The Buzz around Ideaworks Amsterdam

When Google Buzz went live last night, it was almost the perfect answer to one of the main questions that preoccupied the Ideaworks 2010 event held yesterday.

So many delegates and speakers reiterated the role that social media will play in the delivery of better outcomes and patient care in the next decade. And while there's a huge amount of excitement around this trend, there's still a great deal of discussion about how this will evolve.

That's where I think Buzz has given us some important insights.

Let's start with the obvious. I heard one colleague describe Buzz as Facebook for grown ups. That's definitely an improvement, certainly for the many of us who find that managing privacy and blocking unwanted content is too complicated and tedious on the world's most popular social media platform.

And it certainly has a pick and mix flavour to it. But then again you can't blame Google for choosing the best of what's out there already, and then layering it over existing services, such as Picasa, which were under threat from Facebook's new photo upload tool. 

So a future in healthcare? Maybe with early professional adopters. Buzz is certainly a very elegant tool for public or group discussion. It has a simple, clean UX, which might make it suitable for professional to professional, or even professional to patient conversations (think Google Wave but much more accessible to the general user).  I also think it's going to be great for real time chat - my experience so far is that comments appear instantaneously. And possibly even crowd sourcing. 

Going back to the conversation with delegates at the Ideaworks event, there was a growing sense that the medical profession and social media are evolving slowly towards a common ground. Lucien Engelson, one of our keynote speakers from the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, put it nicely. "There's a growing community of e-patients holding a mirror to professional healthcare. We have to take a look at ourselves." Good point. The sooner we learn how to manage patient expectations and treat them like consumers the better. Buzz is certainly a good step for learning how to make this happen.