Health Carrots - Requiring Social Media Participation

If you didn’t catch it last week, there is a great article in Time about a Cleveland Clinic based health prevention/promotion program and its implications on the future of health care and reimbursement.  Reading through it, I had an epiphany on the sustainability dilemma of social media.

Sustainability is a real concern with social media.  In a previous blog, I mentioned the ‘great’ Quicken community as a point of differentiation from other financial platforms and a potential model for increasing engagement within Intel Health Guide.  The only problem:  it shows Quicken has not been able to sustain aspects of community participation, making it a great theoretical model, not a practical one.

Sustainability certainly has two sides.  A company needs to keep their community of customers engaged – and remain committed to offering/maintaining an environment that is worth engaging in.  For the later need, I’ll quickly reference Patricio Robles’s blog at Econsultancy.  I’ll peer through that lens in a future blog.

How might heath care entities keep their communities of customers (e.g., patients, physicians, office staff) engaged?  One great motivator is to require the community members to return!

Early in the Time article we read that Renee Turner is given the opportunity to participate in what sounds like a great health prevention/promotion program – for FREE.  The only catch – all she has to do, “is show up.”  Just take that one step further and require her and all other participants to track their progression, and share their stories, through an integrated social media platform.

What makes this even more enticing is the amount of data available to enhance the interaction that can occur in a virtual community that runs in parallel with day to day activities.  Cleveland Clinic presents a dream state of eHealth:

Nearly all of the 5.5 million patients who have passed through the clinic's doors since it opened in 1921 now have a digital health record, and this electronic paper trail is an ideal partner to prevention. The hospital's patient-record system, MyChart, is synched with Google Health and Microsoft's HealthVault to give patients the ability to upload important health information directly from devices such as scales, home blood-pressure monitors and glucometers, which measure blood sugar. That allows patients to track their progress and also helps doctors see whether treatments are working. Doctors and patients can also communicate better digitally, without the need for appointments.

With all of that data, folks like Renee can share their progress with friends and family across the nation, get into health competition with other participants (think Biggest Loser Club), and get or give that extra push of motivation through virtual support groups and forums.

Now bring in the health care professionals – after the program ends, they currently keep in touch with weekly e-mails of tips to keep past participants committed to newfound health habits.  Are we allowed to say emails are so ‘90s?  If past participants are ‘required’ to continue returning to a virtual community (for cash, or steep discounts on health foods and services), why not enrich their ongoing interaction with physicians in a far more engaging and scalable means?

Now, for non-Cleveland Clinic employees, the Lifestyle 180 program costs $1,500. The article notes that, “Some local companies have started to pick up the tab.”  Have them pick up the tab while requiring participants to maintain certain levels of engagement in a community – and one-half of the sustainability problem is solved.

Would it be draconian to offer ‘free’ wellness programs that require a level of social media engagement?  I can’t wait to hear your thoughts.

Cheers - Eric A Siegmann