Example 1
Inova Health System, a not-for-profit healthcare system based in Northern Virginia, has a YouTube page, a Facebook home page and a Twitteraccount. Its YouTube page is extremely successful among all the three social media tools it has adopted. The YouTube page consists of 231 videos with 103 subscribers. The organization posts all kinds of healthcare-related videos to help users to live a better life, for both healthy people as well as patients. Particularly, among all those 20 playlists, there is a featured series called “Fit for 50”. It is a web-based fitness program designed for people who are older than 50, to improve their fitness and lead a healthier life. Typical videos include teaching the seniors to play Tai Chi as an exercise.
The program is available at: http://www.youtube.com/user/InovaHealthSystem.
Example 2
Harvard Health is a Twitter account set up by Harvard Medical School. Drawing on the expertise of 8,000 faculty physicians at Harvard Medical School and its world-famous affiliated hospitals, Harvard Health aims to provide the public with authoritative health information. Currently, it has posted 795 tweets with 317,080 followers. Interestingly, its tweets are mainly concerned with popular issues that people care about worldwide, such as the aging problem, food security issue and aerobic exercise. Together with each tweet, Harvard Health also provides the hyperlink for its followers to investigate further by themselves. Judging from the language its followers use and the portraits of their account, we can tell that the audiences are from all over the world. It is actually a good way to reach out to a wider audience and engage people proactively, rather than simply pushing tons of messages to them.
Their Twitter account is available at: https://twitter.com/#!/HarvardHealth.
Example 3
PatientsLikeMe, as the name indicates, it is a social network platform for patients to communicate and interact. It is shown on their website that by now, the site has 142,564 registered users with 1000+ conditions. The website offers functions such as ‘find patients like you’, ‘explore the treatment reports’, ‘learn about symptoms’ and ‘check for your conditions’, etc. It is a good platform for patients or even healthy people to do self-checking when encountering health problems, to explore what medicine would be effective for the condition and seek peer mental support from those who suffer the same problems. According to the founder, PatientsLikeMe is committed to putting patients’ rights and needs in the first place. In that way, social media help the organisation to show care and concern for the patients.
Here is the web link: http://www.patientslikeme.com/.
Despite the examples of social media adoption provided above, healthcare organisations are not adopting social media on a large scale. It could be explained by the reason that healthcare organisations such as hospitals or medical practictioners are generally risk adverse and normally cautious about new technology trends before they are proved to provide value. When searching the web and literature, the official website of National University Hospital interests us. As the Singapore’s only university hospital, we thought that the hospital should be aware of the positive benefits of social media and should have adopted social media tools intensively.
However, the results turn out different from what we had expected. Firstly, there is a hyperlink provided on the website to go to its Facebook page. But when we follow the link to its Facebook page, the information there is mainly about campaigns or featured talks held by the hospital; the information showing the advanced equipment in the hospital or which doctor to turn to if we have a specific problem is not shown anywhere. Rather than the intention to show care to its patient, it seems the information is put there to attract funding and investment. Secondly, there is not a direct discussion board for the patients to communicate with the hospital or among themselves. The communication between the hospital and its patients is still a one-way direction, in an authoritative way. Thirdly, when clicking on the ‘Getting to NUH’ icon, the page shows a static map which only covers the streets near the hospital. So if a patient is unfamiliar with the route to the hospital, he/she still need to go to Google Maps to search for the route.
Therefore, based on the problems revealed from NUH’s official website, we decide to implement three social computing applications, namely, YouTube, discussion forum and recommendation systemto enhance the functionality of the site. The following is a short scenario of how the three applications can benefit NUH and its patients.