Healthcare Organizations are All a-Twitter

Just a Tweet Away | Articles & Archives | Healthcare Informatics.

Key article in the May, 2009 Issue of Healthcare Informatics.

AxisPortals’s favorite passages:  

I don’t want them just to know what our strategic plan is or what our IT plan is.  People like to work with people, and so this is a mechanism of letting my personality show, along with what we’re trying to accomplish as a healthcare organization, and as an IT organization.–Will Weider, CIO Affinity Health System, and Ministry Health Care.

And

Some might argue that e-mail is sufficient for staying in touch with employees, and that social media is just another obligation for already busy executives, but Weider, who receives hundreds of e-mails every day, says he can better manage his time with sites like Twitter by more quickly sorting through messages.  By limiting posts and direct messages to 140 characters or fewer, the site forces users to communicate as efficiently as possible.

AxisPortals Aphorism:  Social media personalizes communication, and supports institutional growth and education.

Health 2.0

The February issue of Healthcare Informatics surveys the top tech trends for 2009.  Take particular note of the “Health 2.0” sidebar in the patient portals section:

“[H]ealthcare companies are looking at how other Web technologies–such as blogs, Wikis, and social networking sites–can play a role in patient interactions . . .Web-savvy healthcare organizations are studying ways to adopt technology to interact with patients to self-manage, and to interact with one another in social networking situations . . .’This is about being inclusive, and allowing people and providers to collaborate in new ways.'”

This is the sort of observation that tends to make AxisPortals very happy, because it promotes general business understanding that Web 2.0 technologies and approaches aren’t strictly social and aren’t just for kids (more on that in my next post), but are fundamentally part of the way we live now, and must therefore be fundamentally part of how we concieve of business now, as well.

Web 2.0 Central Concepts

AxisPortals Aphorism: Web 2.0 is good for healthcare, and it’s good for the health of every business.