Mediaboss Marketing

When you work in a service-related industry, focusing only on ROI isn't always the best to measure a project's success , says Scott Ranson, vice president and CIO at Brookdale Senior Living.

"Sometimes you just have to go out on a limb for what you know is the right thing," he says. "Connected Living was one of those things: We're making a difference in folks' lives every single day. It's hard to put a price tag on that."

With a capacity to house 69,000 seniors nationwide, Brookdale is one of the largest owners and operators of senior living communities in the U.S. Its facilities encompass independent living, assisted living, Alzheimer's and dementia care, and skilled nursing centers.

Sara Tery, vice president of Optimum Life at Brookdale, says the company is always looking for new ways its residents can live more meaningful lives.

Senior Living Meets Social Media

In 2009, at an industry conference, Ranson was introduced to Connected Living, a social networking startup for senior citizens. Acknowledging the rise of social media and the impact it's had on others, Brookdale considered bringing this technology to its senior citizen residents.

Because Connected Living was a young company, Ranson worked with it for more than a year both to further develop the product with the specific features and enhancements Brookdale wanted and to negotiate a contract. At the end of 2010, Brookdale piloted Connected Living in a handful of its Chicago communities.

The pilot, which lasted a year, was a basic implementation with little capital investment, Ranson says. They looked for underutilized rooms in Brookdale's community areas and set up a few desks with computers. They made "ambassadors" available to seniors who wanted to learn about computers and taught them how to use the dashboard.

The Connected Living platform, which is cloud-based, features an interface with access to the Internet, email, video chat, photos, a library, games and a social networking component. Residents fill out a profile with information about their family, hobbies and interests. Family members, too, can securely log in to keep in touch.

[ The How-To Guide for Social Business]

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Senior Living Communities Connect With Social Networking

Public release date: 11-Feb-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Keri Stedman keri.stedman@childrens.harvard.edu 617-919-3110 Boston Children's Hospital

Boston, Mass.Hypoglycemia may be a much larger problem among patients with diabetes than is currently realized, according to a study of members of a diabetes-focused social network conducted by researchers in Boston Children's Hospital's Informatics Program (CHIP). The study shows how engaging patients in research through social networking may help augment traditional surveillance methods for public health research, while simultaneously offering opportunities to promote healthy behaviors among participants.

The study team, led by Elissa Weitzman, ScD, MSc, and Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH, of the Intelligent Health Laboratory (IHL) in CHIP, published their findings online on Feb. 11 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

Hypoglycemia is a serious side effect of diabetes treatment where a patient's blood sugar level goes too low. Hypoglycemic episodes can be unpredictable and can lead to unconsciousness, accidents and injuries. Worries about hypoglycemia can also severely impact patients' work, activities and quality of life.

However, the true extent of hypoglycemia and its effects among people with diabetes is not well understood, as the only surveillance numbers for hypoglycemia come from emergency room visits and clinical trial reports.

"We don't know much about how populations with diabetes in general experience insulin effects and complications like hypoglycemia," said Weitzman, a social-behavioral scientist at Boston Children's and the study's director. "Insulin is widely used, but we don't have a grasp of how many patients experience hypoglycemic episodes that are not severe enough to merit emergency treatment. Learning more about hypoglycemia requires engaging a broad pool of patients as collaborators in health researcha model enabled by social media."

Recognizing the limitations of traditional surveillance methods and systems for collecting population-level data on diabetes complications, Weitzman and Mandl turned to a cohort of people with diabetes recruited through the online social network TuDiabetes.org. The researchers had previously worked with TuDiabetes to develop and launch a social networking app called TuAnalyze and engage TuDiabetes members in real time, participatory surveillance of hemoglobin A1c levels (a health metric used to measure diabetes control over a prolonged period of time), feeding back data to participants using maps and graphs. TuAnalyze is based on CHIP's Indivo personally controlled health record platform and implements controls that let users preserve the privacy of their personal health information.

This time, the pair called on TuDiabetes members to use TuAnalyze to share information about the frequency with which they experience episodes of hypoglycemia. They also asked members reporting recent or severe hypoglycemic episodes for details about their lifetime experiences of significant impacts or harms (e.g., vehicle crashes, withdrawal from daily activities in order to avoid hypoglycemia) caused by hypoglycemia.

In a break from typical surveillance and reporting methods, data from the cohort were aggregated and posted back to the participants as they were analyzed via a research blog within TuAnalyze, a participatory approach that Mandl and Weitzman have long advocated. "This new approach, which we call participatory surveillance, establishes a bidirectional communications link between public health and consumers," explained Mandl, who directs the IHL. "It lets us tap the community for crowd-sourced information, but also feed results back and implement behavior change strategies."

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A social networking approach to public health research raises hypoglycemia awareness

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