Hive Health

Around 2,000 teenagers and young adults in the UK are diagnosed with cancer every year. These vulnerable patients often feel isolated, bitter, confused and afraid as they struggle to come to terms with and overcome a life-threatening disease.

In recognition of the difficulties young cancer patients face, eyeforpharma are hosting their first annual Mobile Health Competition. Applicants must submit an idea for a phone application that will help teenage cancer patients manage their condition and make their lives easier. To help pick the winning idea eyeforpharma have created their very own super panel, comprised of teenage cancer survivors and charitable bodies.

The competition is open to anyone working for a pharmaceutical company, advertising agency, healthcare organisation, as well as patients themselves. The winner will have the opportunity to develop their application and see it launched. They will also win $5,000, which they can donate to a cancer charity of their choice.

The Teenager Cancer Trust, PatientsLikeMe, LIVESTRONG Young Adult Alliance, and a host of other charitable, patient, and mobile specialist companies have partnered with eyeforpharma for the competition.

Here at Hive we welcome any initiatives aimed at improving patient care and engagement, so we urge you to get involved and spread the word.

The closing date for entries is January 3rd 2012. 

http://www.eyeforpharma.com/mobilehealth/

A few months ago, a new programme called Ngram Viewer graduated from Google labs. This tool, which sits within Google books, allows you to see how often phrases have occurred in the world’s books over the years. Google have digitalised over 15 million books, that’s almost 12% of all books ever published. With Ngram viewer you can now graph the occurrence of phrases up to five words in length from the year 1400 through to 2008 across 5.2 million books. With the Ngram Viewer you graph and compare phrases from these datasets over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years and rapidly quantifying cultural trends.

There are lots of different things you can check but you need to careful when interpreting your results. Experts warn that some effects are due to changes in the language we use to describe things (such as ‘The Great War’ vs. ‘World War I’). Others are due to actual changes in what interests us (‘slavery’ peaks during the Civil War and again during the era of the Civil Rights movement.)

So what can the Ngram viewer tell us about healthcare? Well it seems that the words ‘doctor’ and ‘hospital’ have had a similar cultural presence from 1800 to the present day. In comparison the use of the word ‘patient’ has steadily increased with a massive boost post-1950.  Most interesting is the word ‘health’, which had a huge cultural presence in the 1600s followed by a dramatic slump in the early 1700s. It’s been increasing ever since.

Go and try the tool yourself, or have a look at what other people have searched for on the Ngrams Tumblelog. 

Scoop.it, a tool that lets one and all hunt, gather and distribute content from around the Web launched publicly today after a year in an invite-only beta.

We were lucky enough to be one of the beta babes and we have been curating Patient Centricity News for a couple of months now.  Its dead straightforward, and is backed by a plum algorithm that once seduced helps you find relevant articles and videos. It cracked the automated pitfalls of death by junk content by leaving the curator to choose what’s right for them, and its this for me that has made the Scoop.it experience so fresh.

As “curation” becomes the next buzz word it been a joy to be part of the big beta crowd.  With more than 2 million visits per month, and traffic is growing by 35 percent month, we look forward to reviewing load more healthcare comms publications.

Our Luke pinged me this.  Tight scriptwriting, great acting and a relevant story.

I saw a great candidate last night for a first round interview. Watching this made me think that alongside the CV, interview notes and discussions with people in the know, we are increasingly assessing candidates by who they are online. In the old days we might do a quick university phone around, or chat to someone whose experience had crossed with the candidate’s CV. Later this moved to  a quick Facebook check to see whether the candidate was fun, and you know, well, sociable.

These days we pretty much audit a future one of us online. In days gone by this was prorata by seniority; the bigger the kid the more we would expect but now it’s an even assessment regardless of level. A slot in the diary figuring out who we have in common, what they have worked on, whether we cross over on an occasional dragon and their day to day social media interaction and level of connectedness

This film asks the question whether that is fair, whether its important to know whether a colleagues has a penchant for spending most of their free time drunk in fountains (you know who you are). O