Prescription: Advocacy
Just back from our healthcare conference in Madrid to find this very relevant and timely article on smoking cessation in the New York Times yesterday. Covered is a study to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine that finds there is a significant social factor at work in kicking the habit. It follows an earlier paper by the same authors that determined there was also a big social factor in weight loss.
The research points to the enormous opportunity in healthcare communications–discussed in my previous blog post and at our Madrid conference–to more and more create programs that defeat isolation, encourage participation, build community, and don’t just educate patients about treatment therapies but help improve health outcomes through facilitating advocacy.
It also shows how insightful social network mapping and analysis can be, a capability we’ve incorporated into our healthcare and other practices areas through our work with Myra Norton and her colleagues at Community Analytics. Myra — Posting the social network map from the study here in your honor! Let us know what you think.
Here is a social network map of doctors in a particular speciality from a region in the Midwest. Who are the most influential docs?
http://www.orgnet.com/KOL.html