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mHealth Summit: Health Gets Mobile

mHealth Summit: A Summit on Mobile Technologies as a Platform for Health Research and Healthcare Delivery

October 29-30, 2009, Ronald Reagan Building, Washington, DC

From Reuters:

2009 Inaugural mHealth Summit Brings Together Health, Technology and Policy Communities to Advance Technological Innovation in Global Healthcare

From the event website:

The mHealth Summit, a public-private partnership of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, will focus on mobile technologies as a platform for health research and healthcare delivery.

• Information on the agenda, presentations, and accomodations

About the mHealth Summit

The two-day event will explore the role of biomedical research as the driver for the development of compelling applications based on mobile technology. The Summit will bring together 450 to 600 U.S. and international researchers, technology experts, and policymakers in the public sector, as well as those from academia, industry, and NGOs to:

• Assess current policies regarding mobile health technologies and their use in reducing or eliminating domestic and global health disparities
• Build bridges between the scientific community and mobile technology developers to identify mHealth solutions
• Highlight scientific opportunities and challenges in using mobile technologies to improve public health
• Discuss and craft a vision for the development and use of mobile technologies in the future

The agenda will include several case study tracks, as well as panel discussions that address broad themes related to mobile technologies as tools for research and improving health. The mHealth Summit program committee has announced a call for presentations and is seeking case studies that describe current or completed research projects using mobile technologies to improve research data collection, healthcare delivery, health outcomes, and/or health and science education. All NIH Institutes and Centers are strongly urged to encourage researchers from their intramural and extramural communities to submit presentation abstracts.

Current partnering Institutes and Centers include:

• Fogarty International Center (FIC)
• National Cancer Institute (NCI)
• National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD)
• National Center on Research Resources (NCRR)
• National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
• National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB)
• National Library of Medicine (NLM)

Sponsors

The mHealth Summit is sponsored by FNIH in partnership with the NIH, the U.S. State Department, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the United Nations Foundation & Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, and the World Bank. Supporting industry members are Microsoft Research, the Abbott Fund, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer, Inc.

The U.S. NIH (National Institutes of Health) provides additional information on each day’s sessions, and a link to a live RealVideo stream, as well. The free RealMedia player is required to view this stream.

View the mHealth Summit live video stream (Runtime 570 minutes)

From NIH’s website:

Summit Mission
The mission of the mHealth Summit is to explore the use of mobile technologies to improve public health, particularly regarding underserved populations; health research, training, and education applications; and delivery systems, in the U.S. and around the world.

Summit Overview
Mobile technologies have the potential to transform global health care on many fronts, from research and diagnostics to training and preventative interventions. Targeting experts from such diverse fields as medical research, software design, clinical health care, hardware manufacture and network transmission, the summit hopes to spur development and deployment of innovative, practical, affordable and effective solutions to health challenges in underserved and resource-poor populations.
In addition to reviewing current tools and research from a wide spectrum of stakeholders, the summit will foster inter-disciplinary collaboration that could identify entirely new opportunities that team existing mobile-industry companies with emerging public health facilitators.

Summit Goals

Start time: Thursday, October 29, 2009 8:00 AM EDT (-0400)

In addition, you can follow (and contribute) on Twitter to the live tweetstream for the Mobile Health Summit Both both days via the #mhs09 hashtag.

Tags: ATA, cellular, crisis, DHS, Emergency, FEMA, flu, FrontlineSMS, H1N1, health, Healthcare, mHealth, mobile, NIH, Nixle, pandemic, preparedness, ptsd, sms, swine flu, TBI, telemedicine, underserved, WAP, web, wireless

Creating Talkable Brands: Beyond Social Media 101

What makes a brand truly conversation-worthy? Or, If your organization’s social media initiatives have reached a point of diminishing returns – or never gotten past square one, what’s the secret to success? Your mileage may vary,  but the answer may also be pretty straightforward: video.

Courtesy of my friends at WOMMA, I came across this new video of Jeben Berg, Creative Director at YouTube, discussing how to effectively leverage and promote your organization’s video assets. (Yes, a video about video.)

He clearly “gets” the concept of video as an effective means to initiate and focus discussion on brands. He also understands it’s a potent  force multiplier when used in combination with other forms of text-based social media (discussion forums, blogs, wikis) and static web content.

SEO: It’s Not Just for Text Anymore

I think you’ll particularly appreciate his concise summary of what I’ve advised clients: namely, the importance of going the extra mile to incorporate rich, accurate tagging of video (and even the ALT tags for static images) with descriptive Meta keyword data for Search engine Optimization (SEO) purposes, so that your content actually gets found by people who are searching for what you have to offer.

Remember, YouTube’s a part of Google now. Those lovely little video thumbnails that appear in your Google searches are directly keyed to the Meta data you provide. What’s more, your diligence about proper tagging now will stand you in good stead for the emerging semantic web.

Yes, markets are conversations, and conversations are all about ideas, and the actions that flow directly from them: Purchase. Contribute. Enlist. Enroll. Volunteer. Vote.

So, if a picture’s worth a thousand words, video is worth at least ten thousand. Strategically incorporating relevant, high-quality video content is far more than just a contrivance or “conversation starter,” Rather, it can be one of the most effective  (and, yes, authentic) ways to initiate discussion on your brand’s, product, service or cause in online communities of shared interest or practice.  That’s creating a truly “talkable” organizational or personal brand, whose key concepts can be incorporated directly into social/SEO-optimized PR and strategic communications, as well.

Although he doesn’t address it specifically, the inherent, potential Word-of-Mouth/Word-of-Tweet virality of video content is a critical point, here, as well, especially when combined with a specific call-to-action.

Got Video? Unlocking the Value of Existing Assets

U.S. Marine Corps Combat Videographer

In my experience, many organizations have un/underutilized video content they’ve never considered putting online – either on the public internet, or internally, as appropriate. Conference presentations, training sessions (sales, safety procedures), HR orientation and much more can be leveraged for cost savings, knowledge capture,  and to create consistent training protocols.

For one client, I worked with their internal IT, risk management and marketing teams to create a virtual “academy” or “university” (complete with its own  logo done in collegiate-style lettering) within their existing corporate Intranet.  This resource relied heavily on existing, internally-produced video content that was timely and relevant, but had been relegated to DVDs that stayed at the clients’  headquarters, where they had spent most of their time stuck in their cases.

As this organization had 20+ locations, (each of which were sending their management teams and new recruits/hires to the main offices for training), it made economic and operational sense to rip this video content, consistent with its licensing from DVD (and even a few analog VHS tapes) to digital video files. These were then converted to streaming Flash (.flv) web video. This achieved the following:

• unlocked the value of its existing investments in video content at minimal cost
• enabled video to be integrated with socially-enabled intranet and extranet based training resources
• saved over $75,000 in annual travel costs through remote training, and created consistency of information presented

Want to learn more? Get in touch.

In the interim, I encourage you to check out the Jeben Berg video below. It’s 2:30 well invested.

Tags: branding, Cluetrain, community, corporate, cost savings, data, extranet, Flash, flv, Google, intranet, km, knowledge management, Marketing, META, PR, search, search engines, SEM, semantic, SEO, streaming, training, video, videography, web, womma, word of mouth, YouTube