Your new job: Health 2.0 guide

As a story in today's issue notes, the road to Health 2.0 is a slippery one. On the one hand, providers can clearly benefit from having more fluid interactions with patients. On the other hand, the more exposure to the public increases, the greater risk that someone will slip up and say something inappropriate, post the wrong file or disclose patient information inadvertently.

While some of these problems don't fall within the IT department's jurisdiction--it's a bit beyond your control if a drunken intern posts pictures of himself on Facebook swilling from a beer hat--you do have a role to play.

For one thing, you can help end users understand the range of options out there and explain how the technologies work. The content may be Marketing's department, but helping users get comfortable with important applications is ultimately your job. Even something as simple as interactive discussion may need more documentation and training than you expected. Some managers assume that since Facebook et al are consumer applications, that's it's clear how they work and how to best use them. Well, it isn't.

If your hospital, health system or medical group has decided to take social media seriously, you may also find yourself in the role of social-media evangelist and guide. A recent study by Gartner notes that many social media projects are failing because IT managers wrongly believed that successful communities would spontaneously form after social software tools were installed. In fact, they've found that 70 percent of social media-based communities fail to blossom on their own.

According to Gartner, you and your business management colleagues will need to choose a core purpose for the community--and arrange your implementation of the social software to achieve that purpose. Otherwise, what you get may not be productive. Gartner has found that of the 30 percent of communities that do coalesce on their own, many end up focused on interactions that don't provide business value, and may even be counterproductive.

Yet another key role you can play is to make sure your administrative colleagues know what the risks are (such as reputation-damaging photos, or worse--gossip about patients) of staffers going online, and to help them develop policies to fend off such behavior. Your administrators may be hitting Twitter and Facebook every day, but they may be in the dark about all of this, so they could very well need your help.

Social media applications are here to stay, and even if they leave healthcare organizations a bit more exposed, they offer big opportunities to help clinicians, staffers and patients share knowledge. But as your organization transitions into using them, it's going to need people who are willing to guide it through these waters. For the time being, it looks like you're elected. - Anne