Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Web course at Tufts

Lisa Gualtieri (Adjunct Clinical Professor in the Health Communication Program) asks me to publicize this course:

Tufts University School of Medicine

Sunday July 18-Friday July 23, 2010

Most healthcare and public health organizations who are trying to communication with healthcare consumers share these problems: “our website hasn’t been touched in three years”; “we set up a Facebook page but don’t know what to do with it”; and “what exactly is Twitter and how do we use it?” With 61% of American adults looking online for health information, healthcare organizations need a Web strategy and healthcare professionals need to understand the latest technologies to plan and execute health communication initiatives. There can be a risk in not embracing the Web if other health organizations are and if healthcare consumers expect it. Yet it is difficult to decide which of the rapidly evolving Web technologies to select and how to use them to provide effective health communication, especially as part of a coherent Web strategy.

This course covers how to develop and implement a Web strategy to drive a health organization’s online presence, specifically the processes for selecting, using, managing, and evaluating the effectiveness of Web technologies for health communication. The course will use case studies from organizations to illustrate initiatives with a discussion of what worked and the recommended improvements and will work in small teams on a Web strategy redesign for Harvard Health Publications. Guest lecturers will provide insights on their experiences with the use of Web technologies for healthcare organizations and on topics that will lead to better use of Web technologies for health communication including on how healthcare consumers search and how to reach them, health reporting, and graphic design for health Web sites. Guest lecturers include: Bill Tancer, author of Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters, Gary Schwitzer, Tara Montgomery, Ed Coburn, Tania Schlatter, and Kent Bottles, MD.

1 comment:

jonmcrawford said...

This is interesting, with the advent of services like http://text4baby.org/, I've been wondering how using Twitter private conversations (or something like) might get a patient in touch with a medical case manager more efficiently, and how you could manage that point of contact in addition to the already overwhelming effort to contact via phone/mail/etc.

Looks like an interesting course, I hope that they at least mention EHR in passing, if not as a major topic.