This case study outlines challenges with content curation for medical and healthcare communities and how customers are using Cronycle to overcome those, enable patients and provide continuous learning environments for healthcare professionals.
Growth of Online Communities
Medical information is becoming increasingly abundant and accessible online. Both patients and medical professionals are being empowered and benefitting tremendously from this. A 2013 report by Pew Internet and American Life Project found 72% of internet users say they looked online for health information of one kind or another within the past year. Thirty-five percent of those specifically searched for medical conditions that they or a loved one might have, primarily for online diagnosis of diseases and treatment options. For patients it can lead to timely information for critical healthcare decision making.
Medical professionals are using it to stay updated with the latest and greatest. It has become an important source of learning with new healthcare innovations, research studies, trials etc. coming in the public space. Dialogues between medical professionals, for e.g. as part of informal communities on social media platforms like Twitter, have fostered exchanging notes on diagnosis, new procedures and treatments.
Challenges & Solutions with Content Curation for Healthcare Communities
Easy access to health information online is a huge positive but there are a few major challenges that need to be addressed adequately to derive maximum value. The ever-increasing scale of information, the scale and dynamism of information sources and a lack of measure of the trustworthiness of content are critical issues. Tooling to manage these to enable curators hasn’t evolved proportionally.
Medical and healthcare information curators provide a great service by filtering credible valuable information from this ever-growing vast trove of content noise. Their experience and expertise are a boon for the communities they service. But, the sheer number of sources and scale of content produced daily has made curation humanly unmanageably without some FILTERING tools. Nicolas, Cronycle co-founder, talks about this filtering problem in some detail here.
Cronycle, powered with Right Relevance topic semantics and topical influencer communities technologies, leverages 2 of 3 ‘judgment-based’ filtering forms discussed in the link above. Both expert filtering and network filtering are human-centric and provide the human curator AI-powered capabilities. Scale is managed via semantics based relevance signals and trust signal provided via the topical expert networks.
Cronycle for Continuous Microlearning
Health information curators on Cronycle are sourcing relevant content by creating feeds like Patient Safety, Emergency Medicine, Alzheimer’s & Medical Technology among others. This saves a lot of time and effort and provides relevance with a usable measure of trust, via the trusted expertise communities, something that is extremely time consuming and error prone otherwise. Community interest content is then pinned to Boards where curators add value by summarizing, tagging, annotating curators before sharing with their audiences.
As the Cronycle medical curators community grows, they empower patients and medical professionals by fostering richer communications and building relationships via conversations. We envision them building on the early tooling for continuous learning with even more curated knowledge. This content curation will enrich the medical information and dynamic microlearning ecosystem for healthcare learning, training, research and education.
