Let’s Measure Patient Virality

Mission:

Share stories of the everyday existential angst of ordinary patients with chronic conditions.

Team:

Dr. Amar Dhand, Dhand Lab: https://www.dhandlab.com/

Miss Farah Yousry, Side Effects Public Media: https://www.sideeffectspublicmedia.org/

Dr. Jay K Joshi, Daily Remedy: https://www.daily-remedy.com/

Goal:

1. Write stories of patient journeys
2. Study how the stories become viral
3. Monitor follow-up clinical engagements

Pilot Phase Plan of Action:

1. Jay will identify and obtain consent from patients in NW Indiana, where he currently practices medicine, who are interested in sharing their stories as patients navigating through a complex healthcare system.
2. Journalists from Side Effects Public Media, under the leadership of Farah, will interview and showcase these patients. Interviews will take place at Jay’s clinical practice and at the patients’ homes.
3. Stories written will be published through Side Effects Public Media and their syndicate media outlets.
4. Stories will be monitored for engagement, including traditional metrics such as views, read-time, back links, and other SEO metrics traditionally used to define virality.
5. Select readers will also be asked to provide more detailed feedback on the story. The feedback would entail a brief questionnaire gleaning reader perceptions of the story. It would be administered once the selected reader has completed the story.
6. This questionnaire is a modification of the Reysen Likability Scale. It uses Likert formatting to determine how likely a reader is (1) to spread the story and (2) to engage with the patient in the story.
7. We will cross reference the questionnaire with the traditional engagement metrics to determine if we can identify elemental components in the journalistic framework of telling a patient story that leads to virality.

Key Elements to Include in Stories:

1. What does the patient want?
2. What’s getting in the patient’s way?
3. What are some workarounds that the patient’s exploring?
4. What is the broader pattern here?
5. What is the news and health policy impact?

Key Perspectives to Incorporate in Stories:

1. In sharing patient narratives, we “create something greater”. We foster a community of patient engagement, supporting one another.
2. The concept of emergence is important: patients become advocates and advocates build communities. How can we observe and monitor this manifestation?
3. In this project, the patients are the experts. The doctor is simply a facilitator for patients in their clinical journey. We are privileged to listen to the patient stories.

Sample Questionnaire [DRAFT]:

How likely are you to share this article across social media? Please use a scale of 1-5, where 1=not at all likely and 5=extremely likely.

How well do you relate to the patient in this story? Please use a scale of 1-5, where 1=not at all well and 5=extremely well.

How well do you relate to the clinical condition covered in this story? Please use a scale of 1-5, where 1=not at all well and 5=extremely well.

How likely are you to comment on this article on social media platforms that you normally engage with? Please use a scale of 1-5, where 1=not at all likely and 5=extremely likely.

How likely are you to post or comment on this article on social media platforms that you don’t normally engage with? Please use a scale of 1-5, where 1=not at all likely and 5=extremely likely.

What specific aspects of the patient story do you agree with? Rate each of the below on a scale from 1-10, where 1=least likely to agree with to and 10=most likely to agree with.

Key Questions to Determine in Pilot Phase:

1. Are there elements in the story construction that influence virality?
2. Are there select patient stories that elicit stronger emotional responses than others?
3. How strongly does virality correlate with the clinical poignancy expressed in the article?
4. Are there other factors, such as clinical relatability as opposed to personal relatability, that influence virality?