By: Lloyd Jacobson, HOUmanitarian
HOUSTON – Earlier this month, the fifth annual Health Care Technology Conference, hosted by Baylor College of Medicine’s Teen Health Clinic (BTHC), showed Houston the face of some emerging health care promotion and record keeping. Created with the goal of the providing a space for professionals to receive updates on the effectiveness and evaluation of new technology for patient education, and communication, the two-day conference featured many local and national presenters offering a variety of interesting innovations.
Perhaps the most interesting speakers and presenters though came from a couple of new social media campaigns, each set-up by national nonprofits seeking to present a new image before their target audience concerning public health. Larry Swaider from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy presented a new collaboration with the AdCouncil called Bedsider.
This web and traditional media campaign uses humorous public service announcements to drive users to a comprehensive website of resources and information. Developed in response to a problem among 19 to 29 year-olds, who were often outside the scope of traditional teen prevention messaging, the organization (informed by extensive field study and interviews) developed a edgy, yet honest, campaign to reach people in an way that doesn’t come off as preachy, and always stays engaging. All of which is designed to drive users to the campaign’s website, where it provides information and resources where young adults can obtain contraceptives and further information.
Love is Respect
In a similar social media vein, Christina Escobar & Brian Pinero offered a presentation on Love is Respect, a campaign and peer support network created by the Austin-based National Dating Abuse Hotline. This effort seeks to educate youth about proper limits in relationships by using a form of peer social-norming online, combined with counseling via text messaging. Using their website, and other social media, they allow many youth to advice and communicate with one another what are the appropriate bounds and limits in their relationships. Thus providing an influential supplement to what had previously been a traditional 1-800-helpline staffed by trained counselors.
Gamification & Mobile
“Gamification” was another area explored at the conference, in a presentation by Michael Ferguson, of Ayogo. This company seeks to utilize gaming as a means of raising health awareness, and inspire people to act on the messaging offline. With games for adults, like Diabesties, or for kids, such as Monster Manor, Ayogo is helping people of all ages monitor health conditions like obesity and diabetes using educational games that also function as peer monitoring apps one can share or play with family or friends. Many of these new games focus on motivating users to take charge of their health given the fact others will be monitoring their progress, and/or will be competing with one another each day, to see who has exercised the most, or has the maintained the blood glucose scores, etc.
A host of other speakers at the conference included Rachel Kachur, from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, who provided an update on web-based technologies for health promotion. Matt Hendricks from Pharmica Consulting, talked about emerging and current smartphone and tablet apps for Health. And Shannon Vogel of Texas Medical Association and Alissa Light of Minnesota based Family Tree Clinic both spoke on electronic health record systems for health clinics and hospitals.
While the conference’s theme is open for a vast array of technology in health care promotion and coordination, obviously social media is playing a more critical role in supporting the sphere’s goals of health prevention. And its seems a smart bet that it will grow there for some years to come, as it reaches youth so well, and can be done in very engaging ways.