Social networking, popularized by teens sharing information with their friends online on Web sites such as Facebook or Myspace, may now come to healthcare sooner than you think. For a variety of reasons, social networking has been slower to take off in the healthcare world. Physicians typically have less time to devote to socializing online and are willing to do so only if they believe they are getting a unique benefit from the site. And patients have been reluctant to share too much information about their personal lives. But this is changing.
Two new websites are leading the way. One for MDs, Sermo, providing physicians with a platform to ask for advice, discuss cases and share knowledge; and the other one targeted to patients, Patients like me, providing patients with the same disease the opportunity to share their experiences and learn from others.
The need is obvious, but what makes me feel still a bit uncomfortable is their business model. Many of the new services are free to members. Revenue usually comes from advertising or charging third parties the access to data and member discussions. Sermo, for example, wants to charge $100,000 to $150,000 a year to pharma companies and nonmedical businesses like hedge funds, which will use it to research such things as how doctors feel about new drugs. They can monitor online discussions, with the doctors' names omitted, or see topics being discussed on the site -- like a new medical device or a controversial cancer treatment -- to determine what's rising or falling in popularity. It is a bit early to tell, but to me this business model makes sense.
Having said that, I’ve seen a lot of social networking models making sense but failing in the long run. We’ll see.
Electronic identities will be crucial as well for these new portals to fly. Social networking portals in healthcare, especially those who involve physicians, will need to make sure their members are who they say they are. Healthcare, at the end of the day, is a trust related business.
You can watch here a great video that I discovered while reading JJF’s excellent blog, Salud y Gestion, where the CEO’s of both companies discuss their potential.
Social networking, popularized by teens sharing information with their friends online on Web sites such as Facebook or Myspace, may now come to healthcare sooner than you think.
1 comments:
Facebook and Orkut are two of the most popular social networking sites. Both of them offer very similar features and capabilities.If we compare Facebook vs. Orkut.com from a market share perspective then it will show you that both are considerably behind MySpace with Facebook owning just over 11.5% of the market share and Orkut having less than 1%. Facebook has become very popular in North America over the last few months whereas Orkut is extremely popular in India.
Many people prefer Facebook to orkut as Facebook is a much more professional looking whereas Orkut looks somewhat unfinished,Facebook's Mini Feed feature is useful in seeing a quick snapshot on the latest happenings within your network,the ease at which you can customize layouts within FaceBook, especially the drag and drop option,the ability to supply how you know a person (through school, other friends, work, randomly, etc). This is especially interesting when you and one your contacts know the same person, but through different ways. Creating profiles in such websites for my business hotels, budget hotels, holiday packages is happening good in Alexa traffic details.
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