Game On! Enliven Content with Game Dynamics

Anyone remember eWorld?  It was Apple’s attempt to create a search engine that was visual and fun. It didn’t work out, but Apple was ahead of its time in the mid-1990s. Now the time may just be right for eWorld-like next-gen visual and fun business information services.

I spoke of the dual advantages of applying techniques from the online game segment to enhance the engagement level of content and to collect more data about audience at InfoCommerce Group’s Data Content11 conference earlier this month.  The full presentation with video can be found here (minutes 4:30-12:32).

The presentation includes parallels from healthcare where companies like PatientsLikeMe are matching members of their patient community sites with relevant clinical trials. This is just one example of an online publisher that is serving as a matchmaker between its audience and researchers and creating value to all stakeholders as a result.

I saw eyes light up during my talk when I introduced the topic of applying game dynamics[1] to B2B and consumer health content to increase the engagement level and make the audience more valuable to researchers.  A “game layer” for business and consumer health information may seem inappropriate at first glance, but I suggest that borrowing some of the best features of popular games to make content more engaging, easier to navigate, and more personalized can pay dividends. The secondary benefits of collecting more information about your audience and their preferences as they interact with more responsive content are significant, too. Again to use examples from healthcare, if your audience includes the leading experts in a specialty area or a large group of patients with a specific disease or set of symptoms, serving as a matchmaker between your audience and market research firms could represent a new revenue stream, especially if you have compiled data that can be used to segment the audience better than alternatives that currently exist.

I thought of eWorld when I saw HumanaVille, on online resource for seniors who are Humana members. As I mention in my presentation, I’m not sure that a fun visual online interface is the answer to getting seniors engaged online, but it’s worth a try, especially if the alternative is a typical online directory. 

[1] For a primer on game dynamics, see this post: http://tomhumbarger.wordpress.com/tag/scvngr-game-dynamics-playbook/

Using Data Content to Build a Patient-Centric Healthcare System

Every healthcare industry pundit seems to be talking about healthcare data: big data, data analytics, patient-generated data, population health data, predictive data, and more. Variations on the theme of: “data, data everywhere, but not a [fill in the blank]” are cropping up all over the place at healthcare conferences. We all agree that electronic medical records, large-scale medical research studies, and devices for recording health and wellness metrics are generating more data, but the expertise for managing the data is in short supply.

At InfoCommerce Group, we understand that data by themselves don’t solve problems, but well-managed data can be programmed to serve any number of purposes. We call it “data that can do stuff”.

Applying best practices for data management requires planning and effort. Quantity without quality will get us nowhere. Join us for the Healthcare Roundtable discussion at Data Content11 next week and participate in a lively conversation about how we can corral the expanding sources of health data, “leverage the liberated data” as I wrote in September, and create a collaborative learning system that establishes a robust base for the next generation of evidence-based medicine and shared decisionmaking between patients, providers and payers. 

Stay Tuned for Health 2.0 Coverage

This blog took a hiatus in August, but will be back in force for the remainder of September. I’ll be attending the annual Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco next week and look forward to some related events starting on Friday, September 23 (HealthCamp SF Bay), the Rock Health BootCamp on Saturday, and the pre-conference Patients 2.0 meeting on Sunday.

Health Content Advisors is a media sponsor of Health 2.0 this year, so watch for daily updates to this blog, along with my Twitter feed @janicemccallum that will post more frequent updates from the meetings.  Follow the conference hashtag #health2con for updates from the entire group of attendees.

On the topic of conferences, the InfoCommerce annual event, Data Content11, is coming up soon (November 2-4) in Philadelphia. As always, some healthcare companies will be represented on the program, but the focus is on the broader issue of how to build successful data publishing businesses. This year’s conference program theme is: Cloud, Crowd, and Curation.  Join us for B2B data publishing’s best networking event and to learn from our Models of Excellence companies how to create and sustain high value data businesses.

For those who want to know more about Data Content11, please contact me at jmccallum@infocommercegroup.com.  Or, drop me a line if you want to meet up in San Francisco.

How Is Healthcare Like Construction?

At the InfoCommerce Group’s Data Content 2010 conference last week, Per Lofving from McGraw Hill’s construction group, Sweets, described how a literal trailer-full of paper is left behind at the end of big construction projects.  Automated applications exist in construction, but they don’t speak to each other, so printouts are used to deliver information from one party to the next.  My immediate thought was “oh, there’s another industry besides healthcare that is still dead-tree based“. 

Lofving was joined by Mike Collins from Autodesk and they described how they partnered to integrate data from Sweets into Building Information Modeling (BIM) applications offered by Autodesk. Two key points stood out during this presentation:

1. Lofving described how B2B trade publishers have historically been very proprietary with the data they aggregate, even though it could be used to improve workflow in the industry if provided in the appropriate formats. 
2. Collins described Autodesk as a data business.  He said they get categorized as a software business, but in actuality, they should be classified as a data business because the modeling software integrates industry specifications and offers a data-driven workflow solution to builders.

In healthcare, the number of guideline publishers may exceed the number in the construction industry, but the construction case study illustrates how publishers could partner with “software” companies to create workflow solutions for their customers.  Yes, the information they provide may be useful in its current format, but it could be even more valuable to the industry if it were integrated with application software to provide true workflow solutions (e.g., clinical decision support systems).  Also, the health IT vendors need to become more aware of the existing sources of clinical information provided by healthcare publishers that aggregate, index, archive, update, and distribute clinical information.  There remains work to be done in formatting data for delivery to IT applications, but that level of detail can be worked out during partnering negotiations.  The healthcare industry and all of us will be better off when health IT and healthcare publishers create stronger partnerships.