We recently featured the “I’m a Flu Fighter!” Facebook app that allows/encourages you to spread the word about the H1N1 vaccine to your FB friends.
Health and Human Services (HHS), which helped develop the application, has actively been using social media to fight H1N1. So we thought there might be an interesting backstory about this app — and interviewed its creator, Ben Reis.
Reis is an expert on health data. Working at Harvard Medical School and Boston’s Children’s Hospital, he thinks hard about how to collect data and how to model it to make it useful to doctors and public-health officials. In 2007, he noticed that people were spending “hours a day” on Facebook, and he thought “maybe we can use this for good.” So he cooked up HealthySocial to “leverage the power of social networks to improve health.” It’s a growing collection of FB apps (including “I Saved A Life!” and “Get Well Soon!“) that combine fun with public-health messages.
When Reis created a barebones flu-shot application for HealthySocial, he pitched it to HHS’s Andrew Wilson*, who was the New Media Strategist for Flu.gov. Together with their colleagues at HHS and HealthySocial, they expanded and tailored it for H1N1 and launched it recently in time for National Influenza Vaccine Week.
Reis is looking forward to “watching how it grows” and hopes to have good stats on how well it’s being received within a month or two. He also wants to learn from user feedback so that he can improve the application for next year’s flu season.
* PS: Andrew Wilson will talk today about using social media during FluPortal’s webinar on crisis reporting. Sign up (for free) to hear him. The webinar begins at 11 am PT / 2 pm ET.