Social Networking Healthcare

The world of “Social Networking”, a cultural phenomenon of recent years, has evolved an application paradigm, Instant Messaging (IM), into a feature rich, highly interactive and context sensitive service delivery environment. Terms such as buddy lists, presence and IM-bots have emerged as building blocks for services that significantly enhance the user experience. Mapping this paradigm to healthcare can deliver a highly innovative communication platform for information sharing, monitoring and care plan execution. Buddy lists become care groups, presence becomes patient context (e.g. blood sugar level) and IM-bots become E-heathcare services, capable of delivering appropriate contextual information to the care groups. Consider the following scenario: A pharmacist and a local health nurse are both monitoring the blood sugar level for a diabetes patient - the patient appearing as a “buddy” in one of their care groups. Through an IM application, the health nurse first notices a heightened blood sugar level for one of her patients. The nurse messages the patient immediately to ascertain his general status. The pharmacist is also alerted, and the nurse and the pharmacist discuss medication types and levels. A revised prescription is agreed and the patient collects it on his next visit to the pharmacist.