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Can Social Networking Change the Face of Public Health?

Submitted by John Geraci on 20 March 2009 - 5:53pm to DIYcity Main Group.

DIYcity's new app SickCity is on Daily Kos today, under the question "can social networking change the face of public health?" My answer to that is it can, it must, and it will.

Why? Because the costs of public health mandate it. Costs of basic health services are already too high, never mind adding new services to the mix. Meanwhile, mining data that is out on the web, ready to be mined, is so cheap as to be essentially free (it has cost us no money so far to build SickCity, just a few dollars out of pocket).

So, in order to grow, become better, and not break the government bank, public health will need to start considering smart, cost-effective alternatives for services, and they will eventually look to using openly accessible data, data of all sorts - including social network data.

The SickCity team, btw, now has a statistician on board, looking over the algorithm to see how we can make the service more accurate. Version 1 works well in a very rough sense - how well can we make version 2 work, with someone who actually knows this stuff?

Stay tuned!

22 Mar22:59

pictures!

By caroline zeller

Hi ! this is an amazing website, and would love to see some pictures!

23 Mar16:29

The uninsured

By cfigallo

I've been working on a project to increase capacity for free clinics to serve the growing ranks of uninsured Americans. Most clinics make minimal use of any kind of networking tools or practices. If hospitals could more easily refer uninsured ER patients to local clinics, it would make financial sense of hospitals to spend a small fraction of what they lose on unpaid ER bills in subsidizing clinics. Also, volunteer doctors could leverage their expertise by offering some of their expertise through social apps. Something tells me we aren't going to get universal care anytime soon.

28 Mar19:20

nice, but not entirely original

By eysenbach

There are a couple of other researchers working in this field.

See

Eysenbach G
Infodemiology and Infoveillance: Framework for an Emerging Set of Public Health Informatics Methods to Analyze Search, Communication and Publication Behavior on the Internet
J Med Internet Res 2009;11(1):e11
URL: http://www.jmir.org/2009/1/e11

28 Mar19:45

Maybe not original to you

By cfigallo

...but thanks for the reference to the study. Very interesting.

I agree, this is a pretty obvious win if clinic staff can afford the equipment and find the time to save themselves time.

I'm not an academic, so am looking for toward practical application and implementation.

Stay cool.

29 Mar16:16

re: nice but not entirely original

By John Geraci

Thanks for the link, that looks interesting and very relevant.

I think the important thing is not whether one is entirely original, but whether one is effective in bringing about change. There will always be prior arts in any effort, and seeing that others are working on the same problems as you is just confirmation that you are working on something worthwhile. So the more the merrier.

Will have a closer look at that paper, thanks for posting.