As I’ve written here a few times, Washington, DC brings together my interests in empowerment, diversity, and innovation so well – it is still a city where people believe the possibilities are unlimited, because they are.

This is especially true on the eve of the end of marriage discrimination in the District of Columbia. I don’t think the DC local cable channel has ever been as popular among people living in my community, as the hearings for the bill, which is set to pass, occur. I thought it was worth juxtaposing two photographs, one from 1963 (credit: Library of Congress), and one from 2008 (credit: MV Jantzen)

I also want to point out Washington in the ’60s: Share Your Memories | WETA which in a way is Web 2.0 at its best – it is the voices of people who lived during that time, showing the power of sharing, and the use of this medium by the baby boomer generation, who by definition would be the population commenting here:

Living in the 60’s When JFK was President, I was at the State Dept. He’d hold his news conferences there. I would run down to the basement where he got out of the car into the elevator. The only time he shaked hands was when there were the nuns waiting for him, too. I protested in the Vietnam marches; brought people into my apt. (Glover Park) to shower and change during the Poor People’s Campaign….

Knew Washington was changing as I could see inter-racial couples walking down the street together without fear of being shot.

From the narrative above, and the photographs below (click to see full size), we have come a long way, and we have a ways more to go. If it was easy, this would already be fixed, but we are here because it’s not easy.

Enjoy the show.

It has been a busy week to say the least. One of the highlights, though, was giving this presentation with Holly Potter, Vice President of Public Relations and Stakeholder Management for Kaiser Permanente, at the Health Care Public Relations, Marketing & Internal Communications: A Social Media Summit, put on by Ragan Communications.

We talked about how we met, through similar communication-type experiences, and the work we are doing now, including promoting an internal social network at Kaiser Permanente, and promoting participation of physicians and staff online with members and potential members.

It’s been really great to work with Holly and her team, who are coaching us to participate, rather than to not participate, and who we can turn to when we want to know just how high the expectations our communities of us are. The expectations are pretty high, and they’re willing to help us meet them.

See what you think and enjoy.

This is a nice article about how various organizations are working with their customers, transparently, to build trust, one of the most important assets they have. Sadly, there are no health care organizations profiled. What is yours doing to engender trust?

1. Tool #1: Registry of Twitter/Blog/RSS Feeds : Let’s say that you are a professional group, or maybe a large medical group, and you would like to aggregate all of the RSS feeds generated by your members/employees/people affiliated with your organization on the Internet. This could be their Twitter feed, blog feed, delicious links, even flickr feed. The purpose would be to know who in your organization is out there, to follow along what they are doing, and maybe tap their expertise when needed. Friendfeed used to have an “invisible friend” feature, where you could add an RSS feed that was out there without having the person actually get an account, but that feature appears to be gone from the new version. This particular tool request may be hard to explain the first time, so feel free to ask questions in the comments.
2. Tool #2: Preferred URL registry for individuals: This need comes up on this blog a lot – I decide that I’d like to reference a person who I’ve been working with or had a conversation with. Do I link to their Twitter URL? Blog URL? LinkedIn URL? Company biography URL? Or do they even have one? It would be nice if people had a place to indicate which place they would like people to point to when they are referenced. Maybe the default will be Twitter, but until then, I’d like to be respectful of each person’s preferences.

Thanks for any ideas!

Hawn C. Take Two Aspirin And Tweet Me In The Morning: How Twitter, Facebook, And Other Social Media Are Reshaping Health Care [Internet]. Health Aff. 2009 Mar 1;28(2):361-368.

Note: the article no longer requires a subscription for access (3/14/09)

The much anticipated health information technology issue of Health Affairs, and in it is an article written by Carleen Hawn about Social Media in Health Care. The links above to to the Health Affairs site, but it appears a subscription will be required to view it, so hopefully readers have access to an institutional or other subscription to read it.

The genesis of this article was a discussion that was started in July, 2008, at the American Board of Internal Medicine’s forum on Patient Centered Care, where i presented about some of these concepts. This was followed up with discussions with myself and other leaders in the field, such as Jay Parkinson, MD, from HelloHealth, Bob Coffield, a well known legal expert in the area of social media, as well as real patients.

I actually attended the briefing announcing the release of this issue in Washington, DC, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the article is billed on the front cover of a very full catalog of scholarly works. Who would have thought 4 years ago that an article about social networking/media would be front cover material for the Health Affairs issue on Health Information Technology. This says a lot about the impact that social media, or perceived impact, in this area of health care! At the same time, I think Matthew Holt correctly points out that there’s a part two (and three and four) to be written covering what’s below the tip of the iceberg.

In addition to the information mentioned in the article, Carleen Hawn also consulted with some of my favorite innovators in health care, including Scott Shreeve, MD, and the team at the Kaiser Permanente Sidney Garfield Center for Health Care Innovation.

In addition to these contributions, I would also mention the contribution of the California Healthcare Foundation, whose leaders, including Veenu Aulakh, MPH, Sophia Chang, MD, MPH and Sam Karp, stimulated the development of the crowdsourced definition of Health2.0 mentioned the article with a simple question to me: “Ted, what is Health2.0?” (my answer was, “I don’t know, let’s ask the crowd.”)

And, I would also like to mention that innovation like this comes from health care organizations and systems that are able to say,”Not everything has been tried before,” and in my case this is/was Group Health Cooperative, who have learned from our early blogging experience and now bring their physicians and staff online for the world to learn about what they are doing to reinvent primary care. I’ve been engaged in maybe a few conversations over the past few years about why health care organizations should be transparent and it’s helpful for everyone to have an example of why this works well for everyone.

Thanks again to Carleen Hawn, The Health Affairs Team, and The American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation for taking the time to explore this topic for America’s patients (that’s all of us).

Key changes since 2007:

• Biog writing is slowing
• Blog reading is increasing and plateauing across all age groups
• General participation is increasing
• Note the slight dip in news reading for Generation Y relative to blog reading

I like the Forrester Social Technographics approach, which place blog writing at the highest tier of participation. It seems that the Web2.0 ecosystem will come to resemble the human one – a small percentage of people will lead, a larger percentage will participate and follow, and a small percentage will not participate.

Thanks a ton, again, to The Pew Internet and American Life Project for making their data so freely available. I was able to find the magic Excel file with data meticulously categorized and trended on this page on the Pew Internet site. It’s a huge help. Here’s the full presentation. Click on any slide to see fuller size: