New Media Med Blog

The Irish Times just did a article on the online community which New Media Med built for University College Cork. The online community called “Lose the Blues” is aimed at students experiencing depressive symptoms. The website is designed specifically for 18-24 year olds, who may be experiencing low moods. The community allows users to share their experience and offer peer support to each other within a safe environment.

The website was developed by Aine Horgan, and is part of a research study being undertaken at UCC by Ms Horgan and supported by Dr John Sweeney and Prof Geraldine McCarthy in the School of Nursing and Midwifery. The aim of the research is to see if the website can help improve one’s mood.

By building this online community,  New Media Med gives UCC complete control over their own data which was very important to ensure a safe environment. Having all the data also allows UCC to produce the reports needed for their research. New Media Med provides all the infrastructure for reliable trusted online communities where you control your own data.

The Leaving Cert Paper is Ireland’s paper based final examination in second level education. On Wednesday, 30 pupils saw the following day’s paper for less than 1 minute due to a very unfortunate error. By the power of social networking,  the majority of students in the country had vital information on an upcoming exam  by 4 o’clock in the afternoon. The word got to the Department of Education by 4 o’clock and they had to postpone the exam. This caused a logistical nightmare for getting thousands of new exam papers out.

Ireland’s 18 year olds are digital natives, they turn to the mobile phone and social networking when they want to communicate so it was a very simple exercise in viral dissemination of information. In contrast, the Department of Education is paper based so it caused a logistical nightmare for them.

It proves to me that the pace of expansion of social networking in healthcare will be driven by digital natives not by changes in government policy. Health Services need to embrace social networking for dealing with all sorts of issues which affect young people such as depression, anorexia, epilepsy, drug addiction and sexual harrassment.

The bebo generation is here and on a mobile phone near you!

I read recently in The Irish Times about the  study done by Dr Dylan Evans lecturer in behavioural science at UCC  School of Medicine which showed that people who paid more for drugs felt better.  

It made me realise that the huge unpredictability of people’s behaviour when it comes to complying with the medication or treatment which they have been recommended by their doctor.   Only about 50% of people with long term conditions adhere to the medication recommended by their doctor. While it’s easy to stick to a treatment which relieves pain because our body is screaming at us to take the medication, most conditions and treatments are not like that.  As an example, losing weight is the treatment which most doctors recomend for a whole host of conditions from heart disease to diabetes.  Weight Watchers has been successful because you lose weight with a group of your peers and basic behavioural drivers such as peer pressure, embarrassment and competition motivate people to stay on the wagon. The group therapy practiced by Alcoholics Anonymous and many other addiction drug treatment programs is another example.

Social media approaches such as facebook have huge potential for medication adherence. Social media is already spreading like wildfire for healthcare. There are thousands of facebook and ning support groups for mental illness, epilepsy, weight loss. What may seem new to anoyone over 40 is becoming normal life for the rising generation. 

I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has used social media to help with medication adherence.

Hi

We’ve developed a patients’ social networking community using ning and we are putting together an application to have it approved by the ethics committee in the hospital. It will be a closed community which is only accessible to those who suffer from a particular condition and are being treated in a particular hospital. 

I recently completed the application for the hospital ethics committee so I thought I’d share how I did it for anyone else who is going through the same process of getting a social networking site approved by a hospital ethics committee.

Here are some guidelines:

In order to complete the application to the hospital ethics committee we had to submit a research protocol which describes exactly what the pilot study would do. It needed to include our methods of observation and what analysis we would do. I found a useful document on writing a research protocol in here.
It covers all the possible ethical considerations so it was useful as a checklist for all the possible issues which might arise in the review with the ethics committee

Also I drew on past studies of the use of social networking sites in healthcare situations:

Learning from e-patients at Massachusetts General Hospital

An Online Communication Tool Alters the Way Patients Find Information

Here are recommendations for running a healthcare forum

For anyone else going through the same process these are very useful resources.