
Quinn Nystrom Diabetes Advocate & Speaker, www.QuinnNystrom.com
Susan Woolner (@SusanWoolner)
Naomi Ogaldez, Intern at Mayo Clinic
Marie McNeill
Makala Johnson, Social Media & Content Strategy Specialist at Mayo Clinic
Paula Gill, Co-Founder CareHubs
Corey Shaffer, Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), CareHubs
Dr. Elizabeth Murray, Attending Physician, Pediatric Emergency Medicine, University of Rochester Medical Center
Karen Mulkey, Community Relations Officer, OU School of Community Medicine and OU Physicians
Amanda Changuris, (@AmandaChanguris)
Tony Hart, Public Affairs Associate; Social and Digital Innovation Team, Mayo Clinic
Ali Burnett
Ahmanielle Hall, Digital Marketing Specialist at Yuma Regional Medical Center

Visit our resources page for more valuable (and free!) resources on social media and digital health.

When you only serve a one year term as the President of the American Academy of Pediatrics you better hit the ground running. That's what 2015 AAP President Dr. Sandra Hassink did - with the help of her "Mission Control" team of Jamie Poslosky and Cassandra Blohowiak. Reaching out to engage with fellow pediatricians was a top priority and thus was initiated a series of Tweet Chats under the hashtag #EveryChildNeeds. Ably supported by #Tweetiatricians - Pediatricians who are active in Twitter, Dr. Hassink has led some lively Tweet Chats around topics central to promoting a healthy child. Listen to our conversation or jump in at the time stamps below.

Intro
#Tweetiatricians
Engaging with AAP members
Serving as President of AAP
What are your goals?
AAP Tweet Chats
#EveryChildNeeds
Does the hashtag live on?
Child centered conversations
August TweetChat: #Resiliancy
Tweet Chat preparation
"Mission Control"
Kids going to bed hungry
Managing the Twitter handle
Trolls
New social media platforms: Periscope and Meercat
C-Suite involvement in soacial media
AAP Training for members

Dr. Sandra Hassink  

Jamie Poslosky 

Summaries of chats

State of the Child 

Child Nutrition 

Mother's Day Twitter Storm 

Healthy Summer 

Recapturing Summer 

AAP Twitter profiles

Dr. Sandra Hassink on Twitter 

American Association of Pediatrics on Twitter 

Tweetiatrician list

#MeaslesTruth Twitter storm info

PR Daily summary

Symplur article

Blog by @Doctor_V: 

Gathering family and friends to have end of life discussions is not easy. What is a natural expectation of life does not mean we are prepared to talk or even think about how we want to end life. Defining "quality of life" is an intensely personal thing and one even our closest family members may not know. Kathy Kastner is a lay-person in the healthcare field who began blogging about the many questions surrounding dying at her website, bestendings.com. She provides resources, thoughtful blogs and curated information about EOL issues. A highly regarded speaker and though leader on EOL, Kathy has presented at Stanford MedX  and just joined a health technology company as a social media strategist and advisor on technology products for seniors. Listen to our conversation of drop in at the time stamps below.

Visit our resources page for more valuable (and free!) resources on social media and digital health.

Summer football practice can be very dangerous if you're not tracking the heat index or the chance of lightning. That's why the marketing team at Vanderbilt University Medical Center created Smart Coach, a health app for sports coaches and trainers to keep an eye on the weather. Mobile apps are really hot (if you pardon the pun), especially in healthcare. But without a strategic plan, you could waste time, money and patient frustration in creating a health app that does not answer a specific need says podcast guest Cynthia Floyd Manley. Listen to our conversation or drop into the conversation at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:43 Cynthia Floyd Manley
01:15 Summer Weather
02:38 Tracking Lightning
05:14 Coaches & Sports Trainers
04:50 App development team: Betsy Brandis
05:20 Defining needs for the app
07:15 Where do you get the weather information
08:35 Local or National audience?
10:45 Free vs. Fee Based
11:45 App Updates
13:00 Notifications?
13:50 Coach Smart
15:40 Baby Time Contraction Timer
18:29 Not all apps work for healthcare
20:15 Google maps location problems for hospitals
24:34 Managing stress with integrated health
27:28 "Who Moved My Cheese?" by Spencer Johnson
28:00 "Search Inside Yourself" by Chade-Meng Tan
30:00 Marketing Team at Vanderbilt University Medical Center
31:30 Website Update
35:23 Social Media Tip: Colin Hung

• Cynthia's LinkedIn profile
• Cynthia on Twitter

Visit our resources page for more valuable (and free!) resources on social media and digital health.

Sean Erreger is "Stuck on Social Work" and he likes it that way. Sean is a Social Work blogger and Mental Health Case Manager for youth in Saratoga Springs, NY. He is very active in a number of tweet chats that discuss suicide prevention, education, social work and healthcare leadership. He is one of the moderators of #SPSM on Sunday evenings which is both a Tweet Chat and a Video Chat at the same time. Sean blogs about social work at "Stuck on Social Work" where he curates resources for his colleagues and peers. Listen to our conversation of drop in the chat at the time stamps below.

Introduction
What's your "day job"
"Know thy Resources"
Stuck on Social Work blog
Tweet Chat: #SPSM
Tweet Chat: #PTChat
Tweet Chat: #MACROSW
Tweet Chat: #HCLDR
Is it hard to manage so much information?
"Patient Centeredness"
#SPSM TweetChat with @DocForeman
Videos
Shout out to Colin Hung
Talking about suicide
End of live and suicide
Youth mental health case manager
Conversations connect different topics
Social media & work
Tweeting live at conferences
~ National Conference on Behaviorial Health
~ Professional Quality of Life
Jonathan Singer - Social Work Podcast
Social Media Tip: Colin Hung

Social Media Tip: Paula Gill, Co-Founder CareHubs "As your community what they want"

"Stuck on Social Work" Blog

Sean's Social Work profile 

Twitter conversation: #MEDPSYCH

Sean on LinkedIn

Sean's website

Dr. Justin Smith is a pediatrician active in social media. Unlike a lot of physicians, he chose Facebook as his primary platform for communicating to the parents of his patients. Many physicians shy away from Facebook because of concerns that Facebook will require a lot of time to monitor or that comments could get out of hand. Dr. Smith understands a very important rule of marketing; find out where your audience is and go there to engage with them. Known as The Doc Smitty, Justin Smith engages, educates and entertains on his Facebook page providing a wide variety of information from swimming pool safety to stomach bugs to concerns about plugged in kids. His Facebook page fans love to share and comment on his posts and he rarely has to deal with "TMI."

Physician, author, digital thought-leader and educator, Dr. Bryan Vartabedian, is a pediatrician who embraces his role as "The Public Physician." Known as @Doctor_V in Twitter, he joined Get Social Health to discuss his book, "The Public Physician" which is now available as a free download. In addition we discussed his work with Rice University at the Medical Futures Lab, as a voice for pediatric health and the importance of physicians to understand their "digital footprint." Listen to the interview or drop in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction
00:45 The Public Physician
01:45 33 Charts Blog
02:25 Changes since 2009
03:10 What is a digital footprint?
04:00 Every physician is a brand or has a brand?
04:56 Embrace being online
06:15 Proactive Vs. Reactive online
07:50 Passive Footprint - Active Footprint - Active Presence
08:50 Does every physician need to be active online?
10:40 What is the minimum presence?
12:03 Is Doximity tied to SEO?
13:00 Can a physician be "all-in" on just one platform?
15:00 "Surrogate blog" like Kevin MD
16:48 Find your medium
17:35 Video blog as platform
18:48 Twitter & Medical meetings
21:35 Tweeting a live heart transplant
23:53 "Your obligation to patients goes above the law"
24:25 How to stay on the right side of HIPAA
26:15 Doctors moral obligation to speak up
27:05 AAP target of online attacks
28:08 Baylor College of Medicine Digital Smarts program
29:42 Are medical schools catching up?
30:40 Healthcare Statistics course
32:36 Confidence in Medical & Health Apps
33:30 Rice University - Medical Futures Lab
34:55 Startup Weekend
36:06 Dr. Joyce Lee @JoyceLee - Doctor as Designer
36:35 Physicians are trained to follow
38:00 Social Media Tip: Rick Evans - Pick the right medium for the message
38:48 Get Social Health Academy

New York Times: Questioning the Value of Health Apps

Washington Post: "Many health apps are based on flimsy science at best, and they often do not work"

Dr. Bryan Vartabedian on LinkedIn

Developing and managing social media for pharma is probably the most complicated and challenging role in healthcare marketing. Regulations, rules and legal oversight can present roadblocks to a "spontaneous" communication medium. Joining me on Get Social Health are Ogilvy team members Becky Canvin and Rick Evans to share their insight and experience along with a new report "Connecting the Dots- Which pharma companies are succeeding in the social media space?" Listen in to our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below.

00:00 Introduction: Becky Canvin & Rick Evans
00:50 Ogilvy is a world-wide agency
03:08 Engaging with patients
03:40 Pharma content reviewed by 3 or more teams
04:05 Pharma can't make claims in social media
04:25 Twitter & Pharma
05:40 Social media platform for education
07:45 Commenting in social media
11:05 Mobile health
11:54 Ogilvy Pharma Social Media Audit "Connecting the Dots-Which pharma companies are succeeding in the social media space?"
14:38 Corporate social was the focus
16:00 "Push" messages vs 2-way communications
16:40 Largest communities did not equal highest engagement
17:09 Best practice examples
18:40 Bayer Facebook page
18:50 Takeaways
20:30 Relevant content wins
21:09 Listening tools - Sysmos
24:00 Scenario planning
25:15 Tweet Chats
24:00 Community Guidelines
26:32 Crisis simulation
27:42 Team work
29:18 Social media experience varies at all levels
31:15 Words of wisdom... But wait, there's more!
32:20 Ogilvy Health World and Ogilvy Digital Health
33:00 What is the Ogilvy Digital Innovation Lab?
34:13 Social Media Tip: Rich Obertots "Get the CEOs engaged in social media"

Becky Canvin in Twitter and LinkedIn

Rick Evans in LinkedIn

Ogilvy HealthWorld on Twitter and Ogilvy website

Ogilvy Digital Innovation Lab 

Visit our resources page for more valuable (and free!) resources on social media and digital health.