By Paul Hudson, FACHE
ACUTE CARE’s Chief Operating Officer
From The Jacksonville Business Journal:
The Internet in its infancy, or 1.0, was all about accessing information. Think WebMD. But where Web 2.0 describes the onslaught of user-generated content like Wikipedia or Yahoo Answers, Health 2.0 is defined by the use of social software and its ability to promote collaboration between patients and the rest of the medical industry. Having a company Web site is so five years ago.
Social media — the umbrella term for blogs, social networks, photo video and podcasts, and other user-generated mediums — is the new era. And the possibilities are seemingly endless.
At ACUTE CARE, we’ve been active participants in the evolution of “Web 2.0”, with a longstanding presence in blogs, Flickr and listerservs, and recent forays into Twitter and LinkedIn. As for Facebook, there’s a poll up on our blog asking for your opinion on that issue.
Social Media, The Early Years
Over the years we have used our website, http://www.acutecare.com, as a platform of exploration of various tools to encourage interaction, feedback and collaboration. We experimented with embedded chat rooms, feedback forms for suggestions and comments, and a repository of Adobe Acrobat PDF copies of white papers on a variety of subjects available as downloads.
With the exception of the chat rooms, all of the foregoing persist as integrated elements of a recently updated website. Another early experiment lives on outside the boundaries of our website, two Yahoo! Groups communities that support Iowa Emergency Medical Services (EMS) and Emergency Physicians. The IowaEMS group (http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/IowaEMS/) is still quite active, with 118 members as of this writing. It serves principally as a listserv, which Wikipedia defines this way: LISTSERV was the first electronic mailing list software application, consisting of a set of email addresses for a group in which the sender can send one email and it will reach a variety of people.
When it comes to blogs (again, from Wikipedia: A blog (a contraction of the term “web log”) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.), ACUTE CARE was an “early adopter. We’ve been blogging since May of 2005. As with the Yahoo! Groups, we practice what we preach when it comes to the advantages of outsourcing and, having had the blog hosted by Blogger (and after it was bought out by Google, at that site), our blog is now hosted by WordPress and now can be found at http://acutecareinc.wordpress.com/. The blog features a sampling of the digital photos (our “photostream”) posted at Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/16498207@N02/).
Current Experiments with Web 2.0
As noted above, the blog (entitled “Non-Urban Emergency Medicine”) serves as the core element of ACUTE CARE’s social media strategy. I use Google Reader, Google Alerts, Twitter, and e-mail distribution lists to gather information that pertains to our practice and, after sifting through the accumulated data to find that which I believe would be of interest to our audience, after which I post (blog) that information to our weblog. As of this writing, that’s happened 2,316 times, which I suppose qualifies as “prolific”. The Google Reader (and a variety of other similar tools) allows me to subscribe to a wide variety of RSS feeds (from Google: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are a way for websites to distribute new content as it becomes available. Think of an RSS feed as a file that contains a blog or website’s most recent entries. By subscribing to a site’s feed in Reader, you will automatically be notified when that website contains new posts or entries. Instead of checking sites repeatedly for updates, RSS feeds bring your favorite websites to you!) There is a subscription button on our blog that allows you to subscribe to our RSS feed, our you can enter our address or title into your reader to subscribe that way.
I’m getting the impression that blogs are fading in favor of Twitter, so we signed up for an account at the “micro-blogging”site (http://twitter.com/acutecareinc) and have enabled “publicize” on the blog so that my posts are turned into “tweets” on Twitter. As noted above, I follow a number of Twitter accounts as sources of information, and have been impressed with the timely dissemination of interesting news and opinion.
We’re also experimenting with LinkedIn, which has been characterized as “Facebook for professionals”. I maintain an account at http://www.linkedin.com/in/paulbhudson (which includes a feed from our blog and a link to our website) and we’re participating in LinkedIn’s beta testing of company profiles with an ACUTE CARE account at http://www.linkedin.com/companies/acute-care-inc.
Which brings us to Facebook. We’ve not as yet joined this site, the largest social network in the world, with over 300 million users, but the doing so is under discussion. In true “Web 2.0” fashion, we’re seeking input from our stakeholders. We want to know what you think. You can take part in a poll on our blog about this decision, leave a comment about this post when I post it to the blog, leave feedback using a form on the website (http://www.acutecare.com/about_us/contact_us.php), send me a “tweet” on Twitter, “PM me” via e-mail at paulh@acutecare.com, phone me at 800.729.7813 (how about using Google Voice?), or even talk to me, or any other member of our team, in person.
For all this talk of Social Media, we promise to maintain our commitment to frequent on site interpersonal communication and an open line of communication with you, our partners in the provision of quality Emergency Medicine services.
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