Hey Doc, What It Is

Are you still trying to decide if there a return-on-investment available through the use of social media? While you’re waiting you’re losing. Losing future dollars. Losing relevance. The value of your voice in the community is depreciating as patient-driven physicians are amassing new wealth in the form of clout. Clout with future patients and clout eventually becomes dollars.

Those doctors or healthcare organizations aren’t necessarily better at medicine than you. They’re simply better at culture. Your value proposition in the marketplace is what you know about achieving positive health outcomes. You’re pretty good at connecting that to a patient’s experience in the exam room, through a prescription or in surgery. But how’re you doing out there?  You know, online via social media. 

Still looking for something to prove it’s the right thing for you? Well, how about letting me debunk some health care social media myths for you.  You know, tell you what it is (and what it’s not).

It’s not a road to nowhere. It is a path to connectivity with patients, their families, future patients and others who influence health choices. 

It is a way for you to maintain a general conversation with the community that demonstrates a willingness to share information that might make a difference in their wellbeing. By the way, people who share make more friends. Friends refer friends. Friends are patients, too.

It’s not date night. Your patients are not asking you to out to dinner.  They’re simply looking to connect through their preferred channel. And this one has emerged to be that.

It is by all evidence an affordable conduit to the future as those with options choose providers, and those within plans sort one doctor or organization from another based on word of mouth, ratings, and social media manner—like bedside manner but on your smartphone.

It’s not a drive through window. Patients are not likely to ask for a diagnosis of some ailment. They’re too private for that. They’re just looking for something that might help them sift through clues about what ails them and you’re their most trusted source for that kind of information.

Look, I don’t profess to know much about making money but I have learned this, people connect with those who care. And caring starts with sharing.  Social Media is that.

Hey Doc, Wake Up Better

It’s easier than ever for someone to give his or her two-cents-worth. In 140 characters you can say whatever you want about almost anything to just about everyone. But hey, times have changed and the cost of an idea is a little higher than it use to be. So if you’re going to say it, make it count. And so we will.

Sleep. That’s it. Sleep. Okay if you want your 99-cents-worth, the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock App for your iPhone or Android phone.

What does an alarm clock have to do with what we write about here? Well, this particular idea involves you, your patient community, your use of social media and mobile. We talk about those things here every month. But this time, instead of talking about it we’re going to do something together.

The wellness benefits to a good night’s sleep are well document and so no matter your specialty, there’s an application for your use of this app and a health benefit to be realized by you and your patient.

Practice Family Medicine?  When you’re sleep deprived, you often feel “worn down” -- and that’s a clue that your body is vulnerable to infection. “Not getting enough sleep makes you more vulnerable to picking up illnesses and not being able to fight them off,” says Donna Arand, PhD, DABSM, clinical director of the Kettering Sleep Disorders Center in Dayton, Ohio.  Can’t convince yourself or your patient that one or the other isn’t getting enough sleep? Let the app help.

Cardiology your area of expertise? Then you know the story. But does your patient? Former President Bill Clinton confessed that he thinks lack of sleep had a lot to do with his hospitalization to unblock a clogged artery (okay, maybe the Big Macs were part of it too but he’s on to something) "I didn't sleep much for a month, that probably accelerated what was already going on," Clinton said. 

He’s probably right. “When you don’t get enough sleep, you have an inflammatory response in your cardiovascular system -- in the blood vessels and arteries -- and that’s not a good thing!” says Arand. “We see the same thing in hypertension. If that sleep deprivation continues long term, chronic inflammation has been linked to things like heart attack, stroke, and diabetes.”

In the Mid-South and Delta Region we’re all aware of the diabetes, okay I’ll say it, epidemic. The key underlying problem in Type 2 Diabetes is insulin resistance, where the body does not make proper use of this sugar-processing hormone. Guess what? When you’re sleep deprived, your body almost immediately develops conditions that resemble the insulin resistance of diabetes.

And it’s not just in those we can spot walking down the street. “In one study of young, healthy adult males, they decreased their sleep time to about four hours per night for six nights,” says Arand. “At the end of those six nights, every one of those healthy young men was showing impaired glucose tolerance, a precursor to developing diabetes.”

Another study found that people in their late 20s and early 30s who slept less than 6.5 hours per night had the insulin sensitivity of someone more than 60 years old.

So, what’s this got to do with the app? Many of us lack the discipline to do even the simplest things to improve our health. But a recent survey found that 9 out of 10 smartphone owners wake up with their smartphone. Maybe we can use that information do something powerful.

You, your patients, our friends, and me are invited to participate in our Wake Up Better Y’all experiment. It's not necessarily scientific but certainly a fun and well-intentioned effort to see if what we do here together can be good for us.

Besides, one of the main features of the app is to wake you up at the right time. Not just the time you set the alarm for but in your lightest sleep phase. When that happens you’re more likely to awake renewed and on the ‘right side of the bed’. And everyone us around will appreciate that.

For more information on the Wake Up Better Y’all experiment and the Sleep Cycle App visit www.wakeupbetteryall.com or hit me up on twitter.

Hat tip to the good people at webMD and Donna Arand, PhD, DABSM, clinical director of the Kettering Sleep Disorders Center in Dayton, Ohio.

Hey Doc, I Hope You'll Try This

The most important part of your social media presence is not what your hospital or practice has to say, but what your patients have to say – especially to one another. Peer-to-peer interaction is the heart of social media. Likewise, it’s an important variable in the health care.

According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center, more that 7 out of 10 Internet users living with a chronic illness have gone online to find other people with similar health issues. As a trusted source for health care information, you can use social media to reinforce that role by creating a channel for their connectivity. Your effort provides value and supports patients during their journey to wellness.

Unfortunately, too much of what happens in a health care brand’s social media strategy is marketing and public relations centric. “We’re sponsoring a 5K.” “We have the best doctors.” And so on.

What if instead of posting content that merely announces information, you published open-ended content that creates engagement and starts conversation?

Treating your social media as a sort of water cooler for conversations allows you to move in and out of it as teacher and learner. It enables conversations wherein your patients and their friends as fans and followers learn from one another.

Did I just make this up? Nope. “These (social media) tools help us reach so many more people; we can bring shared interactions into our practice and that is powerful. This isn’t in addition to your job. This is part of your job.  This is a conversation, and that is what we are trained to do. We can engage learners, patients and peers,” Farris Timimi, M.D., medical director for the Mayo Clinic Center.

And, social media allows patients to have the conversation that you’re often reluctant to have – the one that says, “it’s going to be alright”.

It starts with “I’m newly diagnosed” or “My loved one is going through a difficult treatment” and all they’re really looking for is somebody who’s been there and can tell them what to expect.

Patients and their friends are hoping to find answers, information, advice and perhaps empathy. They are hoping to find someone who truly “gets it” or who shares their experience and has made it through. They’re even hoping for an opportunity to share hope with another.

You’re not a cynic. You’ve just been conditioned to focus on the serious business of medicine. But that sometimes gets in the way of the hope and promise of medicine - which is what most patients see as medicine’s role.

This notion of hope and connectivity was recently affirmed by a little social experiment. My teammates built a wall, placed it on a street corner in Memphis for one day and invited people to leave a thought related to health. We called it the “I wish you well” wall. There were over 1000 post-it-notes left on the wall and dozens taken by those who happened by.

We learned that patients, family members, friends and passers-by generally want the best for others. They’re notes were hopeful, often funny, sometimes poignant and full of promise. The notes were personal yet widely applicable.

We know that patients want to connect with you, but they also want to connect with one another. You don’t have time to build a wall for post-it-notes. So, use your social media presence to make it happen.

Post a subject header like “What’s the most meaningful thing a friend has done for you during your treatment?”

Your efforts will lead to connections, enable shared experiences and fuel a little hope for better health outcomes.

Come on. Try it. I wish you well.