G2 Communications Inc.-Medical Practice Marketing

We help physicians recruit, retrain & refer

  • WHO we are
  • WHAT we do
    • Healthcare Case Studies
    • Healthcare Clients
  • WHY choose us
  • WHERE we are
  • HOW to learn more
  • Blog

Jul 21 2014

Leveraging Community for Successful Aging in Place: Q&A with Martin Entwistle, Part 2

I recently introduced you to Martin Entwistle, Executive Director of the David Druker Center for Health Systems Innovation at Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF). The Innovation Center team is working “to create disruptive solutions that tackle the pressing health challenges of our time,” Entwistle explains. “We think through real problems, build prototypes to address them, and develop solutions at the enterprise level for wider deployment.”

One such pressing issue is the impact of aging on seniors, their families and the wider community. Here, Entwistle offers a closer look at linkAges and its potential for activating communities to better care for and support aging individuals. He also shares insights into PAMF’s process for discovering and refining innovative solutions to our most pressing healthcare problems.

What does the PAMF innovation process look like?

We innovate by human-centered design which means peeling back the onion of the problem. For example, in evaluating the issues faced by seniors, we may identify access to transportation as the problem, but this is a solution to one part of a bigger problem. The real underlying issue is isolation and loneliness, which is multi-dimensional and requires solutions that provide a more systemic approach than just providing transport.

Our approach is heavily informed by ethnographic studies of the people who are the subject of our solutions. We use this approach to provide an in-depth understanding of the issues people face in their day-to-day lives, in this case seniors and their caregivers. This process helped us understand the importance of community and community-level support to address the issues of successful aging, and to begin to develop solutions that would directly tackle the identified underlying problems.

Further careful planning and execution is required. Solutions need to be designed and tested, typically through a process of prototyping, and sometimes these prototypes don’t get the expected results. In innovation you try something and you might have to throw it away, but even when you do create a successful prototype you have to think about how to deploy it, build it out and scale it, all the while making sure that the various components fit together and work as a seamless system. Going from prototype to actual deployment is one of the hardest steps in the process.

How is the Innovation Center approaching health care for a growing aging population?

As described above, our analysis of the barriers to successful aging identified the need to create a community of support for the aging process, and to enable people to grow old and remain valuable in society. How do you get the support of the community when there is a lack of neighbors helping neighbors and your family is scattered across the country? The experience was succinctly described by one of the participants in the ethnographic studies who reported “in older people their world dies before they do.” They’d like it to be bigger and more expansive–have more people and hobbies in their lives, or simply be able to go to the store. We realized the solution needed to be community focused and address social context and behavioral issues, including access and the ability to interact with others. It’s all about life continuing to be meaningful as people age.

It appears that many of the issues older people experience are driven by loneliness or isolation. The focus of our linkAges program is to address these challenges and help people age in place successfully.

In what ways is linkAges innovating to change the current healthcare model?

Healthcare providers have extensive and in-depth information about the medical issues faced by patients, but frequently more detailed and current social information is lacking. There are significant direct and indirect opportunities for use of such social information; identification of people who have difficulty getting to appointments or to the store for food, alerting an individual’s physician that her patient is largely unsupported in their day-to-day life.

In linkAges we want to identify the people in need of interaction and activate community in a way that enables them to get support from other people.

One barrier for aging seniors could be their inability to pay for things. How do you access services if you don’t have money? Our solution to this problem is time banking. Time banking creates an interconnected community of people who support each other with offers and requests for services where time, not dollars, is the currency. Could someone come and cook a meal or mow the senior’s lawn, while the senior may offer to give knitting lessons or teach younger people skills like wood-working? A key idea is to actively links across all ages in the community, not just seniors.

Another innovation component of linkAges is to try to identify people who are declining and provide support, before an adverse event happens. Can we build a detection system that tells the caregiver if a senior’s pattern of living is different? We put out a developer challenge: how do you identify patterns and get alerts that something is not quite right with the senior? We’re working with a company called Vevity. They had the idea to use utility smart meters which can tell you about energy usage within a household. We could use that information to determine if the stove or lights are going on and off and use these patterns of activity to tell caregivers when the normal pattern of daily living habits has changed.

Finally, seniors have difficulty activating resources. Google and Yelp are typically well tailored to the specific needs of seniors. For example, a senior may want to know if a restaurant is wheelchair accessible, or which pharmacy will spend time to help them find just the right cane to help their mobility. If they can’t find that out they won’t go. If we start a database for this kind of information how do we maintain it? Can we get the community to support this? We’re using our own internal team to do the analysis and find out if this is another part of the system we should tackle.

Conclusion

There’s a fundamental thirst for some kind of new community engagement for the aging population. Society has an appetite to address this challenge but it hard for organic solutions since communities are more and more fragmented. Even in younger people there’s a great desire to interact with older people. They want to be part of giving; there’s a level of altruism. It isn’t all about profiteering. There’s a great interest in linkAges and it is very exciting to be creating a community model that could scale to significant size and have a major impact on successful aging, one of the most pressing issue of our time.

Photo: PAMF

Written by Shelly · Categorized: Healthcare PR, Other, Public Relations, Uncategorized · Tagged: aging in place, community, healthcare, innovation, medical, seniors

Feb 25 2014

New approach to low cost simulation, e-learning style: meet SIMTICS Founder John Windsor

Professor John Windsor chose to specialize in pancreatic surgery because he saw this vital and difficult-to-reach organ as “the last frontier of general surgery, with huge challenges and still much to learn.” This gives you an idea of Windsor’s curiosity and drive — two qualities that led him to found SIMTICS.

SIMTICS is an innovative e-learning company that uses online simulation technology to train students in medical procedures. Windsor, who is Professor of Surgery at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, knew that you can’t teach practical procedures in a classroom and in the hospital.  With the random presentation of patients it is not possible to plan systematic training.  What is more, patients are less happy to be trained on.  A new approach was needed and Windsor set out, with his colleagues, to develop a new way to train large numbers, even in remote areas, through low cost, high tech web-based simulation.

Windsor was inspired by the success of flight simulation for effectively training people in the high-risk aviation industry. In a similar way SIMTICS is using web technology to train for performing complex procedures while reducing risks to patients. Students can learn at their own pace from anywhere and are no longer as reliant on the availability of suitable patients and teachers.

Windsor joined me for an enlightening Q&A on his perspectives on education and innovation; how e-learning is revolutionizing medical training; and his motivations, concepts and experiences behind SIMTICS.

What has influenced your approach to medical procedure training?

An important influence was homeschooling our five children until they were teenagers which taught my wife and I a lot about learning. We learned about differential readiness and different learning styles. We learned about how periods, classes, assigned topics, and homework and didactics are barriers to learning. A child who is learning will keep running with something they are interested in.  They’ll be more spontaneous because they enjoy their learning.  To force a kid to take a step they’re not ready for will turn them off.  In homeschooling the learning is self-paced.  That allows a child to stay on task and keep mining that opportunity for as long as they like.  The success of homeschooling, which was a radical departure from traditional education, gave me courage to try something new with teaching in medical school.

Another important input for me was being involved from the very beginning of the laparoscopic revolution. This was a game changer. For the first time we had digital images of entire procedures, but we also had a whole surgical workforce deficient in essential new skills for the new technique. My return to New Zealand in 1991 meant that I had the opportunity to develop and build a skills training and simulation center–the first in Australasia. But ultimately this too influenced me because of the increasing cost of providing skills and procedural training by short courses and refresher courses.  Without huge subsidies it is difficult to provide a sustainable training program through dedicated skills centers with expensive hardware-based virtual reality simulators and there is the problem of ‘tutor fatigue.’  Taking people out of the work force for training also reduces service output.

So I have a lot of experience in the development, delivery and assessment of short courses to teach clinical skills and procedures.  I learnt about how technology often drove courses, how courses needed to be repeated to address knowledge decay, how courses take people out of the work place and how expensive they are.  I also learnt through my international travel and teaching about education faddism.  Every self-respecting institution wanted their own multi-million dollar skills laboratory even before there was evidence for the reliability, validity and cost-benefits of simulation training. We still do not know if patients do better (the final and most important outcome variable) because of the new ways we teach.

 

How does the e-learning model fit with medical education?

Our education and frameworks are still last century.  The learning space, the learning journey is more complex than it used to be. With the Internet, we should be designing things that are simpler and much more efficient. I don’t think we’ve been radical enough in thinking how learning might be.

We are moving into the age of personalized medicine and I think this needs to be matched with personalized learning. There are some extremely exciting developments in education theory and practice, which are often overshadowed by educational technology. Further, the use of the web as a platform for the delivery of education in healthcare is in its infancy. As such e-learning has tended to be an add-on to existing frameworks and pedagogy, and has not been used to re-invent the learning paradigm.

The biggest challenge of e-learning is getting past the limited mindset and current approach (limited to words and images) to incorporate interaction, simulation, decision-making, assessment and feedback.   These are all possible. We should be supporting more personalized learning off-campus, so that teacher face-time can focus on higher-value activities, and in particular identify specific training needs through e-learning. That has been one of our goals at SIMTICS.

What motivated you to change the medical education delivery model?

The frustration of learning how to do clinical procedures and operations was apparent from the beginning of my training.  Learning is reliant on the random admission of cases. It might be months before one saw a second similar case to practice what she had learnt the first time around. Not ideal for reinforcing learning. Further it is difficult to integrate all the inputs, which come at different times from past experience, experts, books, videos, conferences.  To bring all learning media together on one learning platform was our goal.

So we started brainstorming about how procedural skills might be learnt in a cost-effective, individualized, durable, and accessible way that integrates and extends existing curricula and takes advantage of the internet and the cloud.  The need drove a vision.

How did these experiences all add up to the formation of SIMTICS?

There were three of us at the beginning: a frustrated South African surgeon who was compelled to re-sit his surgical exams in New Zealand, a pediatrician who was a computer and IT expert, and there was me as surgical educator. It was the surgeon who suggested that it would be nice to bring all the learning materials together in one place to facilitate learning.  It was the pediatrician who convinced us it could be done in an integrated and educationally sound way.  So we sketched out, on a napkin, the computer interface that brought the core media elements together.

The surgeon missed his exam, the pediatrician retired and I was left standing, but not before we made some real progress with the concept. We did enough to win a national award and were offered a two-year residency in the IceHouse business incubator. This gave us the opportunity to build a business around the idea.

Why is cognitive simulation the cornerstone of SIMTICS technology?

Cognitive simulation is a point of difference for us, as it emphasizes that much of procedural learning is a mental process. And that much learning can take place before actually doing the procedure. There is an excellent study which demonstrates that mental rehearsal is just as effective as repeated practical courses for maintaining procedural skills, which emphasizes the importance of the cognitive element of procedural learning.

The SIMTICS integrated cognitive simulator allows the student to read the steps of the procedure and understand the basis for it, to watch an expert perform it, to interact with the anatomy relevant to the procedure, and then to do the procedure, with visual clues.  The latter guided learning can be turned off and the procedure repeated as an assessment.  This can all take place before the procedure is done in a patient.  The procedure might be putting in a urinary catheter or a chest drain, performing a lumbar puncture or suturing a wound.  And the learning experience can ensure that the right thing is done at the right time and in the right way to ensure a safe and efficient outcome for the patient.  The learner gains confidence with competence.

The simulation component is special because of its simplicity.  Rather than breaking the bank with a fully interactive state of the art gaming technology, we realized that this is not required for learning.  When a complex procedure is deconstructed and the steps taught in sequence, it is possible to capture these sequences.  The can be used as ‘pre-rendered’ sequences which play out when the right decision is made, or not if the decision making is wrong.

SIMTICS was the result of identifying an urgent need and creating an innovative solution.  What does it take to become an innovative thinker?  Is it within everyone’s grasp?

Innovation starts with an idea, and is usually fueled by a need.  Being aware of needs and being skeptical about common solutions is important.  The reality is that truly original ideas are rare, like the splitting of the atom to release nuclear energy.  Most innovations come from new applications of existing ideas, a sort of cross pollination.  An example of this is the innovation of putting a light weight power generator in a soccer ball so that kids playing football in the dusty village square can provide electricity for lighting or the water pump for the family. The power generator technology is not new, but the application is innovative.  I think we have done this at SIMTICS by bringing together ideas in education and technology and applying this within a new e-learning paradigm of cognitive simulation.

Images: John Windsor, SIMTICS

 

Written by Laura R. · Categorized: Healthcare PR, Medical PR, Uncategorized · Tagged: cognitive, e-learning, education, innovation, medical, patient, procedure, simulation

Apr 05 2013

Storify Your PR: A One-Stop Social Media Solution

Most of what’s said about using social media to promote your brand boils down to this bit of unhelpful advice: You have to use it. That may be true, but it leaves you with little more than trial and error to guide your social media marketing efforts.

While there will always yet another platform everyone says you must use, one shows promise in actually simplifying and enhancing your social media outreach.  It’s called Storify and companies big and small are already using it to skip the pitch and publish their own stories using their best curated content.

What is Storify?

Social media is supposed to boost your brand building and customer engagement efforts, but the actual results are diffuse and still difficult to measure. It’s one thing to sign up for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr, FourSquare and Pinterest, and quite another to create an integrated campaign that is effective across each unique platform.  Storify helps you do just that.

From the user dashboard within Storify you can gather all the content that you have already generated in the press and on other social media sites into one window. From there you can select the best tweets, comments, photos and videos, plus links to PR news stories you’ve generated in traditional media, and package them into a single post.  Think of it as designing the front-page layout of a newspaper: you put the best stuff front and center, highlight noteworthy pieces and entice readers to dig deeper.

Become Your Own Publisher

Storify’s own slogan is “Don’t get lost in the noise.” Rather than spewing a fire hose flood onto the Web and seeing what sticks, Storify lets you bring together a multitude of voices into one targeted story.  And you can publish as many stories as you like. Use it to support your current marketing strategy, respond to up-to-the-minute trends, or bundle the most useful information on a newly released product.

The best part of publishing with Storify? Your audience becomes your distributor.  Storify was built for the lay person, so it’s accessible to everyone and it’s optimized for sharing across the Web.  That means when you create a story it doesn’t only exist on the Storify site; it can be posted to Facebook, tweeted, emailed, and blogged about all with a single link.

Is Storify Right for Healthcare Providers?

Storify is an excellent way to promote medical services and devices. You may have heard the expression, “If you don’t control your image, someone else will.” This is particularly true for the healthcare industry, which frequently has to combat misinformation and bring patients up to speed on medical and technological advancements.  Storify lets you decide what information is important and deliver it to patients in a clear and engaging format. Your message is less likely to get muddled by unrelated hashtags and pictures of cats

In a recent twitter discussion hosted by Healthcare Communications & Social Media (#hcsm), they invited doctors, patients, hospitals, and communications professionals to answer the question: “What motivates healthcare providers to use social media?” Once the discussion was over, one participant used Storify to publish the results. The participant archived the most relevant tweets in one easy-to-browse place so others could read it without having to comb the twitterverse.

The archived conversation is one of the most basic examples of what Storify can do. Hospitals and healthcare companies can get much more creative and produce a range of multi-media “stories” like:

  • Case Studies: Pull in all the tweets, comments, blog posts, and photos you can find on a particular healthcare issue. Discover and highlight patients’ thoughts, questions, and needs to improve product marketing.
  • Executive Profiles: Collect video interviews, Slideshare presentations, press releases, and tweets on company leaders.
  • Product Launches: After the release of a new product, gather reviews, briefs, social media comments, press releases, and marketing content into one package. It can become a one-click patient, employee, and sales resource.

Storify returns some of the command social media has taken away by letting you curate the content to create the kind of story that gets shared.

 

 

Written by Laura R. · Categorized: Healthcare PR, Public Relations, Uncategorized · Tagged: facebook, healthcare, linkedin, medical, PR, releases, social media, stories, Twitter

Dec 26 2012

Your New Medical Treatment Could Change the World… But Not ‘Til the FDA Says So

Recently I attended a Media Panel for StartX and StartX Med founders.  StartX is a highly regarded startup mentorship and accelerator program, built and run by Stanford University students, with Silicon Valley executives, VCs, Stanford faculty helping the founders succeed.  These founders apply for a six-month program; less than 10% get in.  While the majority run tech startups, StartX Med, which kicked off in June 2012, has 11 newly minted companies, including a biotech outfit started by a 21-year-old who has figured out how to turn skin cells into beating heart cells, and won a $20 million grant from the CA Institute for Regenerative Medicine!  Another student is developing precision guidance implants to treat G-I diseases; think pacemakers for the GI tract.  How about a robotic manipulator that performs ultrasounds during cancer treatment?  These young founders are the future of healthcare.In a conversation with life sciences PR genius Rick Roose, of RCI Partners, we share some basic PR pointers for StartX Med founders…

When it comes to PR – and getting stories published about medical technology and the human body — beware of FDA marketing regulations and making premature claims.  Until your biotech, pharma, medical device or diagnostic product is commercially available proceed with caution on all external communication fronts.  Some products could be years in development before they’ve been proven safe and effective for patients.  These are hope-to-be products in the R&D pipeline, getting ready for clinical trials. They are investigational until approved by the FDA.

So startup communications must clearly state what stage of development the product is in, i.e., still in research, not yet approved, etc.  Founders need to stick to the science, share the pros and cons, and avoid selective disclosure of positive results data.  Talk about clinical data but don’t make inferences or implied claims for unapproved products.  For groundbreaking medical research journalists will accept: “Here’s what we know so far;” or “The data is very encouraging;” or “Doctors are excited about this new approach…”  If you’re running a clinical trial you can publicize positive results but your audience should know the product has a long way to go.

Some startups aim for a nice juicy story to attract investors and partners at this early stage.  But what happens after the initial excitement wears off?  Good PR maintains the media’s attention in a meaningful way with a plan that incorporates all possible elements, mapped out on a PR calendar and a budget allocated for execution.  While the stem cell treatment product is in development be available as a media expert to be called upon for articles related to this evolving technology.  You’ll have company news to announce along the way: new executive hires, new funding, new partners, a new advisory board, etc.   Without a sustained effort, PR is a hit-and-miss affair. You can get some big hits but it will be tough to keep the buzz going.

 

Written by Laura R. · Categorized: Medical PR, Public Relations, Uncategorized · Tagged: biotech, medical, medical device, pharma, PR, start up

Nov 14 2012

PR Case Study: How to Promote Your Medical Start Up Without EPA Clearance

Nearly 80 substantive media stories and more than 170,000 Google hits resulted from closely-coordinated marketing and PR efforts between G2Comm and start up PurThread Technologies

The Client: PurThread Technologies, Inc. — San Francisco, CA

— A start up with a new antimicrobial textile technology for preventing hospital acquired infections

The Challenge

PurThread Technologies (PT) is a development-stage company that is refining an anti-microbial textile fiber designed to help lower the incidence of healthcare associated infections (HAIs). The company was restricted from promoting its products without EPA clearance, yet wanted a seat at the table for the highly-important discussions about HAIs, and infection prevention and control.

The Public Relations Strategy/Solution

G2Comm was brought in to publicize the results of a research study sponsored by PurThread. The study showed that 92% of hospital privacy curtains harbored infectious bacteria within one week of being laundered. In concert with study investigators, G2Comm capitalized on the research findings, creating PR documents for the media to publicly introduce PurThread while at the same time complying with regulatory guidelines.

G2Comm also used the study to position PurThread as a lead contributor to the discussion of HAIs, since the topic appeared regularly in mainstream media as well as health journals and blogs. Concurrently, G2Comm forged relationships with editors of key healthcare publications.

The Results

—More than 80 stories on PurThread’s study appeared in top-tier national and industry media including Reuters, CBS News, FOX News, MSNBC, Time magazine and many more.

—Viral syndication of the original news story on the study generated 170,000+ hits on Google, enabling this development-stage company to amass a significant base of quality followers.

—In advance of receiving EPA clearance, PurThread executives are being interviewed and writing commentary on infection control for well-respected healthcare publications.


Written by Laura R. · Categorized: Public Relations, Uncategorized · Tagged: hospital, medical, start up, technology

  • 1
  • 2
  • Next Page »

sgordon@g2comm.com
(480) 685-3252 (office)
(650) 248-6975 (mobile)

Copyright © 2022 — G2 Communications Inc.-Medical Practice Marketing • All rights reserved •