We’ve been writing a lot about the case for mobile in healthcare over the past couple of years. And we’re going to keep writing about it. With one quarter of US adults turning to their mobiles for healthcare information, it’s important that the industry keeps pushing forward with innovative sites, apps and tools that will keep us at the top of our game and, in the end, be useful to the community at large.

To that end, exploring how to better accomplish this is always something we’re interested in. Which is why, on Thursday, January 26^th, some of the crew from Pixels & Pills will be at the BDI Mobile Healthcare Communications 2012 Case Studies and Roundtables.

About the Event:
Consumers and professionals are increasingly using their mobile devices for healthcare information. They are also interacting with healthcare providers and colleagues on their mobile phones. This conference will demonstrate the best case studies of how major healthcare brands are connecting with consumers and professionals through mobile communications.

Speakers and Roundtable Moderators:
Meighan Berberich, Vice President, Marketing, BlogTalkRadio
Lance Hill, CEO, Within3
Scott Hopkins, Executive Vice President, Anderson Direct Marketing
Monique Levy, Vice President, Research, Manhattan Research
Dr. Katherine Malbon, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Division of Adolescent Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital
Talya Miron-Shatz, PhD, Marketing Department, Wharton, University of Pennsylvania
Jenna Mons, Consumer Product Manager for LAP-BAND®, Allergan
Mario Nacinovich, Jr., Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Communication in Healthcare; Managing Director, AXON
Xavier Petit, Shire
John Vieira, Daiichi-Sankyo
Date: Thursday, January 26, 2012
Time: 8:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Place: The Graduate Center of The City University of NY; 365 5th Ave; NY, NY 10016

For additional information, including registration, please click here to visit the event website. Use promo code P&P for a discounted rate of $175.

Hotel Sponsor: Hotel 373 is the official hotel of BDI’s events. Click here to receive a discounted rate

Sponsors:
PR Newswire; Within3; Anderson Direct Marketing; BioCrowd ; Cinchcast; Journal of Communication in Healthcare; Manhattan Research; New York University; Pixels and Pills; Public Relations Society of America – New York Chapter; Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development

by Russ Ward (@russcward)

Can science be crowdsourced? Can medicine take advantage of the knowledge of the masses to leapfrog to advances? Can we use social media tools to cure disease?

These are (increasingly specific) questions about the utility of digitally shared intelligence to improve healthcare – sometimes called “citizen science” (similar to “citizen journalism”). While nobody is nominating Mark Zuckerberg for the Nobel Prize just yet, there are definitely signs that social science is paying off. Here are three.

Where it all began: SETI@home

The idea of taking computer power possessed by the multitudes and combining it for science probably dates back to SETI@home, a program first offered to the public in 1999 to donate their superfluous computing power to the search for intelligent life. Still active, the program works by distributing telescope data out for analysis.

Procrastination for science: Foldit

One of the original and best-known examples of crowdsourced medical science is the Foldit project. It takes the complex process of genome folding, and turns it into an online game. If human players can best computers in figuring out biologically “winning” solutions, this can not only provide immediately faster answers, but can also help researchers teach computers those strategies in order to keep improving the pace of their work – whether assisted by computer or volunteer.

Global symptomatology: Health Tracking Network

While SETI@home and Foldit use crowdsourcing in a more detached fashion, using individuals’ resources to solve scientific puzzles, Health Tracking Network asks for your help by sharing your own medical information. High-level information about your cold or flu symptoms will, they hope, allow better predictions and tracking of these viruses and their paths.

There are certainly many naysayers for crowdsourcing in medicine – including this post by John Mack last year, in which he points out the risks associated with having patients “review” their treatments.

However, there are other examples in which citizen science has sped up the time for experiments to be conducted (including this study on tuberculosis).

To me, the difference is an important one. On the one hand, exploiting volunteer or inexpensive human aptitude for completing small nonlinear tasks rapidly can clearly be efficient and effective. On the other hand, relying on anonymous opinions for quality analysis may not be such a great idea – but I don’t think that’s news to anyone who’s been within ten feet of the internet.

Are you working on any projects that harness the power of the people – be they your clients, your patients, your healthcare professionals, or the public at large – to make medical science advance more rapidly, discover more broadly, treat more accurately or predict more closely?

At ePharma Summit 2011, in February, Thomas Goetz, Executive Editor of WIRED Magazine, discussed how technology can help people make better decisions about their health, and explains the concept of Information with Feeling, or I.W.F., as a way to communicate messages more efficiently through good design.

Did we see this happen? Is the best yet to come?

by Sven Larsen

Twenty-three years ago, World AIDS Day dedicated the first of December to focusing attention on the fight against the disease: raising awareness, fighting to lower infection rates and boost survival rates, and honor those who have been part of the fight.

On a personal level, you can more about World AIDS Day and how you can help by becoming an educator, an advocate, a champion or simply an informed person.

On a professional level, check out what Gregg Fischer told our Sarah McLellen in July about LBI Health’s multi-year “Fight HIV Your Way” photo contest for Bristol-Myers Squibb. As he said, the idea is to connect and honor people with HIV – the end goal being to help them overcome stigma, to have the courage to tell their stories and ensure that they get the best care they can.

Every year the theme of the day is different, though the past several years have had the same overarching theme, with a different angle on it each year. The last few years have been dedicated to “Stop AIDS. Keep the Promise”, but this year begins a five-year cycle focused on “Getting to Zero”.

Think back: when the first World AIDS Day was taking place, fewer than eight million people around the world were HIV positive. AZT was only a year old. Children with AIDS were told they’d have to stay inside a glass enclosure in order to go to school. The government, for the first and only time, mailed a disease-education pamphlet to every citizen. Understanding was low, fear was high; perceptions and medicine were both colored by fright and ignorance.

Today, some 33 million people are HIV+, and 30 million people have died.

The numbers aren’t all negative. The quantity of new infections is finally shrinking, and a person infected with HIV who receives prompt antiretroviral treatment may have a life expectancy of another 32 years.

But of those 33 million people, only 5.2 million of them are receiving treatment anywhere like that – a statistic that explains the “Getting to Zero” theme of 2011’s World AIDS Day: the goal of achieving zero AIDS-related deaths. As the organizers point out, however, this is not merely a case of getting access to one drug or (if one existed) vaccine. Rather, it’s a myriad of goals, related not only to treatment but also to the facets of prevention that come many years before an actual infection: Improving access to clean water. Education (particularly of women). Safety. Employment.

How can we “celebrate” World AIDS Day today?

I plan to do it by asking myself – and asking you – these two questions:

• What can you do in the developing world to improve those facets of people’s life?
• What can you do in the developed world to raise awareness of these needs and help to focus resources against them?

Please leave your comments below.

by Dennis Portello

Everywhere you turn, a wave of seemingly ever-accelerating technology changes impact our world. From computers to communications, from basic research to go-to-market products, technology has increased productivity and, most would argue, increased our standard of living.

Against that backdrop – not to mention the backdrop of individual lives, full of smartphones, computers, iPads and cars with more computing power than the systems guiding the first moon launch, it’s easy to forget a basic fact:  Not everyone has access to this range of cool technology.

In fact, if you’re reading this on a computer, you’re in the minority, globally speaking. Accessing content on a smartphone? You’re in an even smaller group.

That’s a crucial point in the global healthcare market, where many of the biggest challenges lie in developing nations – places where GDP per capita won’t support basic sanitation or nutrition, much less a new iPhone.

Technology works in healthcare, supporting and providing positive patient outcomes. So what are the leading technologies being adapted for the developing world?

Cheap tablets and computers: On October 5, India launched the world’s cheapest tablet, the Aakash, priced as low as $35. Similarly, One Laptop Per Child‘s XO and Intel’s Classmate PC share a common mission:  Bringing children access to education through computer ownership. Both programs distribute laptops to schoolchildren across the developing world. These efforts are targeted at students and the general populace, but they also present enormous opportunities, both for devices loaded with appropriate software to inexpensively aid medical professionals in the developing world, and for health-related communications to a newly connected population.

Cheap mobile phones: Today, mobile phones are as inexpensive as $15. With more than 5 billion mobile phone subscribers and 90 percent of the world’s population covered by a cell signal, lowering the cost of mobile communications can provide a lifeline to hundreds of millions of people with no access to traditional landline communications. One company sees this as a way to change global healthcare: Medic Mobile is focusing on the lowly text message as a way to change how patients and doctors interact. Can low-tech SMS programs revolutionize global health? The key is ubiquity: In sub-Saharan Africa, for an example, 50 percent of people now have access to a cellphone. Within two years, if not sooner, that figure will jump to 100 percent. No other form of communications technology comes close.

Cheaper sanitation: Keep people’s food and water clean, and you’ll solve a lot of health issues. So it should be no surprise that technology is driving down the cost of sanitation. India’s Tata Chemical has released an affordable – at around $21 – water filter that needs no electricity, yet purifies water to U.S. EPA standards. Although new and not yet pervasive, the filters address an enormous problem: Advocacy group water.org reports that one billion people don’t have access to clean water, and 2.5 billion people don’t have improved sanitation.

If these advances sound a bit like something out of science fiction, then take comfort in the fact that we’ve been here before. From the first vaccines to the first X-ray machines, first MRI devices and first genome sequencing, the march of healthcare has been the story of advances aided by technology. And, at each step along the way, there have been parallel efforts to try and make these technologies more mainstream and less expensive so they can also aid the developing world.

by Krissy Goelz (@krisgoelz)

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the healthiest one of all?

Imagine if looking in the mirror could reveal more than just the lines on your face or the state of your hair. What if the mirror was magic and could know what medications you needed to take or whether your blood sugar might be low? Wouldn’t it be great if we could improve our health just by looking in the mirror? While that may sound like a scene straight from The Jetsons, that vision could soon become a reality thanks to Magic Mirror technology.

Created by researchers from the New York Times R&D lab, the Magic Mirror combines voice recognition and motion sensing technology with an RFID tag reader. The technology is actually a computer with a reflective surface, creating an interactive information center in the privacy of an individual’s restroom.

How can the Magic Mirror improve health care?

It can keep patients on track– Forget missing doctor appointments or failing to remember to schedule your next mammogram. A calendaring application is available via a touch screen right on the mirror (watch out for finger smudges!) and can help people remember to keep their scheduled appointments, set up a visit with their health care practitioner or take their medication as prescribed.

It puts detailed information about prescriptions at a patient’s fingertips – Forget late night calls to the neighborhood pharmacy to determine drug interactions or to ask if your medication needs to be taken with food. Putting a prescription bottle or OTC medication tagged with an RFID chip on the mirror’s small ledge displays information about the drug such as when and how it should be taken, potential side effects, the prescribing physician’s name and other pertinent details.

It can encourage healthy choices – Not only can virtual technology help users “try on” clothes or visualize different hair colors and style, it can also point to other body issues such as weight gain. Unlike a regular mirror that just reveals your problem areas, the Magic Mirror can pinpoint where weight gain occurred and connect it to potential health concerns. The mirror can also be used by marketers to deliver healthy tips or coupons to inspire purchase.

It helps people stay current with news and events – Most people don’t talk about reading in the bathroom, but it often is a sanctuary for interrupted time used to educate or entertain. With the Magic Mirror, they can get alerts about drug recalls or access breaking news about health trends, prescriptions and more. The NY Times API enables it to deliver its own content such as blog posts, articles and videos, perpetuating anywhere, anytime access to information.

While the technology is still in prototype phase and its general availability has yet to be announced, it’s likely to be affordable with it hits the stores. Reflecting on the way technology has advanced, it’s only a matter of time until the Magic Mirror shows itself on the home front.

by Briana Campbell (@MsMatchGirl)

Here’s the question: How do we help people get healthy and stay healthy?

With all the information that’s available, you’d think it would be a no brainer, right? There are warning labels and public service announcements and calories posted at point of purchase. Yet, people seem not to care. When, for instance, was the last time you heeded the calorie count when popping in for a doughnut? And you smokers (I know there are a few of you reading this), do you read the warning label on that pack of cigarettes? I didn’t think so.

The fact of the matter is that it’s hard to get people to change their habits. And whether it is about sticking to a diet, following a physical therapy regimen, or giving up a bad habit, it’s just not human nature to be so easily changed.

Here’s where we start talking about gamification.

We see gamification entering the marketing landscape in so many instances; it would be ludicrous to believe that it wouldn’t touch those working in the health space. In fact, it’s quite possible that this is an instance where those other marketers can take a glance at our community and find some inspiration to push themselves forward

Yes. We know it’s a buzzword. And we know you’re probably so over it. But, lacking better verbiage, lets talk about how game mechanics can help people with just these problems.

A while back, Buster Benson launched Health Month. I actually remember this, as I had a couple of friends participating. And I remember thinking it seemed pretty silly. Being a self-sufficient and stoic New Englander, joining my friends in a healthy living, no cocktails, exercising game didn’t seem like anything I would want anything to do with. Apparently, a lot of people did. People lost weight and lowered cholesterol levels. They quit smoking and stayed quitters. They, for the most part, got healthier. And Health Month is still going strong. In fact, as we spend more and more time living in online communities, maybe it’s stronger.

Which brings us to something I heard about on On The Media quite recently, Superbetter. It “is specifically designed to create “gameful” incentives to help people recuperate physically and emotionally from injury.” On The Media Correspondent Alex Goldman decided to play along for six weeks, while recovering from a traumatic injury sustained while on his bicycle, and blog about it. Superbetter looks like a really meaningful way to recover, but looking at Goldman’s blog, it also looks like it takes a lot of work.

Here’s the thing I didn’t get when I watched my friends jump on the Health Month bandwagon all those years ago – humans, as social animals, are only boosted by the support of others. And, that support can be competitive of nature. Playing against yourself, your colleague or your friend, it pushes you to do more. To work harder. To be better.

We know we’ve just scratched the surface here. Is there a gaming platform that you see leading the way when it comes to helping people to lead healthier lives? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn of THINKHealth talks about the digital skill sets required to change health related behavior and how the Fast Forward film festival addresses those topics.

Joe Hogan of Epion Health talks about putting tablets at the point of care at Digital Pharma East 2011.

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn (@healthythinker) talks about how macro and microeconomics affect people’s attitudes towards healthcare.