Interactive/Social Media Insights

Marc Danziger is attending the MW HIMSS conference October 23 -24 “Virtual Healthcare: Keeping IT Real.“ He is co-presenting with Revere customer, Florida Hospital – Setting Healthcare IT Strategy in a Web 2.0 World. In 2007 Florida Hospital engaged The Revere Group to assist in the implementation of their portal strategy and requirements. Web 2.0 in the healthcare industry is growing at an incredible momentum and is predicated on the emergence of tools that enable interaction and communication in ways that simply were not possible a few years ago. Florida Hospital is well underway in implementing Web 2.0 strategies throughout their organization. We are proud and honored to work with such an esteemed healthcare organization.

The social networking landscape is vast and limitless from networking for patients – patientslikeme.com to networking for doctors – sermo.com; and incorporating health-related videos, as some hospitals are doing, on YouTube, and the addition of podcasts, blogs and wikis on their own corporate websites as well as related healthcare sites. There are many opportunities to share, be heard and stay informed. We welcome your comments, your experience, and engaging healthcare and web 2.0 questions and insights.

Yesterday, I was on a blogger’s conference call with Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen, who discussed the efforts by the Coast Guard to use social media tools both as ways to improve internal communication and management and to improve communication between the Coast Guard and it’s stakeholders.

I’ve had some exposure to the military’s adoption of commercial tools like IM, blogging and wiki within secure military networks, but it was interesting to hear the guy at the top of the command chain say things like this:

If you look at the recent coordination in our response to Hurricane Ike, I knew from my own experience as the principal federal official in Hurricane Katrina that we can only be effective to the extent that we empower our leaders on scene and make what they are doing visible to senior leaders without endless routing of information through echelons.

To that extent, we empowered Admiral Papp as the Atlantic Area commander to coordinate directly as the lead operational responder. And to the extent that he needed resources from Pacific Area, they actually coordinated that between themselves without any Coast Guard headquarters intervention, which is probably a first for a major operation.

That said, what they are doing has to be visible to us and using things like chat rooms among senior leaders at the same time we’re using conference calls to using all the modern IT tools we have within the Coast Guard suite to simultaneously make all senior leaders aware of the situation and the operational picture down there is what we’ve got to do. And we should endlessly restless and curious about new ways to do that and flatten the organization.

…it’s everywhere.

Welcome to my first post blogging on the Revere website. I’m the National Competency Leader for Web 2.0 and Community at Revere, which means that I evangelize within Revere and to our clients about these tools, and I work with clients to strategize and deliver solutions based on them.

More of my professional background is on my LinkedIn profile.

I’ve been blogging for quite some time in my private life, and it’s an interesting thing to see it become a part of my job as well. In the last year, I’ve noted a similar inflection point as the discussions I’ve had with my colleagues and our clients has shifted from “Why would I do that?” to “How do we do that?” - which I do take to be a positive change. Read more…