Aussie startups take the fight to depression

Jason Berek-Lewis Creator, Healthy Startups 
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Many Australians encounter a black dog at some point in their lives. I don’t mean pets or stray animals,

but being affected by a mental illness such as depression.

Depression is the most common mental health problem for young Australians. About one in every four

people aged 12 to 25 will experience depression (headspace.org.au) and studies suggest that men are

less likely than women to seek help for their health problems (beyondblue.org.au).

Now there are new ways of reaching out to people suffering the same illness and fighting off the same

animal, courtesy of startups such as Soften The Fck Up, founded by Ehon Chan.

Chan, a former depression sufferer himself, questioned the lack of resources available for men suffering

from mental health issues. Suicide is the leading cause of death for men under 44 and Chan wanted

to send a message that it was OK for men to ask for help. He wanted to broadcast that sometimes you

can’t fight the black dog all alone, and sought to give men the resources and community with which they

could get help.

Soften The Fck Up works to reduce the stigma associated with mental health issues amongst young men,

and operates through the platform of social media to get the message out there. Stories are shared,

blogs are written and videos are recorded. A digital manifesto has also been written and you can throw

your support behind the cause by signing it online.

Something so simple has had the power to challenge common perceptions of what is a “real man”. It

has spread across Facebook and Twitter, gaining 1,470 likes and 717 followers respectively. Social media

platforms such as these have proven that more and more “real men” are finding the courage to step

forward, and in turn are finding a wide support network that works under the instant virtual meeting

place of social media.

An important platform in the development of Chan’s idea was PlanBig, an initiative that nurtures the

seeds of big ideas and watches them grow via an online community. Chan put his idea on PlanBig and

caught the attention of supporters, ambassadors and most importantly, men going through mental

illness.

PlanBig works so that anyone and their idea, as small as it might be, can work towards something big

with the help from others. Anyone can put their own idea up on the interactive site and anyone can

support it. It brings together “a community who is passionate, engaged and eager to lend a hand or an

ear” and sometimes, it’s that hand or ear which can make all the difference.

Youth ADHD Bipolar Initiative (YABI) is another organisation which has utilised PlanBig to help support

young people suffering from ADHD or bipolar disorder. YABI organises events and experiences and is

also focused on taking the stigma out of mental illness. One in fifty young Australians live with bipolar

disorder and one in twenty live with ADD/ADHD. YABI seeks to provide a system of support for people

suffering from these mental health conditions as well as their carers.

YABI was founded by Michael Mant-Smith who has personally experienced mental illness. After losing

his mother in a tragic accident, Michael experienced an onset of ADHD symptoms which forced him to

stop work as a paramedic. Also, director of YABI, Jordy Heis, has seen the dramatic effects of mental

illness after a family member was diagnosed with bipolar disease.

One of YABI’s recent plans on PlanBig was to create beach volleyball teams at St Kilda (a seaside suburb in Melbourne, Australia) and this initiative has helped sufferers of ADHD or bipolar disorder build strong, lasting relationships through social inclusion. Initiatives such as this demonstrate the positive results that startups can have on those they reach, and how online communities such as PlanBig can help facilitate this.

The dogs won’t stop chasing, but with online community initiatives like PlanBig, startups such as Soften

The Fck Up and YABI are finding a place to unfold and ultimately help those in need.

How to find the hidden startup in every hospital...

Jason Berek-Lewis Creator, Healthy Startups 
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Image via http://3.bp.blogspot.com

... or maternal child and health centre, or general practice, or 24 hour emergency clinic or tent in the middle of the desert.

Every day, in each one of these health services and more, entrepreneurs are building teams, finding new investors, building new solutions, out caring their competition. They are disruptors, innovators, entrepreneurs or you might call them doctors, nurses, psychologists, surgeons, midwives, cardiologists...

In the West, high government debt, budget deficits, doctor shortages and ageing populations are creating 'perfect storms' for disruptors, people who are looking at old systems, tearning down the 'way we always do it' and building something new.

My vision for Healthy Startups has always been to champion these thinkers and doers, and I have done so where I can, but I also hope their stories and other posts on this blog can inspire the startup in your hospital or healthcare service.

You don't have to build the next big thing in health apps, or create a diagnostic attachement that works with an iPhone, but there are plenty of areas within hospitals and other health services that are crying out for disruption.

My number one tip for disrupting your health service and starting your own in house startup: really care about your patients. Not about treating their illness or successfully completing their surgery. Really care about your patients: know who they are, who they love, who loves them, what matters most in their lives. Patients are more than illnesses in broken bodies. Patients are more than analytics, treatment codes, health insurance forms and medication merchants. Each of them has a real story that is much bigger than just their condition.

Understand that and you have disrupted everything and your hospital is now a startup.  

Where are you building your hidden startup? What do you plan to disrupt? 

600% increase in traffic to your health blog. Here's how to do it

Jason Berek-Lewis Creator, Healthy Startups 
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Traffic to this site has increased by more than 600 percent when compared to our best months in 2011. I am not being smug, I am not being arrogant, I am not being complacent about this achievement.

I owe this new level of success to one factor only and that is you, my reader.

I want to share how we achieved this together to give other health blogs some tips on how to grow their audiences too. The more eyeballs we can draw to sites about how new technology and social media is disrupting healthcare, the better for people who need the health system to be at its best. 

Here is how you go about building your 600% spike in traffic:

Share more than you promote

Outside of search, Twitter is the #1 portal driving traffic to this site. The Healthy Startups account has 655 Followers on Twitter and while that number has been increasing, it hasn't grown six times over in the last three months. Our audience on Twitter isn't growing at a huge rate, but the level of engagement with that audience is.

I promote this blog heavily on Twitter (see below for more on Retweeting Yourself), but more than only promoting Healthy Startups, I use Twitter to promote others. Take a look through my stream and you will see that about 60% - 70% of my Tweets are retweets of others' content. The retweet is your most powerful Twitter tool, it's payback big time because by using it you are doing a favour for two parties: the original source of the tweet and your followers. By retweeting their content, you are validating the original author and your are sharing some great content with your audience - everyone wins.

Retweeting relevant content also shows that you are on top of new trends in healthcare communications, technology, startups. You have to be on top of trends before you can jump out in front of them and disrupt your own patch in healthcare. Twitter is a great way to show that you get this space now, and you can see where it's going and you can grasp that and make a run for it.

Lastly, if your tweet stream is engaging, chances are your health blog will be too. If eyeballs are being drawn to what you can say in 140 characters (or less) they are going to follow to see what you have to say in long form.

Curate and create

In mid 2010 Seth Godin wrote on his blog "Every 18 months for the last decade, the world has doubled the data it pushes to you." The level of content we create and consume is exploding. The boom in news sites, blogs, social networks, apps means the competition for eyeballs has never been more fierce. 

Using your blog to curate content, as a tactic for sharing, is a winner. We are all time poor. We are all already slaves to our screens. We use tools like Evernote or Read It Later to store stories, blog posts, infographics that we will read 'some day'. If you can quickly, succinctly and accessibly curate what your audience wants to read about about healthcare innovation and disruption, they are going to stick. There are no losers from curating and sharing. 

Of course, you want others to share your content too: having an influential blogger or Twitter account share your content to their thousands of followers can drive a huge spike in traffic to your healthcare blog. So, the $1 million question is what types of content get shared the most? In my view it's not list posts, not opinion pieces, not PR heavy posts. It doesn't matter what headings you use or how many pictures or infographics you can cram in.

To achieve a 600% increase in traffic to your blog, you posts need to be:

• timely: if you are going to comment, let us know what you think of emerging trends, things that will happen tomorrow. Leave relfecting on what happened yesterday to the old media
• analytical: don't use a healthcare blog to report news. You can't compete with news sites, not if you are a one person blog. I tried that and I failed. What have you got that no one else does? Your own opinion. Analyse the news, put your own slant on it. If you are blogging about something that 50 other big healthcare blogs have already covered, make sure you do it in a new, interesting, challenging and engaging way
• actionable: I need to work on this, but give your readers something to do after they read your post. I don't mean, give them an easy way to subscribe to your blog or newsletter or easier ways to share on social media. I do mean, give them a tip, tool or idea they can implement in their own work in healthcare communications or startups
• passionate: people are drawn to others who are passionate, people who CARE. Be authentically passionate and readers will come back for more.

Put your analytics into action

The two most important tools that drive this blog are Google Analytics and the stats package that comes baked in to Squarespace (the cloud software this blog is built on). While no two analytics packages will give you the same data, you should use analytics to find out:

• where is your audience - geography and online
• which posts are they reading
• how long are they spending on your site and on which pages 

Thanks to Google Analytics, I know my readers are overwhelmingly based in the USA and Europe (Germany, Poland, United kingdom), but that I also have a growing audience in the Asia-Pacific (Australia, Thailand, India, Indonesia, Vietnam). Most of my readers find the site through Google, Facebook and Twitter (Google+ and LinkedIn are no longer sending large amounts of traffic to the site).

Best of all, Google Analytics lets me know which posts people are reading, which posts they spend the most time reading and which pages people visit most often on this site. This helps me to know which of my own content I should retweet (see below for more) and what types of content I should develop in the future.

Retweet yourself

You never know when your posts will take off. You have multiple (geographic) audiences, reading your blog at multiple times, but if you only tweet your posts at 9:00am local time, how will (potential) readers on the other side of the world see your work?

I tend to blog late at night, so when I do post it happens to be way past the bed time of most of my Australian readers, but 11:00pm in Australia is 8:00am in New York City. My largest pool of readers in the USA are based in California and New York, so I time my posts and the tweeting of those posts to fit New York readers. It works. 

But, Australia is also a big audience for my site, so I re-tweet myself at around 8:00am - 8:30am to catch readers on their morning commute. That works too.

Retweeting yourself (particularly older posts) works well when another healthcare blogger is posting about something that you wrote about months ago. Retweeting your old content (as long as it ties in to what other people are talking about here and now) helps to show you are (ahead of) timely, you are a thought leader and audiences/ eyeballs should pay attention to what you are going to write next.

Retweeting yourself can also work because you never know when your content might take off. I wrote a post called Startups: do 1 thing in October last year (see http://healthystartups.com/founders-blog/2011/10/25/startups-do-1-thing.html). I retweeted the post in February and that drove the biggest spike in traffic to this blog in its history.

Surf trends

About two months ago I wrote a post titled Could Pinterest be the healthiest social network? (see http://healthystartups.com/founders-blog/2012/1/24/could-pinterest-be-the-healthiest-social-network.html). I wrote the post long after Pinterest was launched, but around the time that it really started to explode. Taking notice of this, I Googled something like "Pinterest and health" or "Using Pinterest for healthcare social media" and found there was hardly any blogs or other articles about this. So, without even having a Pinterest account, I wrote my post which is the second most read piece on this blog for 2012.  

Grow your blog - NOW!

It takes a long time to build your audience. For more than a year my readership numbers didn't budge. Traffic to this site has been growing steadily since late 2011 and early 2012. I have some more ideas, tips and tactics that I plan to share soon, but what about you? How have you grown traffic to your health blog? Share in the comments below!

If you have any questions about healthcare blogging ask in the comments below or tweet me at https://twitter.com/#!/healthystartups

Who's building the Siri of healthcare?

Jason Berek-Lewis Creator, Healthy Startups 
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Image courtesy of http://www.engadget.com

While I don't have an iPhone 4S, I'm not completely immune to the potential benefits offered by the Siri voice assistant technology. I can't see myself asking my phone to remind me to buy the milk, but I can see myself speaking to my phone about my health.

Imagine using an app like Sickweather or Influ to report on your 'flu symptoms, but instead of inputting via the phone keyboard or Influ's dial, you tell your phone how you are feeling or you ask your phone to display a map of symptom distribution in your neighbourhood.

What if you could speak to RunKeeper during your bike ride or if you could ask Evernote to bring up all the notes relevant to your medications...

What about a diet tracking app that relies on photos and voice input about the meals you eat each day?

What about getting verbal feedback from your phone when you achieve health goals?

Voice activation and interaction is clearly the future of mobile phone apps and operating systems - both Apple and Google agree (Google is apparently building a competitor to Siri called Majel). This new technology throws down the gauntlet to mHealh app developers, entrepreneurs, startups and disruptors in the health system. Our phones are quicly becoming an important tool for tracking and interacting with our health data - soon we could be speaking to our phones, as well as our doctors, about our latest symptoms.

If you know innovators or startups exploring this area, please let me know... 

Healthcare startups - make me CARE

Jason Berek-Lewis Creator, Healthy Startups 
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Image courtesy of Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk.

Why should I care about your healthcare startup? There are dozens of others out there who are disrupting all corners of our healthcare systems: insurance, disease mapping, diet management, cardiac health, social networking, exercise and fitness, bill tracking...

Your job is to make me, and thousands - millions! - of others care about what you are doing. You can differentiate by out caring your competition: it worked for Gary Vaynerchuk, it will work for your healthcare startup too.

Care to win!

In his books Crush It! and The Thank You Economy, Vaynerchuk sets out his belief that those companies that are passionate enough, that care enough, that live for and love their customers are those that are going to win.

I've said before that there are elements of altrusim in healthcare entrepreneurs (see http://healthystartups.com/founders-blog/2010/12/5/are-healthy-entrepreneurs-altruistic.html), but it's is not enough. Caring means nurturing and rewarding your community, it means building the beta product so that it is cooler than what you aimed to launch, it means answering tweets at 2am, it means rewarding your coders and product guys before you reward yourself, it means treating your Angel investors as angels.

Caring means building something to disrupt our ailing healthcare systems: a tool that will save doctors time, a product that empowers patients to manage aspects of their health, an app that educates teenagers about healthy diets.

Caring means accepting the red tape, the closed shop, the bureacratic blackhole of healthcare and forging ahead because you just have to try.

If your startup does all this and more, I'll take notice and I'll care and I'll reach out to you and ask you to write a guest post for this site because your's is a startup I want to invest in, not only with my money, but with my health too.