Working in social business development can offer a number of gratifications: the stimulation of new ideas, the pleasure of collaborating with creative, dedicated colleagues, and the satisfaction of a shared enterprise that has no less ambitious a goal than to improve upon or even resolve issues associated with a particular aspect of an existing industry practice.

Social business development reaches its apogee when all three of these elements are in conjunction. The fact that this does not happen very often is one of the reasons why STweM has to date not entered into any formal business partnerships.

Today, that changes.

Evolution of a partnership

Knowing of my enduring obsession with finding better ways to facilitate contextually appropriate communication within the health conversation between communities of interest, towards the end of 2011 Felix Jackson, Chief Medical Officer of medDigital, introduced me to Tim van Tongeren, medDigital‘s Chief Product Officer. Felix explained that Tim was working on developing a new medDigital creation that would offer secure, flexible online advisory boards to the pharmaceutical industry.

A flurry of conversations ensued during which Tim delineated medDigital‘s thinking around the new product’s development. Together, we explored the ways in which the product spoke to customer need, how users would experience it, and the business model within which it would be presented. Working with Tim was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, and I was delighted to have been part of the development of what we can now call medBoard: a secure, easy to set up, online advisory board product that offers faster time to insight with great flexibility at a market-beating price.

As I learned more about the platform, it became clear to me that medBoard has the potential not only to be the best product on the market, but also the most elegant, most customisable, and most competitively priced solution available to pharmaceutical industry leads looking for contemporary solutions to the enduring challenge presented by the need to expedite advisory boards. As an adjunct to face-to-face boards, or even perhaps in time as a replacement for them, medBoard offers the sort of benefits that I believe will see it become the industry standard, best-in-class product for advisory boards.

Consequently, when my subsequent introduction to medDigital‘s Chief Executive Officer Dennis van Rooij led to the board kindly offering me the opportunity to become the company’s first partner and serve as an ambassador for medBoard, medCrowd and future medDigital products, I was happy to accept.

So, today I am glad to announce that I am medDigital‘s Partner #1; you can read more about the medDigital partner program. Friends and colleagues in the industry can expect to hear more from me in person as to why I think medBoard is the right advisory board solution for them, but in the interim you can discover more for yourself.

Or better still, why not just ask me about it?

What is the best health information?

The average user searching for information on the Internet is not using Boolean logic or Google advanced operators to refine their searches.

They are using natural language declamations or questions which search engines then ‘translate‘ to produce results.

However, when we ask ‘what is the best health information available on the Internet?’, we may not be posing the question we think we are.

What we are actually asking is: ‘what health information are we most likely to find on the Internet?’

This is a regrettable state of affairs, but one that needs to be acknowledged.

It is also one that needs to be rectified.

Today, I am launching the ‘I have’ project.

I’m not developing it, though.

We are.

What are the ‘I have’ project’s goals?

• To offer definitive answers to the question ‘I have [disease state]. What should I do?’
• To produce 1 page signpost summaries of the most reliable, relevant, patient-focused, outcomes-oriented, evidence-informed health information available for a wide range of diseases.
• To publish outputs compiled with SEO best practice in mind to be promoted through social networks and communities in an effective way with the intention that they should appear above the fold on the first page of Google results for the disease they address. Even the best health information is useless if it isn’t discoverable.
• To harness the expertise of healthcare professionals, patients and curators in co-creating and sharing the very best health information available for the disease states addressed by each document concerning treating and/or managing of the disease, living with the disease, and learning about the disease.

What is happening first?

• The ‘I have’ project’s proof of concept output will be I have breast cancer. This project is now live for any contributor to add to. The ‘I have’ project maintains an open editorial policy which asks that contributors add their own additions, but leave comments querying the validity, accuracy or relevance of others’ additions rather than modifying or deleting them themselves.

What will happen next?

• If the ‘I have’ project progresses beyond the proof of concept stage, clusters of publications will be released by disease classification on a monthly basis.
• New projects will be added to the ‘I have’ project publication directory and plan. This open document is now live, and ready to accept your suggestions under the ‘Proposed projects’ tab at the bottom of the spreadsheet.

Both have their merits, but to me one looks like the past, and one looks like the future.

Medify aims to ‘help you and your family more easily navigate, stay current, and manage the often complex process of finding answers, while empowering you to get help from those you trust most’.

The ‘evidence from real patients’ the platform presents allows users to hear the patient voice indirectly, mediated as it is through Medify’s analysis of research studies by medical researchers about patients:

Medify envisions the benefit its service confers upon patients being transferred in the following manner:

Whether patients either discover or use the platform in this manner, and whether these behavioural expectations on Medify’s part map on to patterns of use in practice remain to be determined.

Medify’s home page contains a search bar:

Results are displayed in the following manner:

Treato aims to ‘enable people to understand the real life experiences of other patients, letting them make better informed healthcare decisions for themselves and their loved ones’.

Unlike Medify, Treato allow users to hear the patient voice directly. The data it presents is filtered by search restriction rather than the analyses of medical research, and as such is structured rather than mediated.

Treato’s simple homepage is effectively a custom patient reported information search engine:

Here is what a search on COPD resolved to at the time of writing. Note the supplementary search refinements in the top right hand corner that Treato offers automatically on the basis of the search term entered (as an aside, Treato’s success in filtering out the high level of spam in the social health conversation is impressive):

Clicking on the ‘compare drugs’ button causes the main pane to resolve to a collapsible medication comparator, with tabs for drug comparison (default) and drug switching, with an additional in-frame filter.

Note also the social optimisation via Google+ and facebook, although intriguingly not Twitter. Seeing how much conversation Twitter drives across the Social Web, it is to be hoped that this sharing option (perhaps with Tumblr and other drivers of interest and awareness) will be added in due course.

Immediately beneath the comparisons, users encounter recent examples of the actual discussions that Treato has searched. Compellingly, a link is provided to the conversation’s point of origin so that the passive searcher is one click away from becoming an active participant:

Of the two platforms, Treato seems to me to capture more of the Spirit of the Age:

• Treato offers direct access to patient reported information; Medify offers indirect access to patient reported information.
• Treato views patient reported information as dynamic: something to be engaged with and participated in rather than analysed, mediated by medical research, and only then delivered back to the patient in the manner Medify does.
• Treato looks forward to a future where patient reported information will actively inform every stage of the drug development and licensing process in real-time rather than be considered in isolation in the historic moment of a particular scholarly or clinical context.

In my opinion, the drug development process is more likely to evolve socially and incorporate elements of Treato’s functionality and feedback loop potential than it is to retro-fit medical research with the appearance of social engagement without manifesting any of its defining characteristics in the way that Medify currently does.

Hat tip to Ritesh Patel and Gideon Mantel for bringing these platforms to my attention.

As 'forward' to email, so 'retweet' to Twitter

Twitter’s official Help Centre describes how to Retweet using the Web interface, but there are other manual Retweeting options.

This post describes them.

Automated (new style) Retweets

The official Twitter Help Centre advises that other users’ Tweets may be Retweeted via the Web interface by the following means:

1. Hover over a link
2. Click the Retweet link
3. The tweet will then be shared with all your followers.

Manual (old style) Retweets

Retweets could theoretically also be entered via the web interface manually simply by typing ‘RT @username: [Tweet]‘. However, if you intend to publish a lot of the variation Retweets often described as Modified Tweets (MT), it may be easier to use popular Twitter client TweetDeck.

One of TweetDeck’s least mentioned but most useful features is the option to modify Retweets, accessed via Settings > Twitter. The final option in the list is a drop-down menu:

Selecting Always ask me forces Tweetdeck to ask the user whether the Retweet should be published without editing, or whether the user wishes to edit the Retweet before sending:

Choose Edit then Retweet to add value to your readership by reorienting the Tweet’s message in some way, perhaps to give emphasis to a point, add a hashtag to broaden the Tweet’s potential readership, pose a question, or to include a link or further information. Remember to edit the default RT in the initial position to MT to signify the fact that you have modified the Tweet

The distinction between the two is a subtle one.

Key learning:

Rule: all @Replies are also @Mentions, but not all @Mentions need be @Replies

So ‘Thanks for the link @username’ is both an @Mention and an @Reply

But ‘I saw a great Tweet from @username on patient advocacy’ is only an @Mention

Twitter’s official definition of an @Reply is ‘any update posted by clicking the “Reply” button on another Tweet‘.

In order to post an @Reply automatically using the Twitter interface, the following procedure should be used:

• Find the Tweet you want to reply.
• Hover over the Tweet and click Reply.
• Add the message to be Tweeted in the box that will pop up, and click

In order to post an @Reply manually use a Twitter client such as TweetDeck.

A Tweet that contains another user’s username preceded by the @ sign (e.g. @yourusername) will appear in both the public Twitter time line and the @yourusername account’s own Twitter feed.

Twitter calls this category of Tweet an @Mention.

Key learning:

Tweets that begin with an @Mention (e.g. ‘@username hello!’) will appear in your public Timeline but only feature in the Timeline of your followers who follow both your account and the account of the user you mention

However, Tweets that do not begin with an @Mention (e.g. ‘hello @username!’) are visible to everyone

Therefore if it is important to you that the @Mention should be placed at the beginning of a Tweet and you want that Tweet to appear in all of your followers’ timelines, begin your tweet with an unobtrusive character. A period is used most often for these purposes (e.g. ‘.hello @username’)

What trends for 2012 may we discern in the social health conversation?

Here are some of my thoughts as to the residual, dominant and emerging subjects.

Slipping off the map

It’s time to say goodbye to listening and engagement.

Of course, this is not to say that either idea is somehow no longer relevant.

Success on the Social Web begins and ends with good listening, and we should always be looking to interrogate and refine our listening strategies and test our existing methodologies for relevance.

Similarly, if you are not engaging on the Social Web, you are not paticipating in the Social Web.

To reach for an analogy: on sitting down in an exam room, I always found it useful to begin by arranging my paraphernalia on the desk.  It cleared my mind, relieved a certain degree of stress, and helped me prepare to order my thoughts in the same manner. However, if I had spent the entire duration of the exam re-organising my desktop, I wouldn’t have written anything.

It has been time to act for several years, not to reflect on the creation of the conditions of possibility for action. A reluctance on the part of any community of interest participating in the health conversation on the Social Web to acknowledge this can only smack of wilful prevarication and a hunt for excuses to undertake the difficult work of integrating Social Media into strategic and tactical activities as part of a broader endeavour to evolve into a truly social enterprise.

Compass points

Mobile, gamification and search all remain in the ascendant – and not all for reasons that I’m convinced have been thought through.

Focusing on mobile in isolation is in my opinion a red herring.

Firstly, the definition is so broad as to be meaningless. Is a wifi connected laptop mobile? Are you ‘consuming content in a mobile setting’ whilst browsing a tablet computer on your knees with half an eye on the television? How much data do you pull through your smartphone whilst connected to your home wifi at a useable speed compared to the pixel-by-pixel connections speeds you may be subjected to when roaming?

Secondly, in the same way that it make more sense to talk of ‘media’ once more rather than ‘social media’ due to the ubiquity of the latter, so when we speak of ‘mobile’ what we are really referring to is ‘an increasingly popular context within which information is sought and consumed across a variety of platforms’. All other definitions approach meaninglessness.

I’d hazard you will no more want ‘mobile’ appended to you job title or bio at the end of 2012 than you want ‘digital’ to be as we approach the end of 2011.

Nearly everything is digital. Nearly everything will be mobile. Talking about the importance of ‘mobile [anything]‘ is therefore a redundancy.

Gamification is drifting closer to these rank waters too at a time when maturing social platforms such as Foursquare are downplaying the gaming elements within their products in favour of other themes such as discovery.

Much of what we have come to describe as ‘gamification’ refers either to the integration of user experience elements which mimic the ease of use of option-selection and execution within game environments, or the co-opting of user interface characteristics reminiscent of game protocols.

I would not be surprised to see mobile and gamification in 2012 go the way of listening and engagement in 2011.

Interest in search is enduring as our definition of what constitutes search, where it is undertaken, and the sources of information from which results are being drawn continues to evolve. I say more about this in the company of Faisal Ahmed and Alex Butler in this recent Digitally Sick podcast.

On the horizon

I remain convinced that the significance of social metadata will continue to grow in 2012, most visibly in the first instance in the form of influence metrics.

I’m also expecting to see a rise in the importance of the management of credentialing issues critical to acceptance and success in social environments such as credibility.

So: what you think the trends for 2012 in the social health conversation will be?

Here is what @StuartMayell, @openkimono, @dawidge, @DavidPaulNoble, @julieodonn, @BrianSMcGowan, @MikeCapaldi, @hjluks, @stefpo, @zeeclor, @PhilBaumann, @motorcycle_guy, @kgapo, @Tinii, @Colleen_Young and @jodyms think the answer is, collectively:

Keywords in the Social Health Conversation

Due to the quirks of Wordle, I, me, you, us, we, and why did not make the cut so I add them manually here for your consideration.

So: now it’s your turn.

What have we missed?

What are your keywords in the social health conversation?

How, when and where should we be applying them?

Please add your contributions and comments below.

The Digitally Sick homepage

Digitally Sick is a new weekly podcast-driven initiative from Faisal Ahmed of Life Healthcare,  Alex Butler of The Social Moon and myself.

You can find our podcasts on iTunes and the blog itself for now, and we’re looking at other channels too.

To date, we’ve discussed the 2011 digital conference season, and search and healthcare. Episodes run to about 40 minutes, and are designed for those downtime moments during your commute or whilst travelling when you’d like to listen to something that speaks to your professional interests. We hope the Digitally Sick pods fit the bill in this regard; if they do not, please let us know! We would very much like to hear what you think about them, either way.

You can join the conversation on Twitter under the #digisick hashtag, as well as facebook, and you can add us to your RSS reader here.

Finally, if you there is a topic that you would like to discuss with us as a guest, please get in touch with one of us. Anything and everything relating to digital health is on topic, so let us know what is on your mind!