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