Health IRL: A Collaborative Health Conversation

At Carium my colleagues and I spend a lot of our time virtually. We’re a digital health company with a largely virtual workforce spread across ten states. In some ways, that has made it relatively easy for us to absorb some of the immediate challenges brought by COVID-19, such as working from home.

At the same time, our mission is to help and empower patients and their care teams throughout each individual’s health journey using our virtual health platform. Clearly, COVID-19 presents unexpected and frightening turns in the journeys of many of the patients and providers we serve. Our concern for those with whom we work and the broader community run deep.

Part of what we believe we can offer in this unsettling context is a forum for collaboration. We want to create a way for people to share useful information, strengthen social connections, and tap into the broader community for support.

As we were considering how we might achieve these objectives, this tweet came up in my Twitter feed, from a patient and HIMSS Digital Influencer we love and respect: Stacy Hurt.

We reached out immediately to see if she’d want to collaborate. Stacy has generously volunteered her time to help us shape not just one conversation on social distancing — a very relevant topic of the moment — but an evolving series of conversations, sponsored by Carium and shaped and animated by members of the communities we serve. Health IRL (“in real life”): A Collaborative Conversation was born.

What Is It?

Health IRL: A Collaborative Conversation is a series of real-time, virtual community conversations to help people navigate the changing healthcare landscape with insights and practical, hands-on tips from experts, including both patients and healthcare professionals with well-informed perspectives. It’s basically a webinar, but with a deliberate emphasis on interaction.

COVID-19 is rapidly changing how all of us, especially those whose work or everyday existence depends on healthcare, operate on a daily basis. Even before we’d heard of the virus, the healthcare environment was evolving quickly, thanks to the introduction of new technologies, new types of business entrants (including big tech, telehealth, and walk-in clinics), and the shift in payment models toward value-based care. That’s a lot of moving parts.

Purpose

Health IRL conversations are intended to share relevant and useful information, and to provide social interaction and community-building. Many of us are shut in our homes, working remotely, some while caring for home-bound children, and at the same time worrying about ourselves or others we care for with compromised immune systems, and an economic and social environment that is shifting rapidly right outside our windows.

Format

For each session of Health IRL, we invite two guests to participate in a lively moderated dialog and discussion followed by a Q&A. Generally, one guest is an expert patient/consumer or caregiver. The other guest is an expert from the healthcare system: a clinician, or someone representing healthcare policy, a tech company, or another participant in the evolving healthcare landscape.

The key point is to encourage and demonstrate positive collaboration between patients and healthcare providers, broadly classified. From our perspective, health and healthcare will only improve significantly at a population level if both sides of the equation are involved and able to contribute. While healthcare providers bring medical training, knowledge, and skills (in addition to medicines, infrastructure, and empathy), patients are experts in themselves, their bodies, and their preferences related to health and life. In addition, patients are the ones who make the bulk of the decisions that impact their health, together with their families, friends, and other informal caregivers who support them. And they literally have skin in the game.

Live video Q & As from our community addressed by the featured guests, polls, and a chat function integrated into the platform keep it interactive. Depending on demand, we may continue the conversations on other platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

How can you get involved?

We’ll also be looking to you, our community, to share ideas for other topics we should discuss and other people to feature — so please reach out with your ideas.

Sign up here to get each week’s topic, guests, and registration emailed right to your inbox. We hope to see you on a Health IRL virtual chat soon!