INCREASING PATIENT INSIGHT IN A TOTAL OF 5-MINUTES A DAY (part 4)

Armed with relevant articles (here, here, and here) to inform your patients and guide them to increased well-being, you’ve done most of the heavy lifting in yours aims to educate and guide your patient population.  The final hurdle is broadcasting this information.

Recently Google Reader has enabled the ability to share a given article with a number of social networks.  Because we are focusing on the most widely available social network, Facebook, you will need to get an account (here) or sign into your account. 

Note: I prefer to use a business page (previously known as a fan page) in Facebook as it will send you weekly analytical data such as the number of visits, posts, new subscribers, etc.  All are good measurables as to the productivity and reach of your page.

Google Reader integration:

Having signed into your Facebook business page, here is the easy 3 step process:

1. Sign into your Google account and visit your Google Reader site.
2. Click on the Settings link.
3. Click on the ‘Send To’ tab, then check the ‘Facebook’ box. You may want to share with other social network options.  
4. In your article view of Google Reader, there will be a ‘Send to’ tab.  When clicked on, it now provides Facebook as an option.  Click on this tab for a given article.

A facebook page will pop up with the article title, link, and the first few sentences.  Here you have the opportunity to write your thoughts, include any included thumbnail picture, and post by clicking ‘Share’ much like you would any Facebook post.

It is as simple as that.  The article posts to your Facebook from Google Reader, your patients will receive this post in real time, and most of your work is nearly done.  Your final responsibility is promoting the site with your patients.  This is the easiest of tasks. 

Nearly half of all Americans have a Facebook account (and this number is growing).  All they have to do is ‘Fan’ your page to receive the feed of articles and thoughts into their own Facebook feeds. Telling a patient that you have a previous relevant posts to their condition is reason enough to ‘fan’ your page.  Patients can search your page for prior posts, interact through commenting and e-mailing, and post to your fan page.

Scanning through your Google Reader feed every day should take no more than 5-minutes per day.  Sharing those relevant pieces with a sentence or two should take a minimal amount of additional time.  Seamlessly you will have opened up the dialogue towards wellness with your patient through this powerful toolset.

INCREASING PATIENT INSIGHT IN A TOTAL OF 5-MINUTES A DAY (part 3)

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.

INCREASING PATIENT INSIGHT IN A TOTAL OF 5-MINUTES A DAY (part 1)

Mary Joe walks into your offices with a myriad of problems that all stem from her morbid obesity. Fed up with it all, Mary Joe has had enough and seeks good advice, treatment, and direction from you. Mary Joe sincerely wants to get more information on her condition, the obesity epidemic and weight management.

Old Paradigm: Clinical treatment options aside, Doc/Nurse/Secretary finds the pamphlet(s) or internet print outs dedicated to this and hands them over. If the clinical team is lucky, patient reads them and files them away in a place never to return to the patient consciousness. Fail.

Information is abound on the web. It’s a good place to send Mary Joe. After all, if you Google the word, “obesity,” an astounding 26 million articles pops up in .25 seconds. It’s all there for the patient to sift through: the good; the bad; & the ugly. Unfortunately, for the majority of us, the common denominator to filter the vast amount of information becomes the responsibility of the clinician.

Moreover, with 40 patients on the books today (many with similar requests), labs that need to be reviewed, and a "quick" late afternoon set of rounds at the local hospital, the question becomes how do I set up an efficient system to get the latest up-to-date information to Mary Joe and to the rest of my patient population for their given ailments?

The answer: sound digital information resourcing and broadcasting. Click here for part 2.