Social Media, Health IT and Gov 2.0
July 19, 2009 by Craig Stoltz · 2 Comments
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
Washington Post’s “Salon” Disaster and Health Care Reform
July 5, 2009 by Craig Stoltz · 5 Comments
As a former citizen of the Washington Post newsroom, the recent disaster about the newspaper’s “salon” project is heartbreaking and embarrassing.
I won’t belabor the issues many others have so thoroughly covered, including today’s “apology” by publisher Katharine Weymouth, which feels a bit short of fulsome.
Instead I want to point out something that’s gotten lost in the media frenzy: That the topic of the first “salon” [sorry, I find I have to use quotes when referring to that] was to have been health care reform.
As an independent journalist [among other things] and participant in the “health 2.0″ movement, I find this particularly distressing.
The fact that Weymouth and her team identified health care reform as the first ripe target for a scheme to bring together “the powerful few”: CEOs/lobbyists, “Congressional and Administration officials” and Washington Post health care reporting and editorial staff” demonstrates the peril faced by the group with the biggest stake in health care reform.
I refer, of course, to patients.
Significantly, Weymouth did not invite to her “salon” anybody living with a chronic disease, or someone who lost her health insurance when she lost her job, or anyone who has declared bankruptcy under the burden of paying for a loved one’s brain surgery.
Now I suppose the patient community could have raised $25,000 to sponsor the event and buy a seat at the table. [We could have all chipped in for some nice clothes and a haircut, so our rep could fit right in.]
Imagine how the conversation would have been different if that patient advocate had co-sponsored the meeting of members of Congress and Administration officials, to say nothing of the top leaders in the Washington Post newsroom!
A fatuous fantasy, I know, laughable on its face.
But it illustrates how once again that–despite what appear to be sincere efforts to introduce patient-centric healthcare reform by some members of Congress and the Administration–the very people who are the ultimate beneficiaries or victims of healthcare reform are offered no seat a the table.
Not even Katharine Weymouth’s dinner table.
Three weeks ago, a number of other “stakeholders” in healthcare reform created something called a Declaration of Health Data Rights, a statement that spells out what rights patients have to the electronic information about their care to be gathered as part of any healthcare reform plan. [Interest revealed: I signed onto it and agreed to blog on it as part of a publicity campaign.]
As I’ve argued before, things like the Declaration are necessary because patients don’t really have access to the process when the difficult, ethically complicated, legally messy and often sneaky and malicious work of making healthcare law takes place.
There are many reasons to be disgusted with the Washington Post’s salon misadventure.
The fact that it demonstrated a reflexive Washington habit of gathering an exclusive cabal of the most powerful and moneyed interests to discuss such an important issue may be the most disgusting of all.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Patients are going to have to force themselves into this debate against the resistance and indifference of the Washington establishment. Patients cannot afford the luxury of deference and e-mail.
And so I repeat the rallying cry: Patients: Aux barricades!
Health Journalists on Twitter: Not Entirely Well, Thank You
July 4, 2009 by Craig Stoltz · 2 Comments
I’m going to be hosting a webinar on how health journalists use social media soon.
So I thought I’d check out the health reporters on Muckrack.com, a website that aggregates Tweets of our nation’s journalistic corps.
It can be fascinating to see what sort of brain-lint the media produce minute-by-minute on the world’s tiniest news platform.
As I began writing this entry, for instance, there were dozens of Tweets not so much reporting, but wondering aloud what was up with, the “fact” that Gov. Sarah Palin seemed to be resigning, or at least not running for re-election, or something.
It was an enlightening moment in journalistic pop anthropology. You could see the complex thoughts of inside-the-Beltway sophisticates taking shape right before your eyes.
Tweeted Howie Kurtz of the Washington Post: “Something must be up, I guess. Kind of weird.“
Talk about your first rough draft of history.
The Health Journalist Twitterers
But anyway, I was there to check out the Health niche. The health reporting corps has not for the most part discovered Muckrack yet: Only 10 health reporters’ Tweetstreams were aggregated on the Muckrack’s Health page.
They comprised three Baltimore Sun reporters, two from the Chicago Tribune, and one from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. [All Tribune Co. properties]. Then there is one each from CNBC, CBS News, the Montreal Gazette, and the New York Times.
And how were they using social media? The mixed bag you might expect.
Journalists on Twitter: Seeking Sources, Thinking Out Loud, Promoting Self, Getting Personal
Julie Deardorff of the Chicago Tribune, for instance, used Twitter to conduct some of source-fishing, cogitate about topics in her notebook, promote her own articles and, like all public-spirited Tweeters, reveal some personal information.
For health reporter Julie Deardorff, the professional is personal
In Deardorff’s case, at least, the personal was professional.
- On Thursday June 25 she reported that she “injured my intercostal muscles by coughing for a week straight.”
- Two days later she reported she’d been diagnosed with pneumonia.
- And two days later she was back on the beat, trolling for sources to discuss the Nuval nutrition rating system.
Best-of-Class: Mike Huckman of CNBC
The most prolific health Twitterer on Muckrack–and, with over 3,000 followers, the most watched–is Mike Huckman, the pharma reporter for CNBC. Anybody interested in the bloodsport in the drug trade should follow Huckman’s sluice of reports, rulings, research and rumors about the companies that make America’s meds.
There is also insight into the life of a business journalist, such as this ripe observation about dealing with flacks. [Note the #prfail hashtag]:
mhuckman #prfail Just got call from PR person.I pick up phone,as always,”This is Mike.”They say,”Mike Huffman?”Pitching pvte co anyway,so 0 interest
a day ago by Mike Huckman, Pharmaceuticals Reporter, CNBC
Doctor!!!! Doctor!!!!!
CBS medical correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton Tweets about her comings and goings conducting interviews. Fairly routine stuff for journalistic Tweetle.
But for someone who is both a journalist and an M.D., she can be unusually enthusiastic. Within the stretch of 5 Tweets she managed to use 10 exclamation points. That may be a record of some sort.
New York Times and Twitter: Not a Healthy Situation
The smart set says that it’s poor form to use Twitter simply as a “push” device, as a tool to inflict yourself on the world. Everybody who participates in Twitter [it is said], even journalists, should expect to give more than they take, share tidbits with people who may appreciate them, develop relationships, etc. This is the spirit of the social web, it is said.
The biggest violator of this principle among the health reporting set on Muckrack is the estimable Tara Parker Pope, author of the New York Times’ Well health blog.
Her Tweetery consists almost entirely of two things: Links to her own blog entries and acolytic admirations of the fine work of her fellow Timesfolk. [i.e., "Interesting slide show on NyTimes Lens blog of homeless transgendered teens. http://bit.ly/14POwF"]
It’s true that Pope also gets personal; she Tweets about her preparation for the New York City Marathon.
taraparkerpope My 5.4 mi run tonight spent 630 calories according to http://www.gmap-pedometer.com . But now I’m 800 calories worth of hungry.
Tara Parker Pope, Well Columnist, New York Times
But that’s professional self-promotion too: Pope is the proprietor of RunWell, an online community for distance runners the Times launched recently.
Clearly Pope hasn’t gotten the Tweet about social media ethos. Another Twitter profile bears Pope’s name and likeness. nytimeswell is nothing but a botstream that’s triggered every time her blog updates.
All is not Well at the New York Times blog autofeed
Actually it’s triggered more often than that. Check out the series of simuTweets on celiac disease.
I found it peculiar that the New York Times was using Twitter is such a graceless manner compared to its peers.
The Times, after all, recently hired Jen Preston as its first Social Media Editor. Her task, presumably, would be to help staff make enlightened use of social web tools like Twitter.
So I clicked over to Preston’s feed in Muckrack to see how she is faring.
Not all that well, it turns out.
The Times’ social media doyenne hadn’t updated in about 3 weeks, and only three times since this one:
Working on response to 1,000 replies to last week’s question, how can @nytimes better use Twitter. MediaBistro conference later.
12:15 PM Jun 3rd from web
SEO, Twitter and the Road to Hell
June 28, 2009 by Craig Stoltz · 15 Comments
Why didn’t I see this one coming?
The moment Twitter content became searchable, the seeds of its ruination were planted, watered and topped with Miracle Gro.
This is due to the unbending truth of the First Law of CyberDynamics: That which is searchable will be optimized for said search.
Regrettable corollary 1: Optimized content becomes visible without regard to its quality.
Regrettable corollary 2: Unworthy content becomes the lowest-hanging fruit in the InfoOrchard, unwittingly gobbled up by hundreds of millions of undiscriminating users daily.
[Note: Ungainly botanical metaphor ends here.]
Which is to say: Add to the current list of lifeforce-draining Twitter phenomena–childish follower-hoarding, strategic lurkery, tactical “messaging” and [this is now literal] prostitution–the Tweet designed to show up high on Google [and presumably other Twitter search tool] search results.
I learned this recently after I read an article on Twitter SEO on the website Mashable. I Tweeted thusly:
And so it has come to this: Writing Tweets for SEO. Mommy, make it stop. http://bit.ly/adRQO
Within moments my e-mail box showed that two SEO profiles were now following me on Twitter.
Not because I had said anything insightful about the art of search engine optimization, mind you, but just because I’d used the word. The e-mails arrived too fast for them to reflect human cognition.
And so I Tweeted again:
Hoot! My last Tweet included the term “SEO” and I was immediately autofollowed by two SEO trolls. SEO SEO SEO Come on, guys, you wanna *go*?
And of course my e-mail box was quickly beetling with several new messages telling me that other SEO trolls had emerged from their funkholes to follow me.
It should come as no surprise that SEOers are sniffing for keywords in Tweets. As Twitter becomes a firmly established marketing tool, more companies are monitoring what’s being said there about their products, people and clients. And participating so their wares and ideas will reach the public.
Disclosure: I know this because, among my many professional services is…helping people use Twitter to monitor what’s being said about their products, people and clients. And participating so their wares and ideas will reach the public. Ahem.
It is a common early adopter vanity to declare that what was once pure and authentic has been wrecked by the know-nothing vulgarian masses and their money-grubbing exploiters.
I’ve always tried resisted this facile snobbery. I remember the knuckleheads who whined that the Mosaic browser ruined everything because it made the Internet accessible to people who hadn’t paid their dues with ftp, Gopher and a soldering iron.
When I began writing this entry about 40 minutes ago, I sent out this Tweet:
I need cheap dietary supplements, online gambling and low-cost life insurance [Note: This Tweet is autofollow-bait to expose perpetrators]
#Neda, Still Outside the Mainstream
June 22, 2009 by Craig Stoltz · 1 Comment
It may appear that #Neda–the young woman whose death on the streets of Tehran was captured on a staggering amateur video–has “gone mainstream.”
Which is to say, that Big Media has recognized the role the image may be playing in driving political opinion, and is exploring it as a way to interpret the continuing protests and political activities. [I blogged on this topic yesterday.]
But no.
Where credit is due: Last night CNN repeatedly ran a version of the 37-second video, with proper warnings about its graphic content. The hosts and guests talked about the video’s potential–and apparent–role in galvanizing the protest movement both inside and outside Iran.
The fact that it has done so is beyond dispute.
But CNN stands nearly alone among U.S. mainstream media in its acknowledgment of the role the Neda video is playing in Tehran.
To check this out, I did on-site searches of three major print-heritage MSM news sites. Here’s what I found, as of 3:30 Monday, June 22 [links below are to stored searches]:
Stories from AP, Reuters and a single homegrown reference: An online discussion by a non-staffer
Three references in The Lede news blog, and reference deep in one print article, which says that the authenticity of the video cannot be verified [of which more in a moment]
Two blog entries, plus wire stories
Let’s open up the search. Here’s what Google News tosses up on a search for “Neda”: 332 results!
But wait, there’s less.
Dig into those results and you’ll see:
- The New York Daily News appears to be alone among U.S. newspapers in offering original Neda reporting in print by its staff. The Kansas City Star and the L.A. Times have blogged on it.
- Among non-daily MSM, Time’s Robin Wright features a print article that uses Neda as a jumping off point to put the current events in historical context
- Otherwise the content comes mostly from ABC news, CNN and FoxNews, which for the most part used the Neda video as a compelling “actuality” to show over the latest news updates.
- Around the world, big media is paying more attention: the BBC and other UK outlets, some local TV stations’ websites, and wire stories from AP, Reuters and AFP.
The journalists most actively discussing the Neda phenomenon? Indie bloggers.
So why the mainstream media prudery?
It could be that, yes, the video is a fraud. I think this a very remote possibility, almost paranoid in its nature. One look at the video makes this quite clear. [One commenter on my blog entry yesterday makes this case--he suspects a "blood packet" has been applied to Neda's face--and many others are doing so around the web.]
The world is a strange and terrible place, and [as a former Washington Post newsroom employee] I am enough of a trained skeptic to see that it’s foolish to rule out the possibility entirely.
It can also be argued that the MSM should exercise its often-valuable caution and care in its reports–especially as new details about Neda’s life and images of her beautiful face emerge from obscure, unfamiliar sources and are being used to serve the protesters’ political ends. In this view, the MSM is the prudent counterweight to the flighty speculations of the social web, refusing to fall into the hands of the revolutionaries’ spinning.
But as I argued yesterday, I suspect it’s less about that than it is about the MSM’s unwillingness to acknowledge [accept? understand?] its increasingly marginalized role in a fast-moving news environment where real-time global information sharing without MSM approval is the rule, not the exception.
I believe that a lot of the media’s “Well, we’re really not sure” chin-pulling is an affected, self-infatuated dodge–a way to avoid of the larger, paralyzing question:
What, exactly, should the mainstream media should do when a story develops so far beyond its control–or understanding?
n.b. Over at the journalism site Poynter.org, Bill Mitchell explains some of the challenges the Neda video creates for traditionally trained journalists.
#Neda and the Power of the Viral Image
June 21, 2009 by Craig Stoltz · 18 Comments
The 37-second amateur video that shows, in vivid and horrifying detail, a young woman named Neda dying of a gunshot wound on the streets of Tehran, has the capacity to change the political dynamic in Iran. It may already have done so.
I will not link to the video here. The decision to watch it should be made carefully, knowing it is sickening and likely to remain with you for the rest of your life. You can easily find it if you want.
I found it nearly overwhelming. I had to step away from the computer and gather myself. Afterward when describing it to my wife my voice was shaking and I couldn’t quite formulate my thoughts.
The morning after viewing it I can say this: I believe that 37 second clip can transform global opinion.
I liken it to the 1972 photograph of the young Vietnamese girl running naked through the streets, her skin seared by the chemical burn of napalm. Or the 1963 picture of police dogs attacking civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama. Both, it is argued, played a key role in galvanizing public opinion on the political issues they represented.
For me, and I suspect many who view it, the Neda video says with absolute clarity: The violent crackdown on street protesters in Tehran must not stand. The perpetrators must be stopped or removed.
It removes any ambivalence or subtlety one might have about the situation there.
Last night I was actually wondering how a government responsible for Neda’s death–in an environment where cheap, instant, global, many-to-many communications has brought the phrase “the whole world is watching” closer to literal fact than it was in the 1960s–can possibly remain in power.
In the cool light of morning I realize that was dramatic hyperbole, heavily colored by emotion.
But still: That 37-second video has already become a singular, powerful fact driving global opinion. Its impact will only accelerate and expand. It will have consequences.
Let me also predict that the mainstream media is going to miss the import of that video. Partly because they dare not show it, and thus it will not become part of their newsrooms’ collective consciousness–or conscience.
But also because they still tend to view amateur, viral “reporting” as marginal “bonus” material, incapable of driving public thought in the way their own professional reporting and opinionating can.
There is a #Neda hashtag on Twitter. It captures conversations about and inspired by the video.
Yet it is now being added as a hashtag to general Twitterizing on the election protests, as an expression of commitment at least as powerful as the green avatars that hover like nauseated witnesses over the 140-character global thoughtstream.
Much is made about Twitter and its limited ability to drive change.
This isn’t about that.
It’s about the power of a single, brief incident captured on video–in an environment where people share what moves them instantly with a global audience, without the assistance or approval of governments, media or any institution—to change others’ minds.
Change the world?
In the cool light of morning, I realize that’s foolish too.
But if you are feeling strong and brave and willing to have a horrifying image seared into your brain, view the video.
It will change you.
