“There are surely no better people in this world than locals who find themselves at home.” –(Me)

Guess what? I’ve suspected it for a while, but now I know. For me, local is still king. I recently found a stellar blog on pregnancy by Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center here in Toronto. And it made me more happy than another hospital social media success story in XYZ city ever could.

Look at Toronto in this picture. Look at Sunnybrook. We may be tiny, square, and pink, but with this blog, the pink thing has the Mother’s Touch. That’s something to smile about, I think!

“Mother’s Touch”

Mother’s Touch follows two mommys-to-be (both due in Fall 2010) on their pregnancy journey, with all the posts written by the mommys themselves. So far, they’ve tackled topics ranging from what to do with ballooning breasts, to the big reveal of the gender of Andrea’s baby (I won’t spoil the surprise ). It’s a darling endeavor by a hospital that, along with Bloorview Kids Rehab and Mount Sinai Hospital, seems to be leading the internet media charge in Toronto.

But mommy-blogging isn’t a new idea – why the excitement?

Mommy-blogging has been around for a while. 23andMe has an entire community dedicated to this. Individual mommys have been at it for years on their own Blogger- and WordPress- islands, and many have amassed devoted followings that persist even after the babies are not-so-baby anymore.

However, I would like to posit to each hospital interested in social media yet afraid of saturation: you still have something very valuable to offer. You have local.

Local is the best.

There is something immensely potent about local. The benefit of social media is supposed to be the connections forged with strangers at opposite ends of the earth – and that’s still a great perk – but definitely not at the risk of losing local.

If I were pregnant, I’d want the best of both worlds. I’d have a look at 23andMe’s stuff. But if I’m having my baby at Sunnybrook, I want to talk to women who have experienced Sunnybrook. I want to read Mother’s Touch; I want to join a local Twitter hashtag conversation (#preggersinTO, anybody?); I want to be connected to women who will be due the same time as I. There are so many possibilities for a local hospital to do something…maybe not novel, but certainly remarkable.

So far, Sunnybrook seems pretty ahead. Here’s a part I clipped from their website:

That’s 6 different modes of social media they are currently into! Wonderful!

I have also been very glad to find a lot of other Toronto health organizations tweeting and Facebooking, but I think they need to go further. I won’t name any names, but it’s a little sad when hospitals Tweet like crazy…and yet a search for Twitter on their websites yields 0 hits.

Come on Toronto! This is my battle exhortation to you! Lead the way!

To end off: a reflection from my own life…

Mother’s Touch is just one blog. But it makes me think that this is the end of an era. This is the new What to Expect When You’re Expecting. True, I’ve never read WTEWYE, but I remember when my own dear Mommy was pregnant with my sister. I was 11 years old and utterly perplexed by the stack of pregnancy books on her dresser. Wasn’t it enough just to see and feel herself being pregnant, and talking to Daddy and me? I didn’t truly appreciate the need of the patient, my mother, for empowerment and knowledge. I believe now that she would have found a blog run by the local hospital pretty useful. Even years later, she still remarks on how much she was surprised by the top-notch care she received at delivery and convalescence…

I can’t help thinking: wouldn’t it have been so much more comforting simply to, well, know?

My favourite online dictionary is, without a doubt, Wordnik.

Do you think we need a social dictionary like Wordnik for medicine?

Here’s the thing. I’ve always said that the reason I’m not retaining new words is that I don’t really understand how they’re used: Wordnik remedies this problem by providing a plethora of contextual clues. Here’s a rundown of my favourite features using the examples of “fibromyalgia” and “h1n1”:

• Examples. This section pulls the oddest sentences (not intentionally, I’m sure, but the result is often very original) featuring your word from a vast array of unconventional sources, including CNN transcripts, diary entries, and classic literature.

The worst part about having the fibromyalgia is looking foward to being able to go to bed. —bettyalready Diary Entry

WEIL: I would say that fibromyalgia is a subset of chronic pain syndrome. —CNN Transcript Nov 10, 2004

Lyrica for nerve pain and fibromyalgia is now a $2.5 billion-a-year product, but smoking cessation treatment Chantix hasn’t lived up to expectations because of links to depression and suicidal thoughts. —Kansas City Star: Front Page

• On Twitter. The latest tweets containing your word. If we could somehow filter out the spammy tweets, how great would this tool be to gauge the hive mind!

• Flickr. These are some photos for h1n1. Check out the masks!

• Related. Sort of like a thesaurus. I know it looks a bit sparse (there are more under the Related tab), but compared to typical online dictionaries (some of which don’t even contain fibromyalgia), this is pretty good!

• Stats. Charts and graphs showing frequency of occurrence, punctuation patterns, and more.
• Comments. There are some good social networking features like the ability to favourite, comment, and create lists of words.

Plus, Wordnik has all the typical features of a dictionary including definitions from multiple sources, pronunciations, and etymologies.

Now, I know there are a lot of medical dictionaries out there. It also seems that communities such as PatientsLikeMe have sections that are starting to look like social medical dictionaries – for example, a search for Lyrica pulls up related forum posts, and detailed information like side effects that Wordnik does not have (click to enlarge):

Yet I feel that there might be room for something more “social” than the rigid definitions on The Free Dictionary’s Medical Dictionary (although it’s pretty good) yet more systematically organized than the PatientsLikeMe forums.

Another reason: as much as patients are being empowered by the internet, I wonder if the adventure for most even gets as far as signing up for a website like PatientsLikeMe. If a reliable, crowd-sourced, and dynamic medical dictionary could show up as the number one hit on Google for their queries, perhaps useful medical knowledge would reach the most people most quickly.

In the meantime, Wordnik is actually having a 2010 Developer’s Challenge right now, so if you’re inspired by this post, get cracking and maybe the medical community will one day owe you a debt of gratitude!

Toronto’s Medicine 2.0 scene is heating up!

Hot on the heels of my recent visit to the Center for Global eHealth Innovations in Toronto, the Center released an exciting new (and free!) iPhone app for Type I diabetics to track their blood sugar: Bant.

Bant is short for Banting, the Canadian who discovered insulin at – where else? – University of Toronto in 1921. And not only is the name stylish, but so is the design.

I downloaded the app yesterday and gave it a spin, with impressive results:

• The first screen is Readings (left), where you select the meal for which you want to add a glucose reading. Then you can simply drag and drop the appropriate marker to the desired time and concentration on the graph. The blue section indicates the goal concentration range.

• As you accumulate data points, you can view a graphical summary under Trends (left).
• Individual readings can also be adjusted from the Bant Book screen (middle), which includes the options to add text notes and/or share your thoughts via Twitter (right).

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Tell me a story and I will follow. Tell me your story and I am so on board it’s ridiculous.

I work at a children’s hospital that has a blog. But Bloorview Kids Rehab does more than post. It tells stories.

• “Lena distracts herself by threading bravery beads onto necklaces — each marking a painful procedure or special accomplishment.” [+]
• “Taryn, a girl 10 days his junior, is Jake’s girlfriend. This incredible blond-haired girl with deep dimples on both cheeks donates all her tooth fairy money to PMD research so she can help find a cure for Jake’s disease.” [+]

Note that it’s not just the facts; it’s the style. It’s like being there. Parents of children with disabilities even guest-post:

When my son with disabilities was younger, I often felt a failure because I still grieved for him. Why did I feel sad, mad, guilty and anxious – when I adored my son and he brought me such delight?

And that makes the BLOOM blog stand out.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about this storytelling business.

I just finished reading Tribes by Seth Godin, which argues that leadership requires a manifesto. I think that the manifesto is a story. It resonates because it is so intensely personal.

Who are we? How did we get here? What will we achieve?

One facet of Medicine 2.0 is caught up in the toys: like iPad for EMR – Twitter for pandemic-tracking — even my own research, an emotion recognition engine.

But we must not forget that the central unit, the ideal granularity of our work is always the patient. The patient, who has the need. Who lives the story.

The story is important.

Lest technology – heck, anything – subsume the patient, we need to tell better stories.

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