Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Welcome to this week’s An Apple a Day.

Firstly, I recommend checking out this post on the BMJ Web Development blog on the most impactful time to disseminate blog posts on different social networks to help them ‘go viral’. A really interesting piece and the sort of insight that might add real value when planning social media campaigns or blogger outreach for clients.

In other digital health news, a recent survey of around 4,000 nurses and nursing students in the US has found that around 71% use smartphones for work, with 66% of students using them at nursing school. It’d be interesting to see if the stats match up in Europe but these findings are a pretty compelling argument for the value of smartphone apps for this audience.

In the digital world, every day seems to bring along a new social media platform or groundbreaking piece of technology promising to change the face of the world as we know it and enhance our day to day lives beyond the realms of our imagination.

For comms professionals, it’s an exciting and challenging time. When you work in healthcare comms, the question that often comes up (once the excitement has died down) is how (if at all) can any of this groundbreaking stuff be applied to the healthcare industry in a way that delivers value for our audiences?

Take, for example, QR codes, which have become increasingly popular recently, particularly in advertising. Yet, to my knowledge, their use in healthcare has been fairly limited. Now, however, a pilot scheme in California is testing their use by paramedics in emergency response situations.

Lifesquare, a Silicon Valley start-up, has teamed up with two emergency response agencies to run a year-long pilot in which they will ask residents to input personal information about their medications into its website, and then place corresponding QR code stickers where emergency responders can scan them for information they need during a medical response call.

Adam Rahman