Oh so healthy social media
Jinfo Blog

By Joanna Ptolomey

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In the UK a packet of cigarettes or tobacco carries a message that smoking can kill – yes the public health messages are that blunt.  Yet two thirds of smokers start before the age of 18 and many will be never be able to give up even although they many want to.  Why is that so?

Complex socioeconomic reasons play their part in public health campaigns and stark information warnings do not seem to solve the issue.  A few years back I was involved in a different way to inform young people via social media platforms and community empowerment. The DMYST campaign was an anti-tobacco campaign, not anti-smoking – let people discover the truth behind the tobacco industry and make their own minds up.  It was the early years of social media but the initial findings and health outcomes of the city projects were positive.

Move forward a couple of years and the Twittersphere and the world of apps has become the norm to most of us.  I could fill LiveWire pages with reams and reams of apps in the healthcare sector – it is a booming market.  But with people’s health at risk what evidence is there of value of use?

Last Friday, on the weekly healthcare social media tweetup Europe (#hcsmeu), one of the questions was specific to adherence of medication.  For example would a SMS text remind you to take your medication or not smoke tobacco, and even if it did would it still lead to a successful health outcome in the longer term?  As I mentioned in my last VIP post content still needs context.

Clinicians hope that mobile health apps will also help with the continual tracking of patient data and lead to more useful evidence for delivering better health outcomes.  Not only are observations of daily living collected but condition specific data, the plan being that creating a more accurate picture should allow for better communication between the engaged patient and clinician.  Some see this as the future of clinical studies.  Note the word "engaged" – like any other sector this is important to a successful outcome.

I have been following the idea of disease tracking for some time now, and with a friend seriously ill in a coma some 18 months ago with Swine Flu (now well recovered), I thought apps could help with the tracking of infectious diseases and provide further real-time clues for scientists.  Geolocation tagging has been a great innovation in finding and managing information of all types, the recent FUMSI article, the ALISS engine and managing long term health conditions, uses geolocation tools too.  

Bringing this bang up to date, the April 2011 Cambridge University report on mHealth considers that applications are not only numerous but diverse in the healthcare market.  So could a mobile phone app to track how people behave during an epidemic limit the disease spread?  The evidence looks promising and it helps to target and measure the effectiveness of public health messages too (a key variable).

Healthcare is no different to any other sector – social media and apps are big business.  There are some promising signs of evidence to support apps and social media improving health outcomes but it is patchy at best.  Let’s hope the seeds take, there could be great return for our healthy future. 

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