Doug Fridsma: I’m going to give this to David because I’m going to say two words, I’m going to talk patient and family and social media and I’m going to ask David to comment.

David Muntz: Well yes, I appreciate that. We did talk about community and I think that’s critical and I do think that social media will definitely benefit patients and families.

I’ve seen where communities exist where you couldn’t possibly have gotten the community together. The truth is, most of the significant events in life are accompanied by community activity, births, weddings, are really all about, deaths, all about community.

There is one aspect of medicine that I would like to see a dramatic sea change and that is from really thinking of medicine as a transactional activity to moving into an aspirational activity. We have focused so much on the transactional things that we gather scale and statistics to talk about how to describe us. We use representations of things. It’s certainly not easy to represent a person in a difficult format.

One of the things that I don’t think we pay enough attention to is, this gets back to the wear-ables and what you should do. Wear-able is really picking up data that’s interesting about what’s happening somewhere on my body, but not in my mind. So, the behavioral aspect of medicine is huge. Trying to determine where somebody is in their willingness to change really does impact the care.

If I’m in pre-contemplation, moving to contemplation to planning to action to maintenance, really has a huge difference on how it is I approach the patient. So, the question is how do you change the conversation that occurs between the provider and the patient in a way that allows a much more meaningful expression of what the correct care plan is based on where I happen to be.

So, let’s spend the time on the people who are in pre-contemplation and move them down the pathway and let’s spend the most time on people who are contemplating and planning in order to make the changes. Until the wear-ables have a behavioral health aspect, I’m ready to do the exercise, I’m ready to change the diet, I really don’t think that we will get the impacts that we need.

If we can figure out a way to make the transactions describe the mental state or the behavioral activities that will allow us to interact with the patient more effectively, I’d like to see that.

Mandi Bishop: Well, we talked about Dr. Google and we just talked about some behavioral modifications and I see that I have a question, but before I ask this questions, do we have any of the HIStalk Patients Scholarship recipients in the room? Is anybody in the room aware of the chronic conditions social media communities for patients that are available? Does anybody know?

If you’re on Twitter and you guys want to take a look at what’s happening from an patient perspective for communities and how health care social media can change the lives of the patients and can help them better engage with doctors, there are a number of hashtags out there. #bcsm for breast cancer social media, #lcsm lung cancer social media are two of the big ones. #lupuschat.

So if you, collectively, wanted to get a sense for what’s happening in the patient community and how they’re getting information that helps them better inform their engagements with their doctors, I just wanted to give a shout-out to those communities because I think they’re doing an amazing job and they’re performing a really wonderful public service. We have a question.

Audience Question from Jenny Laurello: My question is related to data, social media data, and actually applying … whether it’s looking at using the … Twitter data to prevent heart disease … or … children’s hospital … insomnia. What are some of the really innovative cases of social media … you guys receive.

Doug Fridsma: So, I think you mentioned several of those. One of the things that I know we’ve seen in just Twitter-mining is the [inaudible 00:36:36] social media to predict flu outbreaks and outbreaks of other infectious disease. There’s a lot of interesting challenges in use of social media for population health use.

Matter of fact, I was reading an article yesterday for one of my [inaudible 00:37:03] classes. I found a case where it was a patient who actually had an infectious disease and a friend posted on a Facebook account, the friend posted on his Facebook account, if you know duh-du-du-du-du-dah and have been in contact with him in the last several days, he’s come down with whatever this disease was and went into the specific ethics of using social media for some of that kind of thing.

We’re starting to explore all of these different, innovative ways to do stuff on social media. There’s a lot of stuff that you can find out by doing data mining, there’s a lot of predictions that you can make. So, it’s an interesting and emerging area in terms of cool stuff you can do. There’s a lot of opportunity. So, just a few comments.

Audience member asks a question about how Dr. Google can influence a care encounter.

Doug Fridsma: So, when I was practicing medicine, I don’t practice now, but when I was practicing medicine, I made part of my review of systems to include what did you read on the internet. It creates a conversation.

The thing is that there’s good stuff and there’s bad stuff. But if you make it okay to look on the internet and if have it okay to talk to your doctor about it, you actually will find that patients will use it ways that will be very supportive to their health and health care. So, I encourage physicians to have that conversation, like what did you learn about this as you were thinking about coming in to have your visit?

Rasu Shrestha: Really quick comment, in actually look at the emergence of social media in health care, I think one of the biggest challenges that we’ll continue to have be is in the validity and the neutrality of the information that’s out there.

To tackle that, I think it’s really important for us to focus on having really great content, top notch quality, and make sure that we continue to curate a lot of this content as well so that patients know where to for really valid information. Validity and neutrality is, I think, really important.

Keith Boone: Any parent can tell you the value of social, in any form, in dealing with health care for your children. Any parent.