Back in May 2010, TuDiabetes.org, in partnership with Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, launched TuAnalyze, an application to allow members of TuDiabetes (and EsTuDiabetes) to track, share and compare their health information for research advancing diabetes care and public health response.

Just this week, they posted an update on the program’s progress.  In just a few short months, they have people participating from 43 countries!  Read the blog post here for details and to watch a 3 minute video about what our friends a TuDiabetes and their partners have learned so far.

In October 2007,  iGuard set out to improve medication safety for patients, and today it has more than 2.5 million users. Wonder how they did that?  We did too.

Dr. Hugo Stephenson explains how iGuard managed to attract such a large number of patients, and how the community is helping further developments in medical science.

Why Millions of Patients Engage with iGuard, Dr. Hugo Stephenson (16 minutes)
Watch the video and please visit our video sponsor, Klick Pharma.

iGuard achieves this high level of engagement by offering something that patients want - something that’s good for them - in this case free medication safety checks, rapid medication safety alerts, and access to feedback from thousands of patients.

Dr. Stephenson goes on to explain what else worked for them:

• Use a “light touch” - offer something small that people can engage with upfront
• Develop the relationship after the user is integrated into the system in a way that continues to build trust and engagement
• Get people to engage at a “critical point” in their workflow - at the point in time when what you’re offering is top of mind important to the patient

The large number of patients who are highly engaged with iGuard allows the company to contribute to developments in medical science, such as study protocol development and patient recruitment, as well as genomic/biomarker research into side effects and medication effectiveness.

iGuard helps patients and patients help iGuard . . . sounds like a win-win to us.

Making cool or informative videos is one thing, getting people to watch them is another.  We can’t all be Nalts after all.  And maybe your message, no matter how helpful or useful, isn’t as fun as watching the the husky dog who says “I love you”.

So finding you could be a little less “viral” than it is for some.  But all is not lost, here are a few basic tips for making connections on YouTube to get you started.

1. Tag your videos with titles and keywords.
Make sure all your videos have relevant titles and keyword tags. If people are searching YouTube for information related to your video, this is how they’ll find you. YouTube videos also appear in google search results, so your video could pop up there too if you’ve got it tagged accurately.

2. Embed your videos in your electronic communications.
When you release a video (or if a current event or news story brings renewed interest in a topic related to a video you already have) make sure to spread the news. Feature the video on your website, embed it in your blog or newsletter, link to it on Facebook, and announce it with a link on Twitter.

3. Ask others to embed the videos on their websites too.
Don’t be afraid to ask your friends, family, and supporters to embed your video on their blogs and websites too. You can return the favor the next time they have something to share (assuming appropriateness of content of course).

4. Interact.
Engage with others and encourage them to engage with you. Leave comments on others’ videos and encourage them to comment on yours. Invite all comments, don’t approve anything disparaging or offensive, but for everything else, even those comments that aren’t so positive, use them as a starting point for discussion.

5. Connect YouTube to all your other sites.
The equivalent of tech support asking “Is it plugged in?” this is a suprisingly easy thing to forget. Make sure to tell people you have a YouTube Channel. Include the YouTube button/link on your website, newlsetter, blog, even paper-based communications. Let people know you’re there so they can look for you.

Whatever your message, you have ways to spread the word and reach those that are interested. Good luck!

Can you imagine managing a Facebook community of more than 1.2 million people?  You could if you were Brooke McMillan. Brooke is the online community evangelist for LIVESTRONG Foundation, and in this video she talks about how to manage this huge community of support for people with cancer.

Social Media at LIVESTRONG, Brooke McMillan (14 minutes)
Watch the video and please visit our video sponsor, Klick Pharma.

Brooke shares stories and practical advice including:

• How a Twitter conversation helped get a patient with cancer into treatment.
• How to interact online at a human level - you are not a machine or a press release pusher, you’re a person!
• Where to find ideas for topics to discuss, like google alerts, talking about “old times”, asking open ended questions, polls, and crowd sourcing content.

Thanks Brooke!

New Year’s Resolutions are a funny thing. It seems so exciting to make one, but so not fun to actually follow through on it. Most resolutions are so well intentioned - things we know we should be doing, things that are good for us - like losing weight, quitting smoking, getting out of debt, or helping others.

You’d think it’d be getting easier to follow through on our grand plans.  We have iPhones and Droids and hundreds of apps to help us. Here are 12 that Mashable highlights as apps to jumpstart our resolutions - be it anything from improving our health to our social lives. In my experience, these tools do work…but only if we let them.

About a summer ago, I used the free version of the Lose it! app. It’s pretty cool - you input your weight, how much you want to lose and how fast, and it calculates the number of calories you can eat in a day in order to achieve your goal. Then you can use the tool to track your calories against the total number. It has an extensive list of foods with calorie counts already included. It also allows you to pick exercises off a list with estimates for calories burned by minute. When you input exercise, it subtracts the calories from your total for the day and lets you know how many you have left. If you don’t find the food or the exercise you’re looking for, you can input it yourself.

It makes it easy to see just how many of your daily allowable calories you’re giving up when you reach for that cookie. And that knowledge did deter me from making some bad choices, at least for awhile.

After a few weeks I didn’t care anymore about what the phone thought, and I ate the cookie guilt-free. In the battle of cookies vs. iPhone diet plan, cookies won. I guess knowledge only goes so far, and tools can only help so much.

So for this year, rather than resolving to do something that goes against my nature, I’m resolving to work on that inner “e” that helps determine my nature. No matter how much “e” we have to start, becoming more empowered, more educated, more engaged, expert, electronic, enabled, etc. can help us to make better decisions, and manage our own health.  Maybe by the end of this year, I’ll be able to beat that cookie.

Here’s hoping for a healthy and empowered year for us all.