Social Media and Healthcare

Social media bombards users with memes, cat videos and political squabbles. 

For thousands of women facing an aggressive form of breast cancer, Facebook recently brought another, less common offering: hope. 

“We were having a really, really difficult time finding patients,” said Casey Bales, project manager for triple-negative breast cancer research at the IU School of Medicine. 

She coordinates clinical trials – studies in which patients receive drugs or other treatments to try to understand their effects on health outcomes.

The breast cancer trial, begun in 2014, wasn't going well. Three years into the study, less than 40% of the patients needed were enrolled. 

“The trial was in jeopardy,” Bales said last week.

It was saved in 2017 when Facebook posts from the Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer and IU researchers about a trial using genomics – the study of genes and their functions – to find weaknesses in cancer tumors appeared.

Indiana University researchers and the Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer used the popular networking website and Instagram to recruit participants for a clinical trial. The first-of-its-kind social media effort jump-started a once-moribund effort that led to a Dec. 13 announcement that doctors say could save the lives of patients with triple-negative breast cancer. 

Recruiting through social media has become an important tool for physicians and medical researchers, who can sometimes have difficulty finding patients with specific forms of diseases they are trying to study. 

“We are implementing social media efforts pretty much on every new trial,” Bales said.

“Social media gives us an opportunity to leverage communities and resources to interact with a much broader community than we've been able to reach before,” the report said. 

Lisa Hayes is a survivor. 

The 62-year-old Indianapolis woman was diagnosed 12 years ago with triple-negative breast cancer. 

“I didn't even know (at the time) there were different kinds of breast cancer,” she said in an interview last week. “I just thought breast cancer was breast cancer. That's a scary feeling, to know you had a very aggressive kind of breast cancer.”

Hayes endured surgery to remove cancer, eight rounds of chemotherapy and 33 rounds of radiation. She now leads R.E.D. Alliance, an advocacy group working to reduce late-stage diagnosis and death rates for black women with cancer. R.E.D. stands for Reaching to End Disparities.

Her cancer is gone, but Hayes has wondered whether it might come back. She did not participate in the recent clinical trial but said the research is important to her and other survivors. 

“It's great news to hear what they have done,” she said. “It gives hope and promise to everyone coming behind me. It's very personal to me, in that respect.”

Read More: https://www.journalgazette.net/news/local/20191222/facebook-helps-clinical-trials-for-iu-vera-bradley

Dr. Rose Marie Leslie is hoping to reach teens with a message about the dangers of e-cigarettes. So she’s started posting regularly on TikTok, the popular short video app, and has collected a large following.

Leslie, who goes by @DrLeslie and is a family medicine doctor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, has amassed more than 300,000 followers on the platform in recent months. Most of her TikTok videos offer insights on health issues that impact teens, ranging from how to talk to doctors about birth control to why it’s a bad idea for a group of friends to share a lollipop.

She’s best known for getting real about vaping and vaping-related illness. The issue is more urgent than ever for many parents, with surveys showing that vape use at an all-time high among teens amid an outbreak of a life-threatening vaping illness. 

Part of the problem, according to medical experts, is the teens aren’t aware of the risks because public health organizations aren’t communicating with them on the platforms they use.

That’s where Leslie comes in.

Leslie doesn’t talk down to the viewer, but instead shows side-by-side images of a vaping-related lung injury and a normal lung biopsy, and discusses the root causes.

In one video, she shows her followers what vaping lung illness really looks like under a microscope. “That is terrifying,” she says in the video.

Leslie says she gets a lot of messages from teens who have stopped vaping because they watched one of her videos.

“I expected it as a primary-care doctor who’s often talking to teens about the health risks associated with something like vaping that’s perceived as cool,” she said.

Greater engagement on TikTok than other platforms

Leslie is just one of the doctors who have recently started popping up on TikTok. Far more physicians are on Twitter and Instagram, which are more popular with older generations.

But those who have taken the TikToK plunge say they are experiencing far greater engagement on content there than on other social media platforms.

Jefferson Health’s Dr. Austin Chiang, one of the most active physicians on social media, recently joined TikTok after reading about how it’s taking off. 

Chiang uses TikTok primarily as a platform to talk to other young doctors about issues that matter to them, like the cost of medical education or the sacrifice of giving up their 20s to spend nights and weekends in the hospital.

Chiang says he already sees the most engagement on TikTok, which is used by more than 700 million people daily, according to its owner ByteDance.

Chiang and Leslie are also using TikTok to combat health misinformation.

“I’ve heard the criticism that doctors and other medical professionals on social media are somehow less credible, or won’t be taken as seriously by their peers,” said Sherry Pagoto, a behavioral scientist and professor at the Department of Allied Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut. “But I think that school of thought is going to be a thing of the past.”

Pagoto notes that medical experts need to meet teens where they are, rather than sticking to the older methods of advertising on television or Facebook.

“It would be great for public health organizations to follow the lead of these medical professionals on TikTok,” she said.

Read More: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/29/doctors-use-tiktok-to-talk-to-teens-about-vaping-birth-control.html

''Media” has long been part of our moniker here at MM&M – it is, quite literally, the third M of a brand that started its life and remains, at its heart, Medical Marketing and Media – but 2019 marked the first year in quite some time that we attempted to cover it on more than a semi-regular basis.

Frankly, we picked a fortunate time to start, given the flood of transformative news during the year.

But don’t take our word for it. For the final Third M dispatch, before we change calendars, MM&M asked several of the smartest folks in and around health media to answer a few questions about the people and trends that stood out during 2019. Their responses did not disappoint.

Here’s hoping for a similarly scintillating 2020.

What was the most important, most welcome, weirdest, coolest or otherwise most interesting trend or event in health media during 2019, and why?

The physicians who embraced TikTok. There are about 20 doctors (as well as residents and medical students) who are using the popular video platform to share health information. What I find jarring is the juxtaposition of medical topics with the informal nature of the videos. However, I am far from the Gen-Z audience that makes up a significant portion of the TikTok demographic.

“The value of the platform for health education was highlighted by Dr. Rose Marie Leslie in September when she created a video on the dangers of vaping. It amassed millions of views and led to mainstream media attention from ABC News, among others. Clearly these physicians are doing something right because many of them have gained tens of thousands of followers on TikTok. We’ll be watching.” – Eileen O’Brien, managing director, social media, W2O

“Authenticity. From UX design to chatbots, the bar for creating an authentic experience for the consumer has been elevated this year. Authenticity in 2019 evolved beyond the selection of a credible spokesperson for messaging—it’s about infusing it into every brand attribute, using a variety of elements (e.g., voice and visuals) to create an inimitable and trustworthy consumer experience.” – Tabytha Gil, linguistic insights analyst, Ogilvy Health

“The rise of voice search, which essentially means two things. First, with respect to the voice search queries input via your mobile phone or tablet: There are a variety of different statistics out there, but most analysts estimate that approximately 30% to 55% of all U.S. search traffic is being driven by voice search at the moment. This means that both your SEO and SEM strategies need to evolve. This is especially so for health, as voice search is already prompting many more long-tail keywords. The specificity of these keywords is an important point to note, with patients more likely to speak complicated clinical search terms rather than trying to type them.

“Second, there is an entirely different type of voice search playing out across AI-powered smart speakers, like Amazon’s Echo or Show, or the Google Home and Nest Hub. In these scenarios, particularly when there is zero UI or no screen, how can a brand take advantage of voice-driven search queries? One can easily envision this working in an unbranded example, but the billion-dollar question is how can branded search results populate in a compliant manner? The entire voice search economy will be a fascinating one to watch in 2020, but make no mistake: Both Amazon and Google are hard at work figuring out a way to monetize this smart search inventory.” – Justin Chase, EVP, innovation, and media, Intouch Solutions

“The focus on awareness, education, and support around mental health, from organizational, partnership and consumer perspectives. Second, patient influencers and advocates are driving health actions, and brands started to notice. As for the coolest event in 2019, Healthline Media partnered with wellness advocate Nitika Chopra to create Chronicon, bringing together hundreds of influencers to the first daylong event devoted to people struggling with chronic health issues.” – Ingrid Eberly, VP corporate marketing, Healthline Media

Read More: https://www.mmm-online.com/home/channel/media-news/health-media-2019-the-year-in-review/