Social Entrepreneurship
Healthcare companies still don’t “Get” Social Media
We came across a great article in Social Media Today, by Steve Olenski, looking at a PWC Report on the state of social media in the healthcare industry in the US. The report opens with:
“Social media is changing the nature of healthcare interaction, and health organizations that ignore this virtual environment may be missing opportunities to engage consumers.”
The report examines social engagement from the consumer’s point of view, however, the core issue is that the industry is not getting involved in conversations already existing in the social sphere.
“I realize the hospitals, pharma companies and health insurers of the world are very reticent to engage via social media for fear of all the rules and regulations that govern their every move but… at the very least you can engage people at a high level, yes?”
How does New Zealand stack up?
Steve has a great point, and this is something that can be addressed in the New Zealand healthcare industry as well. Whilst patient privacy must remain paramount, having an online community that includes both medical professionals and consumers is a step towards better engagement – breaking down the barriers of communication between “them” and “us”.
According to the report, in the US market:
“One-third of consumers now use social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and online forums for health-related matters, including seeking medical information, tracking and sharing symptoms, and broadcasting how they feel about doctors, drugs, treatments, medical devices and health plans.”
We added our own comment to the original blog post:
The challenge for organisations providing healthcare is to decide whether to enable healthcare professionals to listen into these channels as well as marketing and customer services teams.
LifetimeHealthDiary.com is creating a patient-centred community care record so that people living with chronic disease in their homes can collate and share health information and wellbeing with their care team and family. We are finding that insurers like this for two reasons
- they can quickly assess new applicants for pre-existing conditions by looking at their pharmacy dispensing data
- they can cut response times to trigger events by automating alerts based on critical readings (blood pressure, blood sugar etc) and so save ER admissions and anticipate problems before they become critical, thus saving money.
Want to try out Lifetime Health Diary for yourself? Get in touch
Ray Avery’s Medicine Mondiale – affordable healthcare for all
Ray Avery in his garage lab
Aga and I went to see Ray Avery talk about his autobiography, Rebel with a Cause.
Ray has a mission for his life.
Use science to change the world
You can’t change the cards that you are dealt but you can change the way you play them. He sees success over a “diaspora” of difficulty. And so he set up Medicine Mondiale as an organisation to help him change the world.
We are trying to change world healthcare by getting global organisations who aren’t doing it well to improve their delivery and reduce the costs of doing so. For him, observation is the key to innovation and he learnt to observe closely because he is dyslexic and words are ‘shapes’ to his eye.
He continues
I started to look at the world to see what made things work. Few of our inventions come from linear academic research. We were investigating and watching in Kathmandu Hospitals. Incubators are ventilated and humidified with local water. This meant we were ‘cooking’ babies in a microbial broth coming from the water supply. So we patented an air filter which enabled local, unpurified water to be used.
Before this we worked on developing a cheaper inter-ocular lens for people with cataracts. This is an easy operation and truly life-changing. But each lens costs around US$300. The Fred Hollows Foundation recruited Avery to help build a factory making a new lens design in Eritrea both providing local skills, employment and around $2m profit per annum.
We collapsed the world price for inter ocular lenses from $300 to around $10.
I didn’t want to repeat the sins of other development agencies where a large percentage of programme funding never makes it to the people who need it. They get round this because ‘everything’ is categorised as programme funding including managers in the country of origin as well as visits around the globe so only around 15% of donations actually get to the project.
By an accident of birth around 90% of children have inadequate healthcare.
We think of ourselves as good global citizens. I see the world as a social anthropolgist and I think we can direct a proportion of our intelligensia to create a better world.
Think of a way you can make a difference.
What a great challenge – LifetimeHealthDiary will be thinking up ways to contribute to the disadvantaged.
Rebecca Caroe
Our First Community Group Meeting! (Part 2: Question & Feedback Session)
The participants from various organizations definitely saw the idea as an innovative way forward. Some great examples were brought up on why and how such a system could contribute to creating better health outcomes, provide economical advantages and prevent mistakes and oversights, and halt a growing inequality of health care access, stress and disengagement.
It was a great learning experience to see how lack of adequate health information for those disadvantaged such as the blind, deaf, sick children, people with chronic diseases, parents and caregivers ethnical groups leads to inability to manage, monitor or even access appropriate health care. For use by the blind the tool would need integration with ‘talking data’ but it was considered to be very positive for the hearing-impaired, as a very needed communication tool with health professionals. Also some noted this would be a great tool for recording children’s health – as children`s complete information is usually only known by the parents, but when the child reaches adulthood this information can be forgotten, or not passed on etc.
Almost 40 minutes discussion among 13 participants brought up lots of issues. The main ones examined were privacy and security. Some participants made the counter point that Lifetime Health Diary can be useful for privacy issues. Additionally some commented that privacy waivers are common place. The consensus seemed to be that perfect privacy and security are an ideal that must be strived for, but that it is even more important to simply start.
One example was given where deaf people health consultations often result in shouted conversations in front of other people, whereas this kind of Diary could act as a mediation tool.
Some barriers in uptake were identified as well. Computer literacy, access to the internet, cultural readiness and acceptance were those listed by participants.
Everybody`s involvement was definitely a sign of a great need to address current problems in a fast and cost efficient manner. The bottom-up approach was seen as the way to go, as community-based solutions are needed. Although many questions were fielded, there was a huge recognition and understanding that the Diary is a positive way forward and although there are no perfect solutions to some of the issues, a start needs to be made.
Funding
The participants suggested a couple of funding opportunities including the Tindall Foundation and Working Together More Fund, the Health Innovation Fund at the ACC, The Ministry of Health and some internal programmes run by participating organisations expressed their readiness to work together.
First steps forward
First step needs to be taken! The opportunity to do so will be in a study run by a team of Ignite Consultants. From Monday 23rd of August, five highly motivated, talented and hand-picked students will start to explore how Lifetime Health Diary™ can be helpful for different community groups. Study will be concentrated on the readiness of particular communities, including examining the motivation, perception, potential barriers, as well as looking into the usability of the technology which needs to be adjusted to the specific needs of people on the ground. The team of students will be working for 8 weeks under the guidance of Alec Holt, the Director of the Health Informatics programme at Otago University as well as mentors from the not-for-profit community
We believe that by working collaboratively on enabling the most disadvantaged in our communities and their caregivers to have better access to relevant and needed health information (which they can share with their doctors and other health professionals) can truly lead not only to better health outcomes, but significantly improve the quality of lives, engage and empower people to take charge of their health.
The Project is about to start…!
Our First Community Group Meeting! (Part 1: Introduction)
Yesterday, with help of Sue Russell from DCOSS, Ignite Consultants held a meeting under the theme: Healthy Community Enabled by Information: Social Innovation at Work. Representatives of nine different organisations attended. Despite very short notice they kindly came to share their ideas and feedback on what can be done to address some of the problems arising due to inefficient information management systems between patient, doctors, caregivers and other parties engaged in patient health management.
We started the meeting with everybody introducing themselves, I gave a short introduction followed by guest speaker Hamish MacDonald who presented his innovative technology, Lifetime Health Diary™
I met Hamish nearly one year ago, when running my Social Entrepreneurship Project. He approached me to tell me about the global mission of his company including the 5 billion plus of those who are the most health disadvantaged in the global community, including even in our communities such as the disabled, cultural minorities, people living with chronic conditions, the elderly, etc. who very often face significant challenges in obtaining adequate access and delivery of health services.
But it wasn’t till 2 months ago when he actually showed me what, together with his team, he managed to build and how the vision becomes reality. Intrigued, and seeing a huge potential in how this tool could help people with different disabilities, I took the idea to different organisations to see what they thought. The response was overwhelming.
Lifetime Health Diary™ is a secure, free, patient-owned, internet-based health diary for recording, monitoring and self-managing one’s health, as well practice health prevention. It captures and systemizes all data inputs into an easily understandable “Graphic Natural History” of your heath through lining up all your data by temporal correlation – which is a fancy way of saying your background lifestyle factors and life events are lined up by date alongside your clinical data. This allows your unique clinical story to be better understood by clinicians and caregivers that you personally invite by secure email link to view your health record.
During the meeting Hamish talked about his friend and business partner, Dr. Atsushi Matsunaga, the inventor of the software and a person very frustrated with the inability of the healthcare system to prevent illness in the first place. Hamish shared the history and idea behind the innovation outlining 7 Requirements for the system: i) Better health outcomes for you; ii) Quicker prognosis for your doctor; iii) Shared Patient Care among your Caregivers; iv) Interoperable amongst their different systems; v) All under your Control, vi) Transferable; Accessible, Portable & Private; vii) Free for both you and your doctor.
Hamish finished his short talk, and suddenly, “Access to information”, “Better health care delivery”, “Control and empowerment”, “Patient in the centre of the health system”…a lively discussion had suddenly started and Hamish was under a stream of questions. Details in the next blog post…!
The Project: A Healthy Community Enabled by Information
The project is a result of a partnership between Ignite Consultants and Lifetime Health Diary Ltd and a number of community groups. We all see a great need to address some of the pressure and problems resulting from the inefficiencies of the current health information management system. A significant slice of the population is not receiving the healthcare they should be, for a variety of reasons. This only makes all of society poorer, as their conditions and quality of life get worse and more expensive to treat than would otherwise be the case with timely interventions.
We believe in a bottom-up approach and harnessing the power of technological innovation, academic expertise matched with real needs of real people on the ground, powered by the spirit of young, talented students who want to make a difference.
We want to work together to, in a collaborative manner, enable cost-effective solutions and drive a movement of access, empowerment and knowledge in healthcare.
I am thrilled to be a part of it and I truly believe that this is the beginning of an exciting journey of collaborative effort to not only empower those the most disadvantaged to live better lives but transform the way we manage our health and interact to create a healthy community enabled by information.
We want this blog to be a communication platform for everybody who is involved and who is supporting this initiative, to share ideas and track our progress. Let`s get it started!
A Little Background About Me
My name is Aga and together with 6 outstanding individuals I run Ignite Consultants, an organization which aims to channel resources, train leaders and build partnerships between businesses, the not-for-profit sector and academia for the growth of a sustainable society.
I am from a very entrepreneurial background, interested in how to make a sustainable difference in communities. I grew up in Poland, studied and worked in Glasgow, and have been continuing my life adventure here in Dunedin, New Zealand for the past year and a half.
While running a Social Entrepreneurship Project here in Dunedin, New Zealand, I came across Hamish MacDonald and Lifetime Health Diary Ltd. But it wasn’t until 2 months ago when he actually showed me his innovative software that with my experience of working with different disability groups and not-for-profit organisations, I saw it as a tool which could make a huge difference by enabling people to better communicate with doctors and caregivers as well as putting control back into their own hands.
The last couple of months has been an exciting journey; a huge learning curve, meetings with more than 20 organizations, discovering problems, thinking, rethinking, matching pieces of the puzzle and creating a strong vision of Healthy Community Enabled by Information
Encouraged by support from Otago University, local bodies and politicians we have decided to kick off a collaborative project which we strongly believe will create a huge impact in Dunedin’s communities and hopefully later, other communities in New Zealand and around the world.
This series of blogs will document our work, results, learnings, progress and everything else involved in bringing better health to communities! If this is a topic of interest for you, I would love to hear from you, wherever you are!
How a true passion can bring a sustainable difference
Hi Everyone,
I am thrilled to introduce you our guest blogger, a very inspiring social entrepreneur Aga Nazaruk, a director at Ignite Consultants based in Dunedin, New Zealand. Over the next few days and weeks as it progresses she will be covering a new Project: A Healthy Community Enabled by Information -a partnership between Ignite Consultants and Lifetime Health Diary Ltd and a number of community groups. You’ll be truly amazed (because I am!) what a real change a few people can make by embarking on a collaborative project and working towards a mutual goal!
I met Aga back in Spring of 2010 and was literally stunned to see how much power, energy and passion for driving social innovation into communities, training and inspiring leaders and building partnerships between businesses, the not-for-profit sector and academia for the growth of a sustainable society this petite girl possesses. She reminds me of this powerful storm coming onto the shore, sweeping off the dust and old litter, and bringing a fresh air, fresh prospective and a real change onto the ground.
Aga, welcome aboard! Looking forward to your great posts.
