Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

More excellence from Pew Internet – this time on teen trends using social media. Adults (18-29) still more likely to use social networking sites but only just.

What I really like about these slides is the girl scout case study (over 1,000 girls aged 14-17) – it looks at how they feel about, and use, social networking sites.

Pew Internet/Girl Scout Joint Webinar on Social Media

Insightful witty comments on the state of publishing today from an author’s point of view, and also correctly addressing the problems as well as solution – the ideal publishing relationship today.

and for the record, Margaret Atwood has 2 ebook readers and reads ebooks….

One of the best presentations on how to use social media in health and research I have seen.  Done by an organisation that is in itself impressive:

The Cochrane Collaboration, established in 1993, is an international network of people helping healthcare providers, policy makers, patients, their advocates and carers, make well-informed decisions about human health care by preparing, updating and promoting the accessibility of Cochrane Reviews – over 4,000 so far, published online in The Cochrane Library.

If you are anything to do with or interested in healthcare this is well worth a peek:

Looking at this interesting diagram in the BMJ – the gist of which is something like this: in the ‘old days’ worst case scenario was viewed as self care of your medical condition and best care was to see a specialist.

The problem is: best care is also the most expensive.  But now, get this…. best care is viewed as patients self-managing, because they are more able to so in this ‘information age’.  If this is true, then better care is more accessible to more people, because it is internet based, cheaper and not reliant on seeing specialists.

It is a shift from ‘Industrial age’ healthcare to ‘Information age’ healthcare.

Policy vision of specialist driven care shifting to patient driven care as information age replaces industrial age. Adapted from Ferguson* BMJ 2010;341:c5814

What I like about it, is the fundamental shift in thinking that has taken place with the advent of the internet and social media tools.

Reference

Adoption, non-adoption, and abandonment of a personal electronic health record: case study of HealthSpace, BMJ 2010; 341:c5814

*Figure adapted from Ferguson T. Consumer health informatics. Healthcare Forum J 1995;Jan-Feb:28-33.

Thank you BMJ for making this open access, and to Mike Bainbridge for alerting me to this superb diagram.

I am interested in businesses – whether in health care or outside – who have been able to adapt and change to the new digital online environment and use social media tools.  This slide share by the board of innovation (that’s quite a board) gives some examples – whether I agree with all of them or not, it’s good to see what people are doing.

Complied from Facebooks Ad platform, in January 2011, this slideshow give some interesting stats – check out slides 14 and 15 for example – slightly more male than females (which surprised me) but the next slide shows the distribution of said genders.  Quite a different picture, that said stats are difficult to compile and interpret, so always have a big pinch of salt to hand.