Tuesday, December 11, 2012

#IHI24Forum: Yell "bingo" if you see this...

at the social media lunch session.  If you are the first one, you will win a prize and be featured on this blog.

(For those not attending the IHI Annual Forum, this is a demonstration of the power of social media.  This blog post will be picked up by Twitter and then sent to those watching the conference hashtag.  I wrote it days ago and had it scheduled to appear in the midst of my presentation.)

Addendum:

And the winner was . . .

Stephanie Van Vreede, Systems Manager at ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value, in Appleton, Wisconsin.  The prize, of course, was a copy of my book, Goal Play!  Congratulations!

1 comment:

Denizen K said...

This novel demonstration clearly highlights just how attached to smart phones the American public is. About half of the population now owns a smart phone, and the number is expected to keep growing. With people checking their phones at astoundingly frequent intervals and receiving real-time updates on a portable device, the possibility to share important information is clear and powerful. Although you used it to get someone to yell “bingo” it can definitely be applied to the health industry.

According to a Pew Research Center study, 80% of adults who use the Internet have used it to look up health information at one time or another. Since smart phones have such a wide variety of features and apps, users will be able to look up health information instantly, or even sign up to receive alerts about their specific health condition or a spreading disease in their area.

This seems to resemble the first step in the realization of “superconvergence” as described by Topol in The Creative Destruction of Medicine, where he imagines smartphones as a channel for a constant stream of data between patients and doctors. Even as a 20-year-old male who uses this technology on a daily basis, applying it to medicine seems futuristic. The technology required to make a beneficial change certainly appears to be there, but there must be a change in attitude, which is usually unfortunately slow in the medical field.