Gartner has recently released its analysis of social media, with five predictions for where it is headed (see “Gartner Reveals Five Social Software Predictions for 2010 and Beyond”)—predictions that have implications for both organizational management and for marketing strategy in our field:

1. By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.
2. By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.
3. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.
4. Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.
5. Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

My takeaways of the management implications of these developments:

1. Your organization will need social media presence (however limited) to be included in all of the business networking discussions in your market space.
2. In planning your organization's use of social media, it's important to focus on the solution and not the technology. Executives will need to press tech departments into accepting a solution-based approach to their work—and participating in the evolution of social media's role in your organization.
3. The smart phone user interface will soon become our standard computer interface—it's not just the hardware that is merging.
4. Process analysis in your organization will need to include the social media-based interactions between team members and with customers.

Stay tuned for more coverage on the social media impact on the health and human service field.

We're on the eve of the implementation of behavioral health parity legislation. Medicare has released the procedures for implementation of parity for their beneficiaries—see “Medicare Claims Processing Transmittal 1843: Outpatient Mental Health Treatment Limitation.” The regulations for the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act will be released in January of 2009, “Wellstone Act Mental Health Parity Effective Date Delayed Until 2010.”

But the various pieces of parity legislation will only be as meaningful to consumers as their implementation. To that end, there is a great piece in the December 2, 2009 issue of Medical News Today, “Lessons From the Implementation of Mental Health Parity in California.” Coauthors Margo L. Rosenbach, Ph.D., Timothy K. Lake, Ph.D.; Susan R. Williams, M.P.P., also affiliated with the Mathematica Policy Institute, and Jeffrey A. Buck, Ph.D., offer three pieces of advice from their research:

• The need for increased oversight of health plans—monitoring health plan performance related to access and quality, in addition to monitoring coverage and costs;
• The need to look at the breadth of diagnoses covered by health plans; and
• The need to ensure consumer awareness of parity—mounting a campaign to education consumers about their insurance benefits.
  

Three points we should all put on our 2010 new year's resolutions!

After November’s election results, I’m left wondering…was it a referendum on the President? Where were all those young Obama supporters? Is the GOP dead of its own internal bickering? That independents would within one year swing from Obama enthusiasts to backing decent-to-weak Republicans in Virginia and New Jersey is “simply astonishing,” writes The Wall Street Journal opinion editor.

I don't think it's so astonishing. But, it means accepting the fact that technology has made both political parties—as they currently operate—irrelevant. The world of Internet information; web-based political advocacy groups; and flash mobs (e.g. ‘tea party’ folks) has changed the political landscape. Political parties no longer have coherent platforms that mean anything to anyone and they don't have the ‘member control’ that allows them to mobilize voters. In the future, the winning candidate (and the winning party) will be one who can engage the independent voter around specific issues by using technology to build candidate-specific coalitions of specific voter and interest groups.

For health care reform, both parties are at risk. For the Democratic Party, they're going to need to realize that Americans are skeptical about the operation of the current 'public options' (Medicare, Medicaid, IHS, TRICARE, VA) and don't want to abandon their perceived personal ability to pick a health plan or a professional. Republicans are going to have to go beyond the 'party of no' and "Kill the Bill" rhetoric. Americans know they’re in danger of losing health insurance when they lose their jobs; that many health insurance company policies are nightmares; and that most of us are one serious disease away from bankruptcy. The party that ignores the 'middle view' on health care reform will pay the political consequences for whatever happens with health care.