Marketers Honing In On Online Nurses

Nurses, you’re being watched: a marketing Website has an article on the growing influence of nurses online. Let us know what you think. Here’s an excerpt:

. . . Manhattan Research recently released a report about nurses online noting that approximately three out of four U.S. nurses recommend health websites to patients. The study notes that the average nurse spends eight hours per week online for professional purposes, which is just as much time as physicians, and almost all of them use the Internet in between patient consultations. Nurses are also proactive in researching medical product information specifically online – over eighty percent have visited a pharma, biotech, or device company website in the past year.

In addition to the prevalence of the Internet as a research and patient communication tool, nurses are continuing to find their unique voices online through a growing number of prominent nursing blogs such as Codeblog and Emergiblog which both share powerful stories of healthcare from the nurses’ point of view.

Dr. Anne Schuchat, the disease control center’s director of immunization and respiratory disease, said there was “significant flu activity in virtually all states,” which, she added, was “quite unusual for this time of year.”

Dr. Schuchat

[of the CDC] expressed particular worry about pregnant women. As of late August, 100 had been hospitalized in intensive care, and 28 had died since the beginning of the outbreak in April.

“These are really upsetting numbers,” she said, urging obstetricians and midwives to advise patients to get swine flu shots as soon as they become available.”

And NPR has an excellent story today about health care co-ops, which were recently proposed as an out-of-the-blue (and unresearched) alternative to the public health plan voted down by the Senate Finance Committee. The idea of health care co-ops may be less threatening to those who are afraid of having health care plans more like those in other relatively wealthy industrialized nations, but even a top executive at one of the nation’s two large health care co-ops expressed a certain amount of befuddlement that health care coops are suddenly getting so much attention:

 “We’re surprised the discussion of cooperatives has gone as long as it has,” MacEwan says. “Co-ops aren’t a magic bullet.”

Now for something constructive from a smart and reliable nurse blogger: Safety Nurse’s Top 25 Tweeps for Patient Safety. Here’s her rationale for these choices:

. . . my Twitter network is comprised of consumers, patients and professionals, all of whom value patients and their safety. The healthcare dialogue on Twitter is rich, and the perspectives and causes diverse.

Today’s list allows me to share 25 tweeps I’ve identified as valuable patient safety resources, visionaries, or exemplars; their approach is consistent with the science of patient safety and they’re currently active in the Twitterverse.