The advantages in delivering info to your patients with regularity are compelling. Among them include: increasing compliance, decreasing redundancy, boosting one’s brand while marginalizing threats to your brand, and staying ahead of the public opinion curve. Our tactic is a two pronged approach that will require a set up for data collection and a second set up for data distribution. We will focus this article on data collection through the use of Google Reader.
For those of you not familiar with Google Reader and RSS, let me give you a quick primer. RSS stands for ‘Real Simple Syndication.” In a nutshell, this platform allows a web surfer to receive published articles as they are released for a given web site in near real time. There are different formats to receive these feeds (in browser, atom, etc.) but I want to focus on one RSS feed reader, Google Reader.
Google created an easily accessible and useable RSS feed reader in Google Reader in 2005. This reader platform effectively manages 98% of the sites that have regular updates, and will format these feeds into one uniform look and feel. The end user is left with the responsibility of simply visiting Google Reader to peruse all the blogs, web sites, etc. that one is interested in.
I chose Google Reader because it is free, it is extremely easy and quick to use, it conveys to our mobile world nicely, and it will sync with our data distribution arm, Facebook, seamlessly.
SET UP
1. Create a Google account if you don’t already have one.
2. Go to Google Reader.
3. To use this platform to add and read RSS feeds, the folks at Google have an awesome 1-minute instructional video:
SUBSTANCE
Once you have a feel for adding and viewing feeds, I would like to focus your attention on the feeds themselves. As we said earlier, there is a lot of noise out there in the area of consumer health news. You will spend 5-10 minutes a day in Google Reader perusing these articles and hand picking the ones with relevance to your patient population and broadcasting those (along with any thoughts you may have) on Facebook.
Choosing such feeds requires a specific focus. You will need to look for web sites that publish articles that are relevant to your patient population, in a language that your patients can understand, and relevant to your own clinical values. The web sites do not have to be a 100% perfect fit, with all articles having relevance. You will be choosing only those articles that you want to broadcast. A site that regularly puts up articles that meet your criteria for posting should be included in your RSS feed.
With that said, I will highlight a few web sites and blogs that have shown to have great value in this realm:
• KevinMD.com: has been previously voted best medical blog on the web. If you only read the daily piece, “Top stories in health and medicine this morning,” you will have a good idea of what noise your patients encounter on a day-to-day basis.
• CelebrityDiagnosis.com: claims to provide teachable moments in medicine through celebrity health ailments. Remember this is about staying ahead of the curve. Solid plain English explanations on the diseases themselves are given, great for resolving those patient questions.
• Health.yahoo.net: has a pretty wide breadth of health news bombarding our patients.
• Google news feed: set up your own RSS news feed for any given health movement, disease, condition or ailment:
1. Run a Google search for the desired item.
2. On your results page, click on the “news” link on the left.
3. Scroll to the bottom of list of articles and click on RSS.
4. Select Google Reader as the RSS reader and click “Subscribe now.” You will now have this specific feed into your Google Reader.
While these sites are a great start, do not limit yourself to these few feed options as there are a limitless number of available out there. Now that we have established where we will derive relevant articles, let’s harness the awesome ability of a linked Google Reader and Facebook account to broadcast to our patient population.
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