Global Health, Fitness and Medical Issues

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Social media bombards users with memes, cat videos and political squabbles. 

 

For thousands of women facing an aggressive form of breast cancer, Facebook recently brought another, less common offering: hope. 

 

“We were having a really, really difficult time finding patients,” said Casey Bales, project manager for triple-negative breast cancer research at the IU School of Medicine. 

 

She coordinates clinical trials – studies in which patients receive drugs or other treatments to try to understand their effects on health outcomes.

 

The breast cancer trial, begun in 2014, wasn't going well. Three years into the study, less than 40% of the patients needed were enrolled. 

 

“The trial was in jeopardy,” Bales said last week.

 

It was saved in 2017 when Facebook posts from the Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer and IU researchers about a trial using genomics – the study of genes and their functions – to find weaknesses in cancer tumors appeared.

 

Indiana University researchers and the Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer used the popular networking website and Instagram to recruit participants for a clinical trial. The first-of-its-kind social media effort jump-started a once-moribund effort that led to a Dec. 13 announcement that doctors say could save the lives of patients with triple-negative breast cancer. 

 

Recruiting through social media has become an important tool for physicians and medical researchers, who can sometimes have difficulty finding patients with specific forms of diseases they are trying to study. 

 

“We are implementing social media efforts pretty much on every new trial,” Bales said.

 

“Social media gives us an opportunity to leverage communities and resources to interact with a much broader community than we've been able to reach before,” the report said. 

 

Lisa Hayes is a survivor. 

 

The 62-year-old Indianapolis woman was diagnosed 12 years ago with triple-negative breast cancer. 

 

“I didn't even know (at the time) there were different kinds of breast cancer,” she said in an interview last week. “I just thought breast cancer was breast cancer. That's a scary feeling, to know you had a very aggressive kind of breast cancer.”

 

Hayes endured surgery to remove cancer, eight rounds of chemotherapy and 33 rounds of radiation. She now leads R.E.D. Alliance, an advocacy group working to reduce late-stage diagnosis and death rates for black women with cancer. R.E.D. stands for Reaching to End Disparities.

 

Her cancer is gone, but Hayes has wondered whether it might come back. She did not participate in the recent clinical trial but said the research is important to her and other survivors. 

 

“It's great news to hear what they have done,” she said. “It gives hope and promise to everyone coming behind me. It's very personal to me, in that respect.”

 

Read More: https://www.journalgazette.net/news/local/20191222/facebook-helps-clinical-trials-for-iu-vera-bradley

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The healthcare industry sees technology as a source of inspiration for progress and innovation.

 

Health care is a complex system that is resilient to major changes but vulnerable to butterflies, where even a small amount of inputs has dramatic consequences. While future health trends are being discussed in the industry, some are most useful.

 

The health information technology market is expected to reach $390.7 billion by 2024. Processing 30 billion health care transactions cost almost $250 billion a year. Healthcare spending in the United States will amount to $5.4 trillion by 2024, which corresponds to an annual average of 19.6% of GDP. 

 

As more and more healthcare providers outsource various administrative functions, these three trends will benefit the medical companies as part of their marketing strategy for 2020.

 

1.  Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things is not only an executive fridge that orders its owner’s favorite food itself, or a service kettle that boils water on demand from a smartphone.  These are smart bracelets, sensors, which you can remotely monitor your health.

 

IoT has advantages that make healthcare more reliable, efficient and faster. IoT-enabled devices enable remote monitoring, unleashing the potential for superior care. 

 

The following examples show what healthcare can do with IoT.

 

Real-time location – medical devices such as wheelchairs, scales, sprayers, defibrillators, monitoring equipment or pumps are detected by sensors and easily detected by IoT. Other IoT devices help monitor the environment. Wearable accessories are often used to monitor the user’s health for medical reasons, such as heart rate, blood pressure, calories burned, etc. The manufacturing industry is expected to have 240.1 million people in 2021. Improved patient data and real-time tracking. The future for effective care is higher than ever before. It is now up to health care providers to make the best use of this technology.

 

In other words, in a few years, the world around us will become the Internet of Things.

 

2. Automated Medical Billing

They eat your wallet space, get easily lost, and when you try to find them, you realize you’ve already thrown them away. With medical bills, you always want to be very careful not to lose such important receipts.

 

Introduction of an automated billing system for medical services.

 

Let’s be honest, no one else wants to deal with paper receipts. Fortunately, medical bills are currently processed online or in the cloud. This new software allows your healthcare providers to effectively monitor and optimize their medical bills and payments. They will be able to review their insurance at any time without the risk of insurance errors, as the software will already report possible errors in advance. This increases the security of their records, so third party billing services are very popular. This is something that medical companies should consider for the coming year.

 

3. Patient Experience

A business that is constantly evolving is equated with clients that are also constantly evolving. The medical business is no exception. If you work with a professional and experienced medical invoicing outsourcing company, this will provide you with the best way to lead the way in identifying future trends and strategies related to the success of your RCM.

 

However, be careful with the use of personalized experience, sometimes users may have too complex instructions and directions. Improving patient experience begins with clear messaging and information, especially on practice-specific topics.

 

Read More: https://getreferralmd.com/2019/10/3-healthcare-marketing-trends-for-2020/

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By their nature, hospitals are fast-paced environments that can induce some stress in the people who work there. Often, the roles taken on by people saving others' lives are somewhat thankless.

 

For this reason, Penn Medicine's Center for Digital Health created "High Five," a web-based recognition system that enables staff members to easily use social media-style memes and humor to compliment each other on anything from the routine to the extraordinary.

 

The Center for Digital Health -- which studies how things like the internet and other digital technology affect our health -- began exploring whether a web-based platform would be feasible in health care in 2016.

 

The designers believed that making it easy for staff to quickly send out a nice message in a way that is now second instinct to many would increase positive interactions and potentially serve as a tool to combat burnout.

 

"Keeping it fun and light was us trying to build on what folks already do naturally on social media and via texting," Lee explained. "Humor and levity can organically incentivize folks to connect and support each other. So we thought it made sense to capitalize off of that natural inclination when we were trying to build an opt-in recognition system."

 

High Five, named for the congratulatory gesture, is usable across multiple devices and easily accessible through a webpage that clinicians could reach as if they were working on electronic health records. Each person can search for and select a colleague from the health system, then pick from a variety of memes or GIFs containing positive phrases that were congratulatory or humorous. 

 

The images draw from pop culture or are health-themed and some are the same as memes used commonly on social media. In addition to the images, each message could also be personalized by an accompanying text written by the user. A reply function was also added shortly after launch.

 

High Five has expanded since it was launched in 2016 into several different areas at Penn Medicine such as other emergency departments, Women's Health, Pharmacy, and an intensive care nursery, among others.

 

Users now hail from all 20 academic departments within Penn Medicine, and 32 percent of hospital employees have exchanged 28,808 communications expressing courteous interpersonal behaviors, ranging from appreciation and recognition to specific feedback.

 

A new study published in NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery led by Kathleen Lee, MD, an assistant professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine and director of Clinical Implementation in the Center, showed that this system was adopted by the vast majority of those within the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) -- the first department it was fully integrated into.

 

"The status quo expectation in many settings in medicine is perfection without recognition, Medical errors can result in harsh consequences, while successes are not often not recognized to the same extent. This imbalance is thought to be a key contributor to clinician burnout," said Lee, who led the research with David Do, MD, an assistant professor of Clinical Neurology, and Ian Oppenheim, MD, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who helped to launch "High Five" while he was a resident at Penn Medicine.

 

Moving forward, the team involved with High Five hopes to expand it across the health system completely, especially with the installment of display monitors.

 

"We want to continue to partner with departments and groups to help further harness the workplace civility and positivity that High Five enables," Lee said.

 

Read More: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-12/uops-pmu121019.php

 

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Dr. Rose Marie Leslie is hoping to reach teens with a message about the dangers of e-cigarettes. So she’s started posting regularly on TikTok, the popular short video app, and has collected a large following.

 

Leslie, who goes by @DrLeslie and is a family medicine doctor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, has amassed more than 300,000 followers on the platform in recent months. Most of her TikTok videos offer insights on health issues that impact teens, ranging from how to talk to doctors about birth control to why it’s a bad idea for a group of friends to share a lollipop.

She’s best known for getting real about vaping and vaping-related illness. The issue is more urgent than ever for many parents, with surveys showing that vape use at an all-time high among teens amid an outbreak of a life-threatening vaping illness. 

 

Part of the problem, according to medical experts, is the teens aren’t aware of the risks because public health organizations aren’t communicating with them on the platforms they use.

 

That’s where Leslie comes in.

 

Leslie doesn’t talk down to the viewer, but instead shows side-by-side images of a vaping-related lung injury and a normal lung biopsy, and discusses the root causes.

 

In one video, she shows her followers what vaping lung illness really looks like under a microscope. “That is terrifying,” she says in the video.

 

Leslie says she gets a lot of messages from teens who have stopped vaping because they watched one of her videos.

 

“I expected it as a primary-care doctor who’s often talking to teens about the health risks associated with something like vaping that’s perceived as cool,” she said.

 

Greater engagement on TikTok than other platforms

 

Leslie is just one of the doctors who have recently started popping up on TikTok. Far more physicians are on Twitter and Instagram, which are more popular with older generations.

 

But those who have taken the TikToK plunge say they are experiencing far greater engagement on content there than on other social media platforms.

 

Jefferson Health’s Dr. Austin Chiang, one of the most active physicians on social media, recently joined TikTok after reading about how it’s taking off. 

 

Chiang uses TikTok primarily as a platform to talk to other young doctors about issues that matter to them, like the cost of medical education or the sacrifice of giving up their 20s to spend nights and weekends in the hospital.

 

Chiang says he already sees the most engagement on TikTok, which is used by more than 700 million people daily, according to its owner ByteDance.

 

Chiang and Leslie are also using TikTok to combat health misinformation.

 

“I’ve heard the criticism that doctors and other medical professionals on social media are somehow less credible, or won’t be taken as seriously by their peers,” said Sherry Pagoto, a behavioral scientist and professor at the Department of Allied Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut. “But I think that school of thought is going to be a thing of the past.”

 

Pagoto notes that medical experts need to meet teens where they are, rather than sticking to the older methods of advertising on television or Facebook.

 

“It would be great for public health organizations to follow the lead of these medical professionals on TikTok,” she said.

 

Read More: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/29/doctors-use-tiktok-to-talk-to-teens-about-vaping-birth-control.html

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Healthcare social media marketing has evolved significantly over the past decade.

 

Gone are the days of social media managers posting the same or similar content across one, two, or three social media profiles and calling it a day.

 

Given the importance of social media in healthcare, the team at Convince & Convert wanted to identify common trends across social media marketing from the top U.S. hospitals.

 

Our New Healthcare Social Media Research

Convince & Convert reviewed all Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube public posts from January 1 – March 31, 2019, by 54 of the top U.S. hospitals, as determined by bed count and the 2018–19 Best Hospitals Honor Roll.

 

We used Rival IQ for content aggregation and in-depth competitive analysis of all 54 hospitals’ social media efforts. We gathered insights into how hospitals use private messaging by directly interacting with hospital Facebook pages through Messenger.

 

We also ranked the Top 20 Hospitals in Social Media based on a ranking score that includes Audience Size, Engagement, Engagement Rate Per Post and Total Posts.

 

The 4 Best Practices for Healthcare Social Media Marketing in 2020

Here are the 4 best practices of healthcare social media marketing that will help you set your strategy in the right direction this upcoming year.

 

1. Diversify Your Channel Mix Beyond Facebook and Twitter

Our research found that hospitals post on Instagram less than once every two days, but publish to Twitter and Facebook at least twice per day on each channel. Based on posting frequency, Instagram and YouTube are as secondary channels, despite these audiences being more engaged.

 

2. Vary Your Content Mix to Optimize Audience Actions

More than half of the best-performing posts included photos of people. Twenty-seven of the best 50 posts clearly showed the faces of people or babies.

 

In addition, curated content links have higher engagement: 35% of links shared by hospitals are curated, meaning they are not from the hospital’s own domain. Posts with curated links earned an average of 0.033% engagement per post, while links originating from the hospital’s own domain generated half as much engagement, at 0.015%.

 

3. Boost Top Performing Posts Organic Posts

While engagement is trending down across social media as a whole, brands are circumventing declining organic reach by spending money to ensure their content is getting seen.

 

In fact, 5.5% of all hospital Facebook posts we analyzed are signaled as “likely-boosted”, according to Rival IQ. Of those likely-boosted Facebook posts, the engagement rate per post was 177% higher than the non-boosted posts.

 

4. Connect with Niche Communities

While Facebook Brand Pages continue to be used by patients and hospitals, some hospitals are beginning to leverage Facebook Groups and Messenger to create deeper connections with audiences. 

 

In fact, 30% of the top U.S. hospitals are making Groups part of their Facebook strategy. Twelve of the 54 hospitals (22%) are currently or have recently used Groups as part of their Facebook outreach.

 

Social media marketing is the present and the future is returning to a one-on-one approach of engaging with audiences directly, be it in a private message or in response to a recommendation. Users are eschewing the spotlight in favor of smaller, niche communities where their presence is valued and they are not just a number.

 

Read More: https://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-marketing/healthcare-social-media-marketing/ ;

 

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