21 Days; 7 Seconds

21 Days = The number of days in which if an activity is repeated it will become adopted by the person.
7 Seconds = The amount of time it takes for someone to form a first impression.

Though I haven't validated these to be the common school of thought, it is what an instructor had told us today.

So how does this relate to healthcare?  Well, I recently blogged about lack of user adoption for healthcare applications delivered on web and mobile technology.  So maybe we can try something here.  Let's get in the face of the users for 21 days to remind them about the benefits of these applications and also incent them to use the product for it's intention for 21 days and see if that helps with adoption.  And let's remember in the design of these applications that we have 7 seconds to catch the users' attention where they will decide if they will buy or fly.  So make sure the entry point to the application is one that quickly wow's the users to stick around.

Healthcare Mobile Technology

I went to a conference recently where one of the sessions discussed Healthcare Mobile Technology.  The panel spoke about their visions and excitement of what Mobile Technology can offer to patients and how their healthcare companies have been involved in this space.  The excitement is that we can involve patients in more around their health management and keep them healthy using a device that is already integrated into their daily life, smart cell phones.  One of these companies is Ubiqi Health which is focusing Mobile Technology for the management of migraines. 

I've personally seen Health Insurers spend Millions on putting tools on the Web for patients.  However, what we have seen is that people are not adopting to the Web and the Return of Investment is not realized.  With that said, I apply this too to Mobile Technology.  I believe that people are not totally adopting to using healthcare applications on the Web and Mobile Phones.  I think we need to spend time to fix adoption before spending too much more money on healthcare tools in these platforms.

A couple of mobile and web 2.0 healthcare sites that I want to point out:
http://ubiqihealth.com/
http://www.healthrageous.com/
http://www.patientslikeme.com/

Also, http://health2con.com/ is a great group for following health 2.0.

Healthcare Human Resources Shortage - Right Around the Corner

With Health Care Reform coming down the pike, it makes me think of the magnitude of work that we in the Healthcare Industry are working through right now and the huge amount of work that awaits us.  In addition to keeping our Health Insurance Plans current by slowly updating some of our internal system to realize some efficiencies that new technology provides, we are also faced with many government mandates.  For example, we are looking at 5010 by 2012, ICD-10 by 2013, Health Care Reform varied dates through 2016 and in Massachusetts we are working through Small Business Rate Regulation.  All these efforts are gigantic and the number of human resources alone to get this all done will be many.  There will be an issue in the next couple of years of being able to obtain and secure people to work on all these initiatives.  In the Healthcare industry, when we hire for Healthcare resources, we require prior experience in Healthcare.  We all have a start in healthcare and for me, I had to buy a car, drive 60 miles one way each day and get underpaid in order to get into Healthcare.  I tell people that it's like when we hire a Janitor, we even prefer the one that has worked in Healthcare before.  Though sarcastic, there is some part of truth to this.  So with all the initatives that we must implement in the next couple of years, we will have a hard time in the Healthcare Industry to retain good Human Resources.  My suggestion to solve this issue is that we need to start to look outside of Healthcare and hire talented skills and pair these people up with workers already in Healthcare that can direct, so that we can increase the volume of workers in the Healthcare workforce.