Social Media

We are very excited that the Nova Southeastern University College of Pharmacy has officially launched our Center for Consumer Health Informatics Research (CCHIR)! Like all undertakings of this magnitude, it has been in the works for some time and has benefited from tremendous support from many corners - in particular the Chair of the Department of Pharmacy Practice and the Dean of the College of Pharmacy. Below is a presentation outlining some basics about the Center. I look forward to working with its faculty and collaborators and steering the CCHIR toward many great developments in the future.

Launching a Center for Consumer Health Informatics Research

Our College of Pharmacy recently held its annual student seminar night. A semester's worth of P3 student work culminated in over 100 podium and poster presentations. There were a number of outstanding student efforts; however, I am featuring this one is it fits the theme of the blog and the student group made it available on Slideshare. The work represents their preliminary analysis and has some interesting findings. Congrats to them and to all of our students. I look forward to seeing a final version of this and several others at the FSHP Annual Meeting.

@kevinclauson

Social Media and the Patient's Role

Last semester I taught Consumer Health Informatics and Web 2.0 in Healthcare in the College of Pharmacy (COP) after having coordinated several iterations of it in the MS in Biomedical Informatics Program. At the end of the COP course, I asked the students for their opinions about the most useful and least useful lectures of the semester (with an eye towards improving future offerings). Many of the students mentioned topics that were discussed by one of the six excellent guest lecturers. While I sincerely appreciate each guest lecturer’s contribution, I thought it would be even more meaningful to share a student response about each guest lecturer/topic.

I’ll use the format below to do so (lecturers appear in the order they taught during the semester):

Student quote
Guest Lecturer
Affiliation
“Lecture Topic”

The course’s most useful lecture was Dr. Kang’s since it focused on policy and the big picture instead of just one or two tools.
Jeah-Ah Kang, PharmD
Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising, and Communications (DDMAC)
“Promotion of FDA-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools”

Most useful was Dr. Gualtieri’s because it may be the only one that really looked at things from the patient’s side.
Lisa Gualtieri, PhD, ScM
Tufts University School of Medicine
“Blogging for Health: Communicating the Experience of Illness”

The most recent hat tip for alerting me that one of my articles was published goes to @redheadedpharm, who also has one of the most thoughtful pharmacist authored blogs out there IMHO. I should note that by drawing my attention to the article, TRP does not endorse the contents nor see eye-to-eye with me regarding pharmacists, pharmacy, or social media. And that's ok. I have to think no rational person just wants an echo chamber. In fact, I may revisit the whole 'landscape of pharmacist blogs' in a future post if I can figure out a way to do so that doesn't involve generating the hate e-mail and widespread snark that the AJHP article did.*

There are a number of initiatives, sites, and platforms trying to capitalize on the power of social media and social networking to enhance research efforts. A few of them are ResearchGate, Health InnoVation Exchange (HIVE), and VIVO. Each offers something a bit different; for a full list of 'biomedical communities' check out this excellent resource by @Berci Mesko.

Aside from those 'communities', can social media enhance research? For me, the answer is a resounding yes. I have both observed and directly benefitted via plenty of resources. Here is a random sample: a source of support for grad students that hosts data sets, actual datasets made freely available for conducting research, a how-to for using Facebook to recruit survey participants, and a prelim study on use of Facebook for health education.

The Medicine 2.0 World Congress on Social Media and Web 2.0 in Health, Medicine, and Biomedical Sciences is one of the most valuable conferences I have ever attended.  It was the meeting in this arena with the clearest focus on actual research and evidence for Medicine 2.0 issues and also offered the best opportunity to connect with other researchers, clinicians, e-patients, business and policy people.  In fact, the very first Medicine 2.0 Congress was where I was introduced to (and/or first met IRL) so many people who went on to become research collaborators, colleagues, and friends. 

In the spirit of that original meeting, I am excited for this year’s Medicine 2.0 at Stanford (September 16-18, 2011).  I have always appreciated the fact that Medicine 2.0 has truly been an international gathering, but am happy to see that it is coming to the United States for the first time.  I am also eager to see another first,  the one-day Stanford Summit at Medicine 2.0, which will directly precede the Medicine 2.0 Congress.  The Summit is lining up to have an incredible array of moderators and panelists.

I saw a tweet by John @Poikonen that alerted me to the fact that a second article in as many weeks has been published on pharmacy and blogs. Two pharmacy students (Justin Elkins and Chilla Goncz) and I authored "Use of blogs by pharmacists", which appears in the new issue of the American Journal of Health System Pharmacy. We identified all blogs that were pharmacist-authored, active (i.e. posts in the last 3 months), and written in English. Blogs focused on pharmacy, but not written by a pharmacist were excluded. Forty-four blogs were identified that fit those criteria. We used the most recent 5 posts to assess the blogs based on six categories (e.g. practice based topics, identifying information, positive language, critical language, professionalism and miscellaneous).

Most pharmacist blogs (68%) were written anonymously (versus 43% in Lagu's study of physician and nurse blogs). Pharmacist bloggers were equally represented by community (43%) and non-community settings (43%); the practice settings of the remainder were indeterminable. These blogs most commonly used positive language to describe the profession (32%), other health care professionals (25%), and patients (25%). Critical language was more commonly observed in descriptions of patients (57%); almost half of all posts contained profane or explicit language (48%).

We've seen analyses of blogs by physicians & nurses [1], medical bloggers [2], etc. However, the excellent article "Analysis of pharmacy-centric blogs: Types, discourse themes, and issues" by Jeff Cain (@jjcain00) is the first analysis of pharmacy-centric blogs. It appears in the the new issue of the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association and presents a balanced view of the pharmacy blogosphere. It found that social media promotes transparency (except for authorship). It also recognized that the degree of disinhibiton in the Web 2.0 world may have contributed to a substantial number of these blogs containing negative content about patients, pharmacy, and other healthcare professionals.

Recently I have seen another round of the cyclical deluge of posts, pointers, and tips telling people what Twitter is meant for and 'instructing' them how they should use it. Most of this advice is invariably wrong simply because there is no certain way that Twitter should be used. It is impossible. Even Twitter doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up yet.

However, there are three perpectives about using Twitter that I believe have real merit. The ties that bind all three are that each touches on a range of uses for Twitter and the tones are personalized and/or contemplative, rather than authoritative.

1. How I Use Twitter as a Killer Filtering App by @Doctor_V [Nov 3, 2010]
Concise, clean approach that recognizes the fluid nature of the tool and how it can be employed

2. Twitter: filter, suggestion box, idea machine, window by @SusannahFox [Oct 18, 2010]
Four featured functions of Twitter including example accounts that support each method used

Both of those posts, like all good blog posts, have a number of comments that really add value. The third perspective is...well, it's a little different. I first watched it on my phone and felt like I was watching a cross between Phil Laak and Mike Caro. @AndrewSpong aptly characterized it as "structured free association". Just keep your hands inside the car and hang on for the ride that is:

3. The Four Modes of Twitter: Focused, Filtered, Serendipitous and Random by @PhilBaumann via @HealthIsSocial [Oct 29/Nov 4 2010]

Healthcare in general and pharmacy in particular, is still finding its way with social media. One of the least developed elements of Health 2.0 remains the legal aspect. A few years ago several of us starting discussing scenarios in which a legally valid pharmacist-patient relationship might be created based exclusively on Web 2.0 mediated interactions. This discussion has been aided, of course, by social media. Also, as part of an interactive panel at Medicine 2.0 a couple years ago we posed this question (attendees’ responses here).

This discussion has recently been formalized as a Commentary published along with Matthew Seamon PharmD, JD and Brent Fox, PharmD, PhD (@Brent_Fox) in the American Journal of Health System Pharmacy. An accompanying podcast has also been produced for it by AJHP. Ideally the article and podcast help promote dialogue and encourage the profession to think proactively on the subject.

@kevinclauson

2009 brought many new and exciting changes not only in my personal life, but in the world of pharmacy and technology as well. I’ve learned many new things, gained some skills previously absent from my armamentarium, met some great new people, discovered the “real” internet for the first time, traveled more than ever before, discovered I don’t know diddly squat about a great many things, and am more excited about the next year than I can remember in recent history.

Below is a list of opinions about a great many things that I have seen and done over the past year. Some are pharmacy related, some are technology related, some are personal, and some are just random thoughts.

Am J Pharm Educ. 2009;73(7):1-11: "One positive aspect of Web 2.0 applications is that they create a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners. Unlike learning management systems (which are closed systems) and static Web pages (which are singular-owned), blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking sites are open to learners from multiple schools and facilitate collaboration on content creation. This participatory culture is, in essence, a key component of Web 2.0 and one that gives promise to educators who seek a means to include students in the creation of knowledge."

The article does a good job of describing several commonly used components of Web 2.0 such as blogs, social networks, aggregation, podcasts, etc. While the information in the article is specifically aimed at pharmacy education, it is valuable to practicing pharmacists as well.

The application of Web 2.0 was a popular topic at ASHP earlier this month; I mention it here. Web 2.0 is nothing new. In fact it’s rather old in terms of technology. But like many other technologies, pharmacy has been slow to adopt it. The key to all this is to remember that many of these services can be used to disseminate valuable information to other pharmacists and healthcare professionals. Think of Web 2.0 as just another tool in the pharmacist's armamentarium. More information on Web 2.0 can be found here.