When healthcare IT company Next Wave Health launched in June, its CEO Ivo Nelson said it would rapidly acquire companies to help it develop innovative approaches to healthcare IT challenges. This week, it made good on that statement. It launched a social media collaborative platform to encourage hospitals to share insights with each other on health IT current events like ICD-10 implementation.
It made the move through its acquisition of OnePage from Minnesota-based Digiapolis.
Smart Social Media (SSM 2.0) will provide a cloud-based social media platform for healthcare. The idea is that hospitals will use it as a social media package that they can customize to fit their needs. Eric Lopez, CEO of the Minnesota-based company, gave some details in response to emailed questions.
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Q: Why did you form the company?
Lopez: “Healthcare is such a challenging industry today, the best and brightest should be collaborating together to solve healthcare industry’s toughest operational problems. The communities that will be created, through applications that run on the SSM platform … will be specifically designed to support that kind of healthcare-provider-organization to healthcare-provider-organization collaboration.”
Q: So what will be some of the subjects covered in these groups?
Lopez: “Initially, the applications won’t be patient-facing. We’ll build communities around subject matter issues (like ICD-10, or Information Security), around organizational types (like academic medical centers, or pediatric hospitals), and healthcare expertise (physicians, nurses, Chief Information Officers, Chief Financial Officers, etc). Within and ACROSS those communities, individuals from hospitals and health systems will be able to work together to solve problems, answer questions, and even create new communities as they’d like. Long term however, we’ve got some exciting ideas about how to create patient and care provider applications for better care collaboration and coordination.”
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Q: How will users communicate?
Lopez: “The application will have capabilities for healthcare system collaborators to communicate with each other in a multitude of ways, including direct messaging, writing on virtual “walls”, and participating in community webinars. In addition to being mobile (iPhone, Android, tablet, etc) the application will continue to grow and expand new features over the next several months. Watch for the announcement of our first application soon.”
A statement on the new company said it said it would adhere to the regulatory, security, and privacy requirements of the healthcare industry.
Many hospitals are all for social media. Several social networks are dedicated to physician, nurse and patient communities. But hospitals to each other? It will be interesting to see how many warm up to Smart Social Media. The fact that they can be customized depending on the preferences of the hospitals is a big advantage. If it can attract the hospitals, it could attract the interest pharmaceutical marketers who are frequently interested in finding new ways to reach heir customer base.
