Earlier this month, business IT and Enterprise2.0 master Dion Hinchcliffe posted a very insightful article about social networking and the social graph. With a significant hat-tip to Dion, I wanted to site several of his insights as well as tweak his concepts to overlap with healthcare and health consumerism.
As Robert pointed out today that the MedFICO score is breathing down consumer’s necks… consumers are going to have to wake up, smell the coffee, and begin to quickly learn how to become their own advocate for their health but more importantly – their own health expenses and risks. To an employer and insurer and the government – YOU are a liability. A cost risk. An expense waiting to happen. It’s not a question of “if” you will generate medical expenses, but rather “when” and “how much” medical expense you or your dependent will generate. I’m not pointing out this obvious fact because it’s a bad thing, rather it’s simply the course of life. People get sick, injured, and grow old.
So here’s a dirty little idea that the industry does not want consumers of healthcare to realize… shared information is powerful. Shared information influences behaviors and cost. The more you know and share, the more leverage you have as a consumer of healthcare. Until consumers and employers embrace this notion – you will be powerless.
Sharing, transparency, networking, water cooler conversations… ahhhhhhh and so here is where the winding river leads us: roughly 89% of consumer’s medical decisions (who to see, what to do, etc) are made while visiting around the water cooler or with a neighbor chatting over the backyard fence. Yep. Trusted and inferred relationships, not hard clinical data nor empirical studies, drive the average person’s decision to see X doctor, follow-thru on Y prcedure, and so on.
Social relationships. Social networks. Hmmm the stuff that Facebook has been getting a lot of buzz about?! As Dion puts it:
One of the hottest topics in the online world in the last couple of years has been the growth of social networking services such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as the addition of a social element to existing user experiences. Despite riding several waves of hype, it’s now clear that the social networking space will only get hotter in 2008 according to most watchers. Social software has come fully into its own as of 2008 — for all appearances permanently — and understanding the reasons for this rapid rise as well as figuring out how to leverage it best is the job of everyone who wants to make the most of the Web 2.0 era.Gaining a deeper insight to the social networking phenomenon, now exhibited by the tens of millions of users employing them globally on a daily basis for both personal and businesses uses, currently means understanding the fundamental unit of the social network, also one of the biggest new buzzphrases of the year: the social graph.
Simply put, a social graph is a set of people, referred to as nodes, that are connected together by vertices — better known as links or connections — that reflect their social relationships. You can see a conceptual social graph above, showing the typical distinction of social networks to reflect whether a connection with another person is direct or indirect.
Now – let’s reframe the social graph. What if you considered the individuals who influenced your health and healthcare decisions as part of your social network or social graph or more specifically your Health Graph? Not only your doctor, but also your neighbor, your spouse, someone who has the same health issues or takes the same medicines.
Is there the same power or possibly even more power in your Health Graph? How many people are you influencing and how many influence you when it comes to your health and healthcare?
The Health Graph and its impact in 2008
- The Health Graph is poised to replace the yellow pages healthcare advertising and promotion of Centers of Excellence and will become the preferred organizing and referral structure for health and healthcare relationships.
- Ownership of the Health Graph is going to be a ground zero issue in 2008. As patients and consumers begin to realize that the referral patterns and patient experiences they are creating and sharing are of a growing value to Providers and Pharma, consumer-based information control will become a growing concern, particularly since two-way validation (via utilization of recommended services/procedures/Rx) makes a Health Graph more valuable (and accurate).
- Many health-based social networking services will attempt to create closed and non-portable infrastructures while trying to appear to adopt “transparency/consumerist” open data initiatives.
- Attempts to monetize Health Graphs will drive interest in regulation and legislation.
- Open Web identity and semantic health data standards will ultimately form the national “primary key” for Health Graph nodes, will not get anywhere soon. This despite it being needed badly but the users of the Web have not yet felt compelled to demand it. Data portability and consumer “control” of Health Graphs will begin to drive adoption of user controlled healthcare identity and semantic data standards, and hopefully government regulation will not.
