Only Connect....

 

Connecting people up is what Patient Opinion is all about. Connecting the insight and wisdom of past patients to future patients. Sending your story to the ward, and then getting their response back to you and the local PCT.  That’s what we do.   

 

So it was great to read hear Nicholas Christakis talking about his latest work on social networks on the RSA down load service. Christakis is a medic at Harvard but also a sociologist who has spent the past 15 year studying social networks.

Turns out that all sorts of things can be seen ‘flowing’ through networks – including many sorts of behaviour. If I’m obese then it’s more likely that my friends will be obese. What’s more if my friend’s friend is obese then I’m more likely to be obese. And the same effect works for happiness, or drug use, or altruism. People who know each other face to face create similar patterns of behaviour in each other and this effect is detectable for up to 3 degrees of friendship – in other words in friends of friends of friends who of course have mostly never met each other. Which is weird but if nothing else shows how profoundly social humans are.

 

So what’s this got to do with Patient Opinion? Well we’re thinking of making some of our connections more visible to everyone. First we want to explore letting ‘friends and family’ follow a particularly story. These will be people who the author has invited to follow their story and who have clicked ‘Yes’ on the invitation. Every time there is a response to a story these people will be notified of it, just like the original author is. We would then display the number of Friend and Families that were following each story.

Second we're thinking of doing the same for organisations and other stakeholders. So if the PCT, the hospital and the local LINk are getting automatically notified of that particular story then you‘ll be able to see them just by clicking on the ‘Who’s tracking this story?’ button. That way it’s clear to everyone whether we’ve succeeded in getting any given story to just the right people who need to hear it.

 

But perhaps we should let anyone, any member of the public, follow any story. Surely that could be even more effective. But Christakis work on networks indicates that this isn’t so. It might be gratifying to know that 63 people (or 263) are following your story  but FaceBook ‘friends’ are not real friends (and do not exert Christaki’s's network effects on each other). So what we’re really interested in at Patient Opinion is how to leverage each author’s network of ‘real’ friends and families on behalf of their story. And from the hospital’s point of view knowing that the mini-network of highly involved people around each story see the hospital's great response and the changes that have been made means they are likely to become real ambassadors for the hospital. Even when if in the original story things didn’t go so well.