Preparing for a conference? Don't forget to pack the social media.

Returned home a week ago from the SoCRA Annual Conference, and still digesting. The conference specializes in delivering training content companies can feel confident sending their staff to receive. One of the plenary speakers was Cancer Research Advocate Leslie Hammersmith speaking on the “The +1 Patient: Social Media and the Disease Experience.”  Patients are on social media, in particular Twitter, but clinical research professionals are not.  I'm here to discuss what these professionals are missing:

Health 2.0, Healthca.mp and the Society for Clinical Data Management gathered on the same weekend. These conferences didn't touch attendees at SoCRA (less than five of whom were participating on Twitter).  SoCRA attendees did not touch the conversation in the next room. One attendee said to me, “I wish I could go to one session and know what is going on in another session!” If you attend a conference where participants are engaged and generous on Twitter, knowing what is going on in every room of the conference is exactly what happens.

The number one reason clinical research professionals tell me they are not on Twitter is that they are tired. It just so happens that during the SoCRA conference, an article appeared in the New York Times about the burdens of continuing education. We’re not just tired, we are exhausted.

Twitter is one of the best solutions to that exhaustion. Imagine developing a network that curates the information you need for you. When you take time off work to attend a conference, you attend four conferences at once.  Instead of listening passively to a speaker, you interpret and interact with your colleagues. This solution already exists, but the value for you and for others is only there if you are there.

To facilitate expanding the reach of clinical research professionals on Twitter, I have prepared slidecasts on increasing your engagement with Twitter.  Become a Twitter lurker by listening to presentation #1.

A doomsday scenario for U.S. sponsored clinical research?

Two exciting days of the Physician Practice Survival Conference just ended. Technologists, futurists, innovation experts and innovative doctors discussed the innovations they are already implementing and what the future may hold. One popular model for the future is horrifying for clinical research. It goes like this: at the end of 2013 the insurance exchanges kick in. Two-thirds of employers stop covering insurance and turn their employees over to the exchanges with a bolus of cash to be applied toward medical care. Employees select cheaper high-deductible plans. They are now incentivized to seek providers who offer efficiencies to cash-pay patients. Providers en masse become cash-pay "concierge" physicians.

The excess office visits currently used to secure insurance payment (perhaps 80% of all office visits) end for these cash-pay patients, now served far more efficiently by telemedicine. Excess office space and the staff that attended to that space and billing are shed from the system. Providers, with more direct patient contact and less indirect risk, shed malpractice insurance coverage. In at least one state you can already essentially self-insure and concierge doctors are doing so.

While this model releases huge amounts of excess physician capacity (the primary care shortage model evaporates overnight), these physicians no longer have excess infrastructure to repurpose to clinical research. The available pool of clinical research sites shrinks dramatically.

It could happen.