Social Media, Health IT and Gov 2.0

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at Driving the Adoption of Health IT Through Innovations in Social Media on  Thursday.

The half-day Washington meeting was held in response to two trends:

(1) the $40 billion [give or take] that will be spent over the next 10 years [give or take] to fund the medical system’s adoption of health information technology–electronic medical records, clinical care deliver systems and telemedicine, mostly.

(2) the increased use of social media in the worlds of health care and federal public-health agencies

The hoped-for outcome? To ensure the innovations in social media technology are integrated into all this spending and system reform–to keep the public involved with health care reform, essentially.

My role was to warm up the crowd. I did my best to convince them, essentially, that what they were gathering to do was very good and important. And also really, really hard.

For instance, while the use of social media to elect Barack Obama is always cited as evidence of the power of social media, frankly that may be easy compared to a lot of what people are hoping to use in health care.

Getting millions of people to go to a polling place on one specific day to pull a lever, touch a screen or mark a ballot using social media really isn’t all that complicated.

Using social media to get one obese 68-year-old man who lives alone to test his blood sugar three times a day for the rest of his life? Now that’s a social media challenge.

Anyway, the panels were full of people working on this stuff.

I learned the most from leaders of the federal government’s social media teams in the Health and Human Services sphere. The meeting drew the A-list. Here’s a quick run-down:

Andrew Wilson [@AndrewPWilson], head of Health and Human Services’ Center for New Media.

His main point: Now that some groups are using things like Twitter, blogs and widgets to respond to public health crises, it’s time to spread social media mojo across departments, agencies and the government.

He, like other federal web leaders, is also trying to figure out how to use these same tools to get meaningful input from the public without being overwhelmed by it–and to turn it into something valuable.

• Wilson invited input from the meeting’s audience to hear their ideas for how HHS can use social media in new ways.
• The agency recently signed an agreement with Facebook, allowing agencies to use the platform to do public outreach.

Sanjay Koyani, FDA Director of Web Communications

Koyani leads the FDA’s effort to reach the public with health alerts, including a recent social media campaign to get the word out about the recall of peanut products. The widget alone got 19 million page views and placement on 20,000 sites with very little promotion, he said.

• When the peanut product recall kicked in, he went to launch a Twitter profile–and learned for the first time that that agency already had one.
• The agency is providing webinar briefings for bloggers, to ensure that this group of increasingly influential web communicators is educated about the process, risk, science, etc.

Koyani’s presentation.

Erin Edgerton, M.A., CDC Senior Social Media Strategist

Edgerton leads, among other things, the CDC’s effort to use social media to respond to public health emergencies. She said her team’s role is to “invent ways” to get public health messages out. Check out this gallery showing the tools available for the H1N1 flu outbreak.

• CDC now offers e-cards you can send to loved ones reminding them to. . .wash their hands to avoid spreading the flu.
• The CDC’s main page is closing in on 1 billion [!] annual page views.

Edgerton’s presentation.

David Hale, @lostonroute66, NIH Information Specialist

Hale’s work blew me away. He leads the National Library of Medicine’s effort to do semantic and national language processing of Twitter traffic to sift out the noise and find evidence of emerging public health concerns. They’re also looking for trends in misinformation.

• He’s also leading something called Pillbox, a tool that would identify drugs based only on their physical appearance.

His presentation

Open Government: Transparent Complexity

The federal government is really running with President Obama’s transparency mandate.

Setting aside a few controversial decisions to hold certain material back for specific reasons [torture photos, for instance], agencies are hard at the task of opening up the government to let citizens see what’s inside.

Witness the White House/National Academy of Public Administration’s Open Government Dialogue. It’s a public-private effort to figure out how to get the government to use social media technologies to increase citizen interaction.

Read the Office of Science and Technology’s blog summary of a recent effort to consolidate recent transparency-related brainstorming in order to nudge it toward action.

A complicated effort? A massive coordination challenge? You bet. Just take a look at the White House’s visual summary of the terrain that has been covered so far. This is, of course, just an excerpt.

This visual presentation of the process/output is itself much more transparency-enhancing than the companion texts, meeting notes, etc. But it illustrates this: The effort is huge and nobody should believe this is going to be easy.

An even simpler–which is to say, even more transparent–summary of recent federal transparency activities can be found at the White House’s Open Government Initiative webpage.

Check out the Innovations Gallery and the transparency timeline at the bottom of the home page.

The Weekest Links: Nuke.com, Google Air, Twitter Surgery

If it’s Friday it’s time to sift through the dustpan of another amazing, amusing and alarming week on the Interwebs. . .

1. Ground Zero

A Google maplett that lets you select a munition and a type of nuclear weapon and see what sort of “thermal damage” it might do to the target area. Frighteningly, the destruction rendered by the blast of “Little Boy” [Hiroshima] seems. . .well, not all that bad relative to today’s weapons. Or an asteroid. [h/t Very Short List]

2. Air Force Live

A public affairs arm of the USAF has a modest news-and-info blog on that operates on. . .Blogger! Say, is this another one of those Google-inside-deals-with-the-government things? If federal offices start using Orkut to “create citizen communities,” we’ll know something really stinks.

. . .and finally, our regular sighting of the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse ™:

3. Live-Tweeting Surgery

The captions appearing in the “comments” under this photo, which depicts Henry Ford Health System surgeons describing the action and taking questions, are priceless. Favorite: “At least they’re not searching Wikipedia.” [n.b. While the docs pictured above were scrubbed in, neither was the "primary" surgeon.]

Let Us Now Praise @Colleen_Graffy

While the final hours of the Bush administration tick away, it’s time to note that Colleen Graffy’s tenure as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs ends too.

If you know her at all, it’s as the “Twittering Diplomat.” Operating as @colleen_graffy, she sent a regular stream of messages updating the world–or, to be fair, about 800 followers–on her travels and activities as a Bush administration foot soldier representing the United States. the range of her updates is illustrated by these two successive Tweets from the evening of January 3 to the morning of January 4:

Preparing for the Smith-Mundt Symposium on Jan 13. Reading comments on MountainRunner’s blog (just google it).

Apple Store 1 to 1 lessons v cool. thx all 4 encouraging me to get a Mac. Love it. Who is yr best blog model in case i learn how to do that?

Others have strong ideas about whether her Tweetery had diplomatic value. You’ll find a superb summary of the public discussion of Graffy’s Twittering on the personal blog of State Department webbist Darren Krape. [More links below.]

But from where I sit, Graffy’s contribution goes far beyond whatever goodwill she generated with the people of Armenia. Intentionally or not, she has done more to demonstrate how new media is transforming the world than a conference hall full of 2.0-vangelists.

Some numbers suggest that between 4 and 5 million people use Twitter. Maybe. But it’s still largely an early adopter phenomenon, and I suspect that at least a plurality of users operates in the worlds of media and marketing. They use Twitter to promote their blogs, their businesses, themselves and–alley oop!–their own expertise at “leveraging” Twitter.

[Let me rush to confess I am one of these very people, just as wide-eyed and opportunistic about social media as the rest of 'em. To ensure you don't fall completely under our sway, watch this brief video about New Media Douchebags.]

But by putting Twitter in play to support U.S. diplomacy, Graffy has forced Twitter under the noses of people involved with geopolitics and foreign policy–serious-minded, often intelligent people who, for worse or better, play a significant role in determining who gets what around the globe.

For all its annoyances and fatuities, Twitter demonstrates better than anything else the continuous, real-time, global, egalitarian, inclusive, transparent and completely uncontrollable nature of communications today. Nobody who uses Twitter for a few weeks can doubt that the world of top-down media [or government] speaking to a passive, ignorant audience is over.

Whenever there’s no turning back from something, people often say “You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.” In social media circles we like to say “You can’t drain the pee from the swimming pool.” [Sorry, I forget who to attribute that to.]

Whatever. The point is there’s no turning back, and the people who [not to put too fine a point on it] sort of control the world now understand this. I have no idea what else Colleen Graffy accomplished during her tenure. But I’m guessing her Twittering will prove to be her biggest.

More Links

Graffy’s Washington Post op-ed on her Twittering

Graffy’s response to a blog entry critical of her Twittering

Graffy’s Twitter profile

Print ‘n’ Read Feature: e-Hail to the Chief

Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post has been providing some of the best, most persistent coverage of the use of digital media by the presidential candidates all year.

And now he’s written a big where-we’ve-been/where-Obama-goes-from here piece. Like so much important writing about technologies, e-Hail to the Chief is a lousy read on the web. And so it is my first Print ‘n’ Read ™ feature of 2009, a distinction I assign to articles about technology so valuable they are actually worth printing out on paper and reading away from the computer.

The major theme is how hard it’s going to be for Obama to use the digital media that helped get him into office to carry out the duties of that office. [I've whacked this particular mole-head many times in this blog.]

Highlights include comments from Google’s Eric Schmidt and Al Gore about the messiness of digital democracy when people don’t like what the President is doing–and organize against the very guy they supported. [Am I the only one who didn't know Gore is a "senior adviser" to Google?]

But my favorite part comes at the end, where Vargas witnesses one of the “house meetings” that the transition team’s digital wing is organizing via the web to try to make use of the hunger for civic participation they’ve created.

It’s a somehow sad scene in which regular citizens create and capture a long list of well-worn goals–health care, energy, education, etc., etc., etc.–on a big poster at the front of the room.

The effect is a lingering sense of well-intentioned impotence. It leaves you wondering how on earth you get from that to. . .change we can believe in.

Disclosure: Vargas is a former colleague of mine at the Post.

Government, the Public Interest and You.0

Today I was lucky enough to appear at a Washington forum on government, non-profits and social media.

The event was hosted by Clickability and Kick Apps, two companies that work mostly in the private sector but who, like so many in the tech world, are eyeing Washington as a center of social media innovation. [Or at least technology contracts.]

As one federal agency CIO said over lunch, “It’s Obama. Everybody knows he’s into this, and we’ve got to get up to speed.”

As usual, I learned more from listening to the others than the audience did by listening to me. Here are seven nuggets I picked up:

1. The government is innovating with social technologies more than I realized. I heard about internal knowledge sharing at the State Department, a CDC effort to collect on-the-ground intel from first responders and the DOD’s Pentagon Channel. And the EPA’s blogging program. Here’s a wiki that planks out what various federal agencies are up to with social media.

2. In prepping for the conference, I learned about The Twittering Diplomat. Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy at U.S. State Department, is Tweeting away as she tours eastern Europe on a diplomatic mission. Yes, it opens Twitizens’ eyes to what a diplomat really does. What led her to do it? I have no clue. As I am writing this, she has Tweeted this:

flight departing for Armenia now–land 4:50AM

Of course, the Twitter profile could be a front, a persona created to head-fake the Iranians or something like that. I’d be delighted if this turned out to the first case of Twitter Espionage.

3. Michael Chin of Kick Apps, in his introduction, used a phrase I hadn’t heard on the 2.0 conference circuit: “multilogue”–as opposed to “monologue” or “dialogue.” I like that. I may steal it.

4. Fellow panelist and IBM marketing VP Sandy Carter described her company’s participation in an effort before the Beijing Olympics to get Chinese citizens to take cell phone images of broken stuff out on the street as a way to report problems to the government in time to spruce things up for the international media. She’s author of a new book titled The New Language of Marketing 2.0, full of case histories about this stuff.

5. Mario Armstrong, a digital guy who appears on his own web radio show Digital Spin Radio and occasionally on NPR as a technology expert, talked about a program he works on designed to get more U.S. students to graduate with engineering degrees. The program targets young kids.

Key insight: The adults designed a great-looking social media portal they thought was wonderful. The kids rejected it. Instead of retreating to the safety of a focus group, they just paid a bunch of the kids to plan the site. Armstrong showed a photo of the kids actually doing the card-sorting thing.

6. Alan Wolk, an advertising/PR strategist, talked about how the sort of persistent, minor contacts people have in social networks creates an effect like a “Seurat painting“–little points of color that, when taken together, suggest the full picture without providing every detail. I may steal that too.

7. The Voice of America, that hoary World-War-2-era government-funded broadcast service, launched a highly widgetized, user-generated-content-laden, make-a-profile-to-participate, join-our-discussion social network about the U.S. presidential election. They launched this in just two weeks.

Twittering diplomats. Two-week social media platform launches. Agency CIOs who know they have to get up to speed on social media. Head-spinning stuff.

Drinks were served afterward.

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