Tag: Social Media

Gen Z’s Mid-Life Crisis

Mar 27, 2024

By KIM BELLARD

These are not happy times in America.

Now, I’m not thinking about the increasing cultural wars, the endless political bickering, the troubles in the Med-East or Ukraine, the looming threat of climate crisis, or the omnipresent campaigning for the November 2024 elections, although all those play a part. I’m talking about quantifiable data, from the latest World Happiness Report. It found that America has slipped out of the top 20 countries for the first time, falling to 23^rd – behind countries like Slovenia and the U.A.E. and barely ahead of Mexico or Uruguay.

Even worse, the fall in U.S. scores is primarily due to those under 30. They ranked 62^nd, versus Americans over 60, who ranked 10^th. A decade ago those were reversed. Americans aged 30-44 were ranked 42nd for their age group globally, while Americans between the ages 45-59 ranked 17^th.

It’s not solely a U.S. phenomenon. Overall, young people are now the least happy, and the report comments: “This is a big change from 2006-10, when the young were happier than those in the midlife groups, and about as happy as those aged 60 and over. For the young, the happiness drop was about three-quarters of a point, and greater for females than males.”

“I have never seen such an extreme change,” John Helliwell, an economist and a co-author of the report, told The New York Times, referring to the drop in happiness among younger people. “This has all happened in the last 10 years, and it’s mainly in the English-language countries. There isn’t this drop in the world as a whole.”

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Center and an editor of the report, said in an interview with The Washington Post that the findings are concerning “because youth well-being and mental health is highly predictive of a whole host of subjective and objective indicators of quality of life as people age and go through the course of life.”

As a result, he emphasized: “in North America, and the U.S. in particular, youth now start lower than the adults in terms of well-being. And that’s very disconcerting, because essentially it means that they’re at the level of their midlife crisis today and obviously begs the question of what’s next for them?”

Gen Z is having a mid-life crisis.

A SOCIAL Approach to Health Reform

Dec 1, 2018

By Richard Reece, MD

Every Sunday, I read the Sunday NYT in search of ideas for a blog. Today is no exception. I found the idea in Thomas Friedman’s column, “The New IT Revolution,” in which he holds forth as follows,

“The latest phase in the IT revolution is being driven by the convergence of social media- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga- with the proliferation of cheap wireless connectivity and Web-enabled smart phones and “the cloud” – those enormous server farms that hold and constantly update thousands of software applications, which are then downloaded (as if from a cloud) to make them into incredibly powerful devices that can perform myriad tasks.”

The SOCIAL Acronym

Friedman then goes on to quote Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, who describes this phase of the IT revolution with the acronym SOCIAL.

• S is for Speed – This means physicians and patients can find anything and everything about health care (and each other),

. O is for Open – This means physicians are out in the open and can no longer hide their results or reputation.

• C is for Collaboration – This means physicians must organize among themselves or affiliated hospitals or into loosely coupled teams to take on the new challenges posed by society in general and health reform in particular.

• I is for Individuals – This means anyone – physicians, patients, and entreprenuers – as individuals can reach around the globe to start something or collaborate or consolidate to improve care – faster, deeper, and cheaper – as individuals.

• A is for Alignment – physicians with each other or with supportive health organizations to make sure all your ships are sailing in the same direction.

• L is for Leadership – This means physician leaders are going to have to mixs top-down and bottom-up forces – from public and private sectors – to provide what is best for themselves, patients, and society.

Will Palo Alto Ever Make a Successful Healthcare IT Company?

Jun 1, 2018

[youtube width=”560″ height=”270″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M16lw6Piias[/youtube]

From CurrentMedicine.TV:

With the troubles at the medical doctor social network Sermo, we thought it would be interesting to speak with a healthcare IT venture capitalist about the reasons why the healthcare sector has not adopted Internet technologies such as LinkedIn or Facebook, or other IT business models. We interviewed Bijan Salehizadeh, MD, Managing Director at Navimed Capital in Washington, DC.

The Facebook Model for Socialized Health Care

Feb 26, 2015• 5

By EDGAR T. WILSON

As government involvement in U.S. health care deepens—through the Affordable Care Act, Meaningful Use, and the continued revisions and expansions of Medicaid and Medicare—the politically electric watchword is “socialism.”

Online, of course, social media is not a latent communist threat, but rather the most popular destination for internet users around the world.

People, whether out of fear for being left behind, or simply tickled by the ease with which they can publicize their lives, have been sharing every element of their public (and very often, their private) lives with ever-increasing zeal. Pictures, videos, by-the-minute commentary and updates, idle musings, blogs—the means by which people broadcast themselves are as numerous and diverse as sites on the web itself.

Even as the public decries government spying programs and panics at the news of the latest massive data-breach, the daily traffic to sites like Facebook and Twitter—especially through mobile devices—not only stays high, but continues to grow. These sites are designed around users volunteering personal information, from work and education information, to preferences in music, movies, politics, and even romantic partners.

So why not health data?

Click This, Not That: Talking to Patients About Reliable Online Health Information

Jun 19, 2014• 1

By DANIELLE JONES

Most physicians agree that we have an ethical obligation to help educate our patients about what’s going on with their health, but what does that look like in a world overwhelmed with digital health information? And how do we budget appropriate time when we’re already struggling to balance shorter appointment times, more documentation requirements and busier clinic schedules?

It’s estimated that 72 percent of patients get a majority of their health information online. With an abundance of biased and incorrect information on the internet, our responsibility as physicians has evolved from simply teaching patients about their health conditions to now include educating patients on where and how to find and identify reliable health information.

This premise goes back to why I use social media. We have a responsibility to share, or at the very least be cognizant of, reliable health information in the realm where our patients seek it. In the olden days that looked like an exam room; today it looks like a Google search.

Here are four ways to efficiently help ensure patients have the resources they need to find reliable health information, despite cramped clinic visits and time constraints.

Ask: How can you possibly know where patients find their information if you don’t ask? I have patients come in with birth plans all the time and quite frequently they’ve printed them out from a website with little-to-no additional research into the (often very specific) things they’ve requested. You can’t possibly know or understand their views unless you ask.
Take 2: I understand how limited our time is. I’m a resident with a busy clinic and short, often over-booked appointment slots, but taking two minutes to discuss reliable health information with your patients has great potential for improving patient care and decreasing un-needed visits and calls.
Prep: Have pre-written, condition-specific information for your patients and include curated links to additional reliable information for those who may want it. It’s as simple as a “dot-phrase” on most major EMR systems or a copy/paste file you can quickly email or print.
Encourage: Encourage your patients to take control of their health by being informed. Encourage them to ask questions and explain things back to you, so you’re certain they have a grasp on it. Encourage them to share what they’ve learned in their searches.

Danielle Jones, MD is a a fellow of The American Resident Project, where this post first appeared. Danielle went to college at Texas A&M University (Gig ‘Em Aggies!) and completed her medical school at Texas Tech. Dr. Jones is interested in fertility medicine, social media and health technology. Currently, Dr. Jones is an Ob/Gyn resident in Texas, where she lives with her husband, twin baby girls and three crazy dogs

What Twitter Tells Us about the War on Cancer

Jun 2, 2014• 1

By Brian Reid

The American Society of Clinical Oncology recently made public nearly all of the abstracts — more than 5,000 pieces of research — that were selected for the ASCO annual meeting, which kicked off in Chicago on the last day of May.

Sifting through those 5,000 abstracts would be an almost inhuman task: each abstract contains 2,000 characters. That’s 10 million characters of information about oncology created by experts that’s now available for the public to parse.

But as remarkable as the ASCO abstract drop is, that research is not the only overwhelming trove of communication on cancer created by doctors. One ASCO abstract (based on research by me and W2O colleagues Greg Matthews and Kayla Rodriguez) tells story of how, over the course of 2013, U.S. doctors tweeted about cancer 82,383 times. At 140 characters a tweet, that’s nearly 12 million characters.

We know there were 82,383 tweets because we counted them. Using our MDigitalLife database, which matches Twitter handles with verified profiles from the government’s physician database, we scanned all tweets by doctors for mentions of dozens of keywords associated with cancer over the course of calendar year 2013.

Personal Tech

May 29, 2014• 17

By ROB LAMBERTS, MD

My 87 year-old father broke his hip this past weekend. He was in Michigan for a party for his 101 year-old sister, and fell as he tried to put away her wheelchair. The good news is that he’s otherwise pretty healthy, so he should do fine.

Still, getting old sucks.

During the whole situation around his injury, surgery, and upcoming recovery, one thing became very clear: technology can really make things much easier:

I communicated with all of my siblings about what was going on and gave my “doctor’s perspective” to them via email.
I updated friends and other family members via Facebook.
I have used social media to communicate cousins about what is going to happen after he’s discharged from the hospital and coordinate our plans.

All in all, tech has really made things much easier.

This reality is in stark contrast to the recent headline I read on Medscape: “Doctors are Talking: EHRs Destroy the Patient Encounter.” The article talks about the use of scribes (a clerical person in the exam room, not a pal of the Pharisee) to compensate for the inefficiencies of the computer in the exam room. Physician reaction is predictable: most see electronic records as an intrusion of “big brother” into the exam room.

To me, the suggestion to use a scribe (increasing overhead by one FTE) to make the system profitable is ample evidence of EMR being anti-efficient.

Despite this, I continue to beat the drum for the use of technology as a positive force for health care improvement. In fact, I think that an increased use of tech is needed to truly make care better. Why do I do so, in face of the mounting frustrations of physicians with computerized records? Am I wrong, or are they?

Neither. The problem with electronic records is not with the tech itself, it is with the purpose of the medical record. Records are not for patient care or communication, they are the goods doctors give to the payors in exchange for money. They are the end-product of patient care, the product we sell. Doctors aren’t paid to give care, they are paid to document it. Electronic records simply make it so doctors can produce more documents in less time, complying with ever-increasingly complex rules for documentation.

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