5 Tips for Health Care Professionals Using Google+

My G+ Profile

I thought I'd follow up my previous post, "5 Tips for Health Care Professionals Using Facebook," with one for Google+ users. Don't want to seem biased, though I absolutely am.

#1  First, get on Google+

Yep, that's the first tip. If you're not on G+ you're doing yourself a huge disservice, for a number of reasons.

Which brings us to the remaining four tips.

#2  Get in on the conversations

Google+ conversations, discussions, and posts are so much more intelligent and useful than much of the posts on Facebook. Really.

Here are just a few of the recent Google+ posts from a few of my circles. They're typical of the kinds of posts going on here.

#3  Tailor your posts to your specific targets

It's extremely easy to post only to those people you want to post to.  Google+ uses Circles to categorize your contacts. They're really easy to use and enormously helpful in communicating exactly what you want to exactly the people you want. 

Personal posts to friends, professional posts to colleagues, any way you want to slice and dice it.

With Facebook, everything goes to everyone. (Unless you use their ridiculously clunky List functionality. Which, by the way, they stole from Google+. Ugh.)

Circle, though, are pure genius.

#4 Take advantage of Hangouts

Google has been busy the last couple of years buying small application developers and folding their functionality into the Google+ experience, and Hangouts is one of their gems.

With a quick download and extremely easy setup, you can use the Skype-lke Hangouts to visually communicate with family, friends, and colleagues, up to ten at a time. You can hold virtual conferences from a desktop, laptop, or tablet computer.

Very, very powerful.

#5  Promote yourself or your work

Google+ is perfect for sharing information about the work you've been doing or are interested in. You'll find the Google+ community inviting and encouraging. And growing.

That's one of the criticisms I hear all the time, that Google+ is a ghost town. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There are some fantastic health care-related professionals and other resources using Google+ frequently. So if getting information about your project "out there" is important, you need to post not just on Facebook but on Google+ too.

I think you'll find, as I do, that Google+ is an incredibly powerful application and professionally engaging community. For the kinds of information and commentary health care professionals tend to look post and for most, Google+ beats Facebook hands down.

And no, I'm not being paid by Google to say all this stuff. Google+ really is all that and a banana sandwich.

5 Tips for Health Care Professionals Using Facebook

More and more health care professionals, students, and faculty are using Facebook to gather and share information.

I encourage my authors to get on Facebook too (and also Google+, but I'll address only Facebook here, because Google+ is such a different experience), to help get the word out about their book and to interact with the markets they serve.

The more health care professionals using Facebook, the better. Their posts can increase our knowledge of  health care trends and research and encourage a sense of shared community.

However, just as Facebook can help health care professionals, so can it hurt them.

Here are five tips for using Facebook safely and effectively.

#1  Post links and information your Facebook friends will most likely appreciate.

Posting a link to results from a new study or commenting on a news article you've found informative make for great posts for other health care professionals. To help all your friends decide which posts are right for them, try to include a kind of pointer in your post.

For instance, if a post deals with, say, pediatric emergencies, you might preface the post with something like, "For my friends interested in pediatrics..."

Pointing out the "market" for the post helps your friends concentrate on the most appropriate posts for them.

#2  Post as a professional.

You're a professional or working to become one, so post that way. Even if you post principally for your friends and co-workers, be professional.

You just never know who will read a post ... or when.

Be kind, courteous, articulate. No profanity, no nastiness, no personal criticisms.

Do right by your profession, and Facebook will treat you well. Do wrong, and it will at some point bite you in the buttocks.

#3  Post images wisely.

Be aware that any photo, illustration, graph, or any other type of image you've created and subsequently post to Facebook immediately becomes the property of Facebook. It's not yours anymore.

If that photo you post belonged originally to someone else — say, your hospital or doctor's office — and you didn't have permission to post it, you would be guilty of copyright infringement.

Along those same lines, never "tag" someone in an image without their permission, even if it's a close friend or a co-worker you know well. That person may very well resent having their face identified to people they don't know.

Facebooking should never interfere with friendships.

#4  Use e-mail, not Facebook, for private matters.

I can't tell you the number of times I've seen highly personal information posted on someone's Facebook wall rather than as a message. (The following quotations are fake but similar to many I've seen.)

• "My mother is having surgery to remove her uterus tomorrow at Main City Center Hospital. I hope everything goes well."
• "Jane Doe, I'm heading over to the Bel-Air Lounge for a few drinks. Want to join me?"
• "I'm looking for a babysitter for this Saturday night to go to a party. Know anyone who can do it?"

Seriously? First, does everyone on your Friends list need to know about your mother? Has she said it's okay to tell the world?

Remember, every single thing you post to your wall or on your friend's wall belongs to the world.

And so on, and so on, and so on.

You might think that post is going only to your friends, but you would be wrong. That's how posts on Facebook, videos on YouTube, and tons of other pieces of content posted to a social media site "go viral."

You post to your wall, and a friends reads it. And then one of their friends reads it. And so on. And so on. And so on.

Stick to e-mail, or at the  least a Facebook message.

#5  Handle taboo topics carefully.

It's funny, but for some reason Facebook seems to bring out the worst in people. People often feel quite free to bring up topics they would never bring up at a party, such as politics, religion, gay marriage, or similar hot-button issues.

But on Facebook, they're fair game. If you're a health professional, and certainly if you're a student in a health professions program, please choose your issues and comments wisely.

I say that not because of the standard reason, that a current or future employer might see the post and fire you or not hire you, though that's a good reason too. I say it also so you can avoid alienating the very people you're trying to communicate with.

Case in point. The recent happenings with the Chick-fil-A chain prompted a huge number of posts from people on all sides of the issue.

People wanted to speak out, let their friends know their opinion, promote their "cause," and otherwise put forward their thoughts and feelings on the topic. But how many of their Facebook friends disagreed? How many felt hurt or anger at those posts?

Most likely far more than the Facebooker knows.

Now, posting opinions is part of what social media is all about. But if you're a health care professional, you have an additional obligation to put forward rationed and reasoned opinions.

Rightly or wrongly, impassioned or inflammatory posts can be seen by superiors, colleagues, and patients as being indicative of how you handle yourself as a professional.

Don't let Facebook dismantle what you've worked so hard to build — your reputation as a professional.

Niche Publishing in Health Care Education

Lenny Kravitz

Lenny Kravitz might not need to fit into any particular niche, but health care textbooks certainly do.

Publishers identify each book's particular niche, or market segment, during the earliest stages of development, typically during concept development. We need to figure out who will buy the book before we can actually write the book.

We work to identify markets that offer the greatest opportunity for sales. We love when a book can appeal to a large market. Wheeee!

Some books, though, are made to appeal to a small market. Those might be a tougher sell to a publisher.

Consider two examples:

1. Textbook A is designed for physician assistants (PAs) in the U.S., a market of roughly 84,000. Capturing even 10 percent of that market could prove profitable for a publisher.
2. Textbook B is designed for PAs working in pediatric ophthalmology offices, of which there might be, I don't know, a few hundred? That would be a considerably tougher sell for most publishers.

That doesn't mean that Textbook B would never be published, but it does mean that the author will have to be more diligent in finding just the right publisher.

Authors Are Humans Too

Authors aren't robots, they're human. Oh, well.

We textbook publisher-types tend to be a patient lot. We work with authors who, as it turns out, are human.

Humans get sick. They get pregnant. They have babies.

They care for aging or ill parents.

They lose their jobs or have to take on more and more responsibilities in less and less time.

They're busy, and busy people don't always do as much as they want to do, don't complete everything they want to complete.

Go figure.

So we wait. We nudge. We cajole, tease, and yes, sometimes threaten. (Though, truth be told, that almost never works.)

We do our best to protect the publishing company's interests, but in the end, we're dealing with humans.

A colleague at a project update meeting once jokingly said, when discussing some of the travails yet another author was experiencing, that he (let's make the person male this time around, shall we?) had had it with authors. From now on, he would have a new rule: "No heart attacks. No pregnancies. No babies. Welcome to F.A. Davis!"

We all roared because we knew exactly what he was talking about.

Life happens. And when it happens to authors, we publisher-types wait it out and hope for the best.

Because we're human too.

Dang it.

The Six Content Categories for the Holy Grail of E-Textbook Publishing

In my previous blog I talked about the holy grail of e-textbook publishing and why we need to create content not as a single unit that flows from a topic introduction through to a summary but as non-linear, compartmentalized chunks of related content. We're not doing that now, but we need to start soon.

Our ability to create content as non-linear chunks and then to present them to the user in a truly useful electronic environment depends on the ability to identify one type of content from another. In essence, we need to be able to categorize types of content differently than we're doing now.

Here's a list of the six key content categories I envision being used for health care e-textbooks, presented here in no particular order save the last, the most important content category of all.

#1: Process

Process content would consist of steps in a procedure, routine, or sequence, as well as key supportive text. We create a lot of process content in health care textbooks, particularly in such topics as:

• Medical coding and billing
• Assessment
• Clinical procedures (hand washing, transferring a patient, performing lavage, and many others)
• Administrative procedures

#2: Reference

Reference content would consist of items that support the main textual content, including:

• Charts
• Graphs
• Diagrams
• External links
• Definitions

#3: Pedagogical

Any activity or learning exercise to be completed by the student would fall into this category. In addition, heuristic information, such as learning objectives evaluative outcomes, would also fall into the pedagogical category. Pedagogical content would therefore include:

• Multiple-choice, true-false, short answer, or any other type of test item
• Learning or behavioral objectives
• Learning outcomes
• Relevant standards or competencies for accrediting organizations

#4: Supportive

Sidebar-type content that supports the main text but is secondary to it would be considered supportive text, including:

• Thematic sidebars, which typically make use of a special icon and cover the same topic, such as legal issues, patient education, safety tips, alerts, and so forth
• Non-thematic sidebars, which typically consist of stand-alone boxes of content
• Case studies or scenario-type situations

#5: Administrative

This category would consist of content that provides functionality support, navigational support, and other kinds of content that carry no clinical information. This includes:

• Navigational links
• Directions for functionality
• Help content for site

#6: Core

While all of the other types of content would allow students to wander through the e-text pretty much as they wish, core content would consist of the most important content every student must view and use. Core content would require special functionality that forced, in a way, students down a particular path of inquiry.

This kind of content might prove most difficult to develop because it requires authors to identify the most fundamental concepts for any particular topic area. It's critical, though, that those concepts be not only identified but also developed in such a way as to allow for focused learning.

To identify and develop this content, authors should look at what in a printed book would be, of all places, the summary.

Certainly the six content types outlined here are just the beginning. They need to be discussed, dissected, added to, and amended as needed.

My goal here is to present a foundation for moving forward into the next and essential level of e-textbook development. I hope it's at least a small start in that direction.

The Holy Grail of E-Textbook Publishing

Every time I turn around, it seems, we in educational publishing are discussing the impact of e-textbooks and how they're perceived by the market. We talk about how to sell them, package them, promote them.

But we're talking about the cart before we've figured out how to move the horse. To move the horse we need to completely rethink how we develop textbooks and, most specifically, how we generate content in the first place.

Retrofitting content

Right now, textbook publishers are generally taking already-developed content and merging it with whatever electronic content we can find. Basically, we're retrofitting printed content into an electronic format.

Oh, sure, we try to make all that content pretty and "intuitive," but we're retrofitting it nonetheless. Right now, I think that's pretty much all we can do.

Eventually, though, and I hope sooner rather than later, we need to start developing content specifically and only for electronic delivery. No easy task.

Deconstructing content

To create truly useful electronic content we need to completely deconstruct the way we write books, and then build out with an entirely new approach, one that starts with a summary and then branches from there.

Let me explain.

When you sit down to write a chapter in a textbook, you start with a global concept and then start breaking down that concept into its many disparate pieces. Let's call these pieces of content chunks.

The process works perfectly for print, with the reader delving deeper and deeper into the chunks and each subsequent concept opening itself to discovery. Then, at the end of each chapter, we summarize what was discussed, highlighting each key concept.

We've been trying to do the same thing with e-books, and we've been failing miserably.

Students find retrofitted e-books disjointed and incomplete. They find it hard to follow the flow, and it's little wonder. We can't expect a student to follow a flow of information that has been lifted from a textbook and force-fed into a pretty software shell.

No, we need to write the content specifically for that delivery, and that's one tall order.

Creating content

To create a truly useful e-textbook, we need authors who can write about complex and comprehensive topics in ways that go against pretty much everything they know about writing.

Logical flow from one concept to the next? Not so much.

Gradual building of concepts one on the other? Nah.

Overall organization from head-to-toe, inside-to-outside, normal-to-pathological? Ho-hum.

What we need to create instead are non-linear, compartmentalized, almost blog-like chunks of content that can be manipulated in a variety of ways by the learner. Here's how it would work:

• For linear learners, we would present the content electronically in a mostly linear way, much like a book, with links and other "off-shoot" functionality for related content always at hand.
• For visual learners, we would present the content in a highly visual way, perhaps using concept maps that allow the learner to navigate through the area based on what they'd like to learn, when, and how.
• For auditory learners, we would provide key concepts in audible and written format and allow them to navigate through the content through audible cues.

In short, we need to create content in such a way that it can be used by the end user  — the learner  — anyway they want it while still providing an effective learning environment. We just can't do that by retrofitting content from a printed textbook. It will take more, something new, and something revolutionary.

I think this new process is the holy grail of textbook publishing, and I for one can't wait for it to evolve.