Thank you, Alex, for your compliments.

Sam, you make an excellent point, and we redesigned our home page to address what you describe. Of the 150 groups in Inspire, 50 of them have health association partners. The lion’s share of activity occurs in these 50 groups. As we add partners to the remaining 100 groups, we’ll see activity there too. But as you point out, if you land in one of those other groups right now, there may not be a great deal of activity yet.

Before we redesigned the home page, it was not straightforward for you to find the most active groups if you weren’t visiting directly from a health association partner web site.

What we did to address this was to add site-wide search right on our home page. So if you go to http://www.inspire.com and search for nearly anything, you’ll find a ton of member-generated content; there are now over 50 million words in Inspire written by members(!), and overall site activity is quite high. Quality is high as well, which we have found is one of the meaningful benefits of our health association partnerships.

One final note: an increasing number of visits to Inspire — now several thousand per day — are coming from search engines. If you google phrases like ‘lung cancer survivors’ you’ll find high-ranking results that deep-link into Inspire. We’re not buying any search words; these are all organic results.

Please keep the comments coming. I appreciate your insight, and we strive for continuous improvement.

Thank you,
Brian

I am glad you joined the conversation! Myself and others want to learn about how to leverage social networks.

If you looked at the stuff I’m doing with California Healthcare Foundation around high blood pressure, what input would you have for us?

What’s your backround in this space. And I did subscribe to your feed,

Ted

Your question is the reason i still keep busy and updated with that niche, i think the future holds many possibilities in regards to the health system partnering with these sites.
the options are many: PHR, second opinion, geographic researches for the origin of current diseases, different treatment approaches worldwide, deeper diagnosis of current disorders using the mass approach, shifting of disorders and anything else that comes up just from having a room with thousands of people who share similar symptoms and are eager to find relief.

again - i would like to apologize for the Inspire comment i wish them all the best and success

Sam

Thanks for your comment and the blog - I am glad that someone is covering health social networks. As you point out with regard to Inspire, the model for success is a challenging one.

It says that you used to work for a health social network. What are your insights about how to make these grow and thrive? How could the health system partner with them?

I went to MDJunction’s Blood Pressure support group - and glad to know that there is one for blood pressure. It has only 10 members, and I would say leans heavily on the commercial side. This might cause anxiety for some health professionals, but it doesn’t for me. I’m focused on the need that these sites fulfill among patients who haven’t had their needs met by the health system.

I also followed the links through to this article at HealthCentral on blood pressure medications, and, well, the information is accuracy-challenged. However, I think the thing is not to bash sites and more to figure out how to take the demand that these sites are meeting and use them to help people stay healthy, because the sites wouldn’t exist unless there was a demand for something…

So I’m glad you are covering the health social network space, and I would be interested in thoughts of how to partner with the energy that’s creating these, and foster them to promote lifelong health. Any thoughts?

Ted

let’s hope we all do not need them, but its good to know they’re here if we do

For example Wilson’s Disease - you might not find anyone with WD on any other social health networking sites (hypothetical), but anyone who is touched by WD has gone to the WDA for answers and is lead to Inspire. This is what really differentiates them from other social health networking sites, and the fact that their business model is not ad generated.

I just joined TuDiabetes, but I am not sure if they are affiliated with the ADA. It is a micro social health network for patients with, you guessed it, diabetes and pre-diabetes.

I’m too Young For This! Cancer Foundation has social networking aspects and a ton of links for young cancer patients and survivors.

That’s all I got off the top of my noggin. With NING though, anyone can create a social network for anything. I created one for my 14 month old son and his fans.

I’m sure social health networks are going to grow and also get more segmented - ie. Patients Like Me is adding more disease states, and on the converse more micro networks (estudiabetes.com for spanish language diabetics) - also with co-morbidity, I want to communicate with patients who have high cholesterol as well as caregivers who have a grandmother with Alzheimer’s (example).

There is a need for them in healthcare to connect with patients, and caregivers to find out what works from the patients’ perspective (treatments). Also because of the anonymity online, a patient might share more with an online buddy than their partner, family or friends.

I often post answers when I have them to questions on a handful of such sites, in the hopes that it helps!