Remember, Mom: Digital is Forever.
Humana has launched a social network for its Medicare Advantage and Part D members called “Humanaville.” No word yet if members have started posting embarrassing pictures of shenanigans in the skilled nursing facility…
Actually, it’s not exactly a social network like Facebook. Rather, the design and functionality more closely resembles Second Life, in which users build an avatar and move within a multi-dimensional space, meet others, barter/trade, etc. This is not the first medical network of its kind. The Starlight Children’s Foundation maintains a space for chronically ill teens called Starbright World, which more closely adheres to the Facebook model.
No doubt the plan should be given credit for pushing the boundaries of member engagement. However the model–and more specifcally the decisions made by Humana for the members within the model–seems to adhere to an older model of communication. At a cursory glance it appears Humana is attempting to carefully script and guide users’ experiences, rather than create an environment, a social utility, full of user-defined content.
Like society at large there must be rules of engagement in these environments. But the brilliance of the social media model as an economic force (that’s why Facebook is in the news… it’s not because of Farmville) is that by allowing participants to wander around at will “liking” stuff and joining groups they track people’s actual interests. This means that by the time Facebook puts a particular Old Spice ad in front of you the algorithm already knows: you’re a man, you have a slightly juvenile sense of humor, and you care how you smell.
There is much talk in clinical circles about the tyranny of the internet on two fronts: in making every patient an expert via WebMD et al., and in the public rating of physicians. An entire industry called “Reputation Management” has sprung up in the last two years to protect physicians (and lawyers, and others) from the ignominy of having patients share their experiences with each other. This is a losing battle. It remains to be seen if payers or providers will rise to the challenge of the digital age–which has heretofore been defined by the inability of choice-makers to control it–or if they will revert to type and attempt to narrow choice and access to information along prescribed paths that lead inevitably to the next sale.