Over at techPresident earlier this week, Sifry wrote about the impact of public engagement in the (online) conversation about health reform leading up to the approval of the landmark bill to overhaul the U.S. health system. As part of the Obama administration’s push for greater transparency, Congress has started posting major bills online 72 hours before the final vote. And public debate over health care reform is more out in the open than ever with blogs on both the left and right sides stating their arguments.

“Did all this increased transparency and participation make the bill more or less popular with the public? Did it make legislators more or less likely to vote for it? Those are the hard questions to answer,” Sifry says.

The role of the internet and social media in health care developments is something we’re quite interested in, and I’m interested in what Think Social readers think. How do you think conversation on online platforms or communities will affect the process of actually implementing this health system makeover? Comment below or tweet to let us know — or better yet, write for us.

The communities in Sunderland, Durham and Teesside have seen an uptick in cases of the sexually transmitted disease, especially in women, says the UK’s Telegraph.

According to Peter Kelly, a health official in Teesside:

He said: “Syphilis is a devastating disease. Anyone who has unprotected sex with casual partners is at high risk.

“There has been a fourfold increase in the number of syphilis cases detected with more young women being affected.

“I don’t get the names of people affected, just figures, and I saw that several of the people had met sexual partners through these sites.

“Social networking sites are making it easier for people to meet up for casual sex.”

If this doesn’t sound like a not-quite-right game of connect the dots (veering into the domain of Facebook trend stories), I don’t know what does. Panic about people’s sexual activities and proclivities and how they are serviced by social networking and mobile technologies is nothing new. A few months ago, David Brooks opined in the New  York Times on how cell phones have changed the way dating works in America, for the worst; his column was inspired by a New York magazine analysis of its popular “sex diary” series, in which anonymous New Yorkers write about their daily goings-on, in bed and elsewhere, often coordinated by social networking sites, texts and emails.  About this generation’s sexting degenerates, Brooks wrote,  ”It illustrates an interesting roadblock in the country’s social evolution.”

But a more constructive dialogue is how doctors, organizations and patients are using social media and mobile technology to open up conversation about health and disease, including sexual health matters. Take a look at some promising examples after the jump

Hello Health, started by Jay Parkinson in 2007, combines housecalls, web video calls, instant messaging and email communication between doctors and patients. Originally launched in Brooklyn, the Hello Health network has expanded in the last year to include doctors in Tennessee, California and Connecticut.

Members pay an hourly rate for IM, video and housecalls directly through the Hello Health web site, a special interface created by Parkinson and engineers at Myca Health Inc.; some doctors also have monthly “membership” fees. Your insurance will cover services like x-rays if it allows you to see out-of-network doctors — which is the tricky part.

But what has magazines and health journals lauding the Hello Health concept, and calling Parkinson “Dr. IM,” is the connectedness of it all. Imagine seeing your doctor in your own living room (either in the flesh, or over web cam), then checking in as you go through treatment. Imagine emailing, instead of calling and being put on hold. Imagine following your neighborhood health clinic on Twitter.

. . . . .

As a social networking platform, PatientsLikeMe is an online community where members can share their stories about living with diseases like ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), Parkinson’s and HIV/AIDs with other patients and doctors; find information on treatment, with treatment reports and evaluations; search through symptoms; and read up on research being done on diseases affecting them. PatientsLikeMe is made possible by members who volunteer their personal health histories, as well as anonymous data made available for research.

Members create a health profile of their medical history that helps them track their illness over time. The site keeps a tally of the 45,000-and-growing patient community, breaking down the population in terms of age distribution, gender, symptoms and other categories so that visitors to the site can really find other patients like them.

Besides serving as a digital gathering place for patients, the platform also shares the anonymous data to academic institutions and health care providers who are doing research on those diseases.

(See our full profile on PatientsLikeMe, for the 2009 Think Social Awards, here.)

. . . . .

Or consider the PopTech network‘s Project Masiluleke, a system of spreading information on testing and treatment of HIV/AIDs and tuberculosis in South Africa via mobile phones. Since it launched a little over a year ago, the program has attracted international press from Newsweek to El Pais to the Guardian, and praised for its utilization of technology for the cause.  Previously at Think Social, we talked about SMS as a basis for mass communication of key information in the developing world in our Social Media Blueprints trend report.

. . . . .

Luckily for causes ranging from education to health to the environment  many of you already are stealing ideas, language, applications and emerging best practices in social media for the public interest with impressive early results.

In the ThinkSocial Blueprint we just released with your help we have taken a first step at identifying the mostpromising developments in social media and are sharing the emerging lexicon and frameworks that can help all of us scale what is working well. In the coming days we will be breaking the report down and sharing specific concepts individually. This should help them be more digestible, allow us to update each concept with new developments, and stimulate more conversation and feedback.

Here is a list of all the ten concepts we will be featuring in the coming weeks:

• Active Witnesses/ Active Witnessing
• Social Loops/ Social Looping
• Social Production/ Mass Collaboration
• Social Alignment/ Social Aligning
• Social Transactions/ Social Transacting
• Flash Activism/Instant Mobile Organizing
• Internet Censoring and Monitoring
• Causecasting
• Open Government/ Open Source Government
• Leapfrogging & Digital Divide 2.0

We will also begin to more regulary share links to new developments in social media for public purpose — so if you have developments that youbelieve are important please share them.

VOTE

Name: PatientsLikeMe

Nominated Category: Organization

URL: http://www.patientslikeme.com

Area: Social network, Health and Medicine, Research

About:

Founded in 2004 by three MIT engineers, PatientsLikeMe is a privately funded company dedicated to helping patients with life-changing illnesses, on multiple fronts.

Description:

As a social networking platform, PatientsLikeMe is an online community where members can share their stories about living with diseases like ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), Parkinson’s and HIV/AIDs with other patients and doctors; find information on treatment, with treatment reports and evaluations; search through symptoms; and read up on research being done on diseases affecting them. PatientsLikeMe is made possible by members who volunteer their personal health histories, as well as anonymous data made available for research.

PatientsLikeMe has also partnered with a diverse group of doctors, pharmaceutical and medical device companies and research organizations. By sharing with these partners the anonymous treatment, symptoms and outcomes data from patients, and allowing them permission-based access to the PatientsLikeMe community, PatientsLikeMe aims to drive further research on diseases.

Partners include nonprofits like Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Schlerosis, DNA research firm 23andMe and academic institutions like the University of Wisconsin’s School of Library and Information Studies. And partnerships are what keep PatientsLikeMe running, financially, too: operating costs are covered by partnerships with healthcare providers that use the data for research on treatment and care.

The PatientsLikeMe web site is geared toward the people that need the help the patients. (There is also a related site for industry partners). Members create a health profile of their medical history that helps them track their illness over time. The site keeps a tally of the 45,000-and-growing patient community, breaking down the population in terms of age distribution, gender, symptoms and other categories so that visitors to the site can really find other patients like them.

In terms of interacting with each other, patients can learn from each in forum discussions, through private messages and profile comments. And the platform keeps evolving: This summer, PatientsLikeMe launched a report series addressing issues in each of the disease communities in the network, inspired by patients input.

The Basics:

WHO: PatientsLikeMe

WHAT: An online community for patients with chronic and terminal illnesses, where people can share their stories with other patients, doctors and organizations; and data partnerships with PatientsLikeMe lead to further research on treatment and medical care.

WHERE: US-based, members can be from all over.

HOW to get involved: Membership is free. Corporations, research institutions and prospective partners can find out how to work with PatientsLikeMe at the partner site. You can also follow PatientsLikeMe goings-on on their blog, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube channel.

WHAT other people are saying:

WIRED article

Fox Business Live

Newsweek magazine

Lina Srivastava is the Principal of Lina Srivastava Consulting, LLC, which focuses on employing strategy, communication and media engagement to create social change. The former Executive Director of Kids with Cameras and the past Interim Executive Director of the Association of Video and Filmmakers, she’s consulted with a wide-ranging group of organizations dedicated to social change, worked with the social networking sites Art Tribes Network and ResistNetwork, and provided support to films such as Born into Brothels, The Devil Came on Horseback and Fire Under the Snow.Lina trained as an attorney at New York University School of Law and is based in New York.

While there is much to be gained by listening to and engaging with the technologists, business leaders and media theorists at the white hot center of social media innovation, there is also much to be gained from engagement with leaders from other fields who are encountering and leveraging social media in their work. The purpose of ThinkSocial is in fact to connect leaders who might not otherwise be connected in order to extend the benefits of these powerful new platforms and applications for public purposes.

Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder and CEO of the Acumen Fund, is certainly one leader from the field of social innovation whom I find incredibly inspiring and thought-provoking. And, we were lucky enough to have her paired with Pat Mitchell at the Paley Center for Media recently for a conversation titled “Building a Movement in an Interconnected World.”

As you will observe from the video we’ve put together, Jacqueline uses the power of examples and personal stories to make the case for greater moral leadership and pragmatic, market-based approaches that enable people to earn their way out of poverty and improve their health. While Jacqueline and the Acumen Fund are the first to admit that Acumen is still relatively small and has much to learn, without question its measurable impact through investments in the developing world is one of the real success stories of social enterprise and a beacon light for future endeavors. But, Jacqueline and Acumen are beacons for more than just social enterprise. Her stories also reveal the importance of social media to development.

Her stories manifest the power of social media to bring about a new global consensus for action on poverty and health — one story, one conversation, one call to action at a time. People can now talk in spite of geographic, economic and ethnic differences. And, with this new capability people – particularly those dedicated to development — are in fact finding tremendous insight and inspiration through their social media interactions because of these differences.

The distance between a social enterprise investor, a program officer, or a policy maker or citizen in the United States and a person in the slums of Kenya or India participating in an economic development or health social enterprise has never been smaller. We can now discuss, highlight and organize around the initiatives that work. Acumen is one such initiative and its use of social media is one such example for how this new capability is radically expanding the circle of social concern we all feel and the possibilities for acting on those concerns in mutually beneficial ways.

Please watch the video (4 Parts) and let us know your thoughts. What examples have you seen that further exemplify social media’s role in helping to affect social change?  Who else should we be highlighting here at ThinkSocial? Which individuals, initiatives or organizations are leading the way in their use of social media in the public interest?

We would love to hear from you!

Building a Movement in an Interconnected World: A Conversation with Jacqueline Novogratz (Part 1)

In the the first part of this talk Jacqueline discusses mainstream media’s coverage of the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 and how it compared to social media and Twitter’s role in connecting Iranian people with the rest of the world following the recent controversial elections.

Building a Movement in an Interconnected World: A Conversation with Jacqueline Novogratz (Part 2)

In Part 2 of this talk Jacqueline talks about Pakistan and the opportunities to create a global community around the people who are trying to create positive and lasting change in the country.  She emphasizes how important journalists are in helping to tell stories, both internally and from the outside and how these stories have the potential to reach more people through social media channels.

Building a Movement in an Interconnected World: A Conversation with Jacqueline Novogratz (Part 3)

In Part 3, Pat Mitchell asks whether we need moral leadership in social media.  Jacqueline discusses how leaders in fact have a moral obligation and need to recognize the responsibility that comes with being ‘connected’.  Jacqueline also talks at length about the Rwanda Genocide and how it would have been significantly different had social media been as prevalent then as it is now.

Building a Movement in an Interconnected World: A Conversation with Jacqueline Novogratz (Part 4)

In the final part of Jacqueline’s discussion with Pat Mitchell, she tells a moving story of an encounter in a Nairobi slum with Jane, a former prostitute, whose dreams of escaping poverty, of becoming a doctor and of getting married were fulfilled in an unexpected way.  She first told this story at TED, however in this version she talks about the role of social media and how it has provided an incredible feedback mechanism, allowing individuals in the Nairobi slum to comment on and discuss her TED talk through sites such as Digg.com.