Arizona Brings Asthma Alerts to Social Networks
May 4th, 2009Author: Allison Blass
The Arizona Republic announced that Arizona health care officials are working on a new social network system for asthma alerts, which would send messages via social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, as well as via SMS messages. Messages would be sent when pollution in a certain area reaches levels that could trigger an asthma attack. Devised by a coalition of researchers and official from Arizona’s Departments of Education, Environmental Quality and Health Services, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Arizona State University and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the plan initially called for the messages to be sent via SMS and email. But now they’re working on expanding it to social networks.
With the increase in breaking news being delivered via social networks, especially Twitter, it makes sense that social networks would be a key message delivery system. Twitter users have been among the first – if not the first – to report such breaking news as the Hudson plane landing and California earthquakes, while BreakingNewsOn and CNN rely on Twitter to deliver the latest political and health news, most recently with updates on the swine flu.
Delivering breaking health news could expand beyond just asthma. Although the World Health Organization is on Twitter, the majority of their tweets are links to the press section of their websites. In the case of swine flu, guidelines, advice and updates to the situation could be more easily transmitted via a series of those 140 character tweets. Public health departments, hospitals, pharmacies and even companies would also be ideal for using social marketing to provide updates on relevant health issues, from product recalls (like the latest FDA issue with Hydroxycut) to new safety data.
For residents of Arizona, which has one of the highest rates of asthma in the U.S., this new information system will be extremely valuable, but there are also many ways organizations could step up and apply news and critical information to anyone affected by health issues.
