Janice McCallum, managing director for Health Content Advisors, is a marketing strategist for companies that produce health care content or data products. She specializes in developing and assessing business models that leverage the value of data and has a strong focus on how the healthcare industry can improve information access to enable informed decision-making.
Look Left’s Davida Dinerman recently spoke with Janice McCallum on the Look Left @ Marketing Podcast to talk about a wide range of healthcare and data topics. Conversation highlights include:
- One of the challenges that leads to inadvertently sharing disinformation during times like the COVID-19 pandemic: “Confirmation bias is one of the things that is usually included in media training. You know, if people hear something that's sort of in line with their beliefs, they're going to give more credence to it. So we may just have to open our minds a little bit more, but it's tricky, and it's new. It's unknown. There's a lot of unknown. So information comes out in dribs and drabs. And what seems like reliable information one day may be disproven or not so powerfully strong as originally thought. And that's confusing.”
- Data is only as valuable as your ability to accurately analyze it: “I think there's a lot of promise in information that patients can provide either through their own observations or through devices and sensors. One of the issues — and this is an age-old problem that I've dealt with since the early days of my computer use — is that the data has to be normalized and it has to be in a common format so that analyzation makes sense. If something's not in the same unit as the next item in your data input, then it's not going to make any sense. So one of my hot buttons is that we don't spend enough time on or put enough dollars or effort into gathering data and preparing data for analysis.”
- The difference between engagement and empowerment as it relates to patient data: “The concept of patient engagement that we mostly see now in practice is, ‘Oh, here, patient. Here's some more information,’ or ‘Here, patient, do this.’ And it's a one-way delivery of orders, if you will. Whereas patient empowerment would be much more of an interactive process. And for me, patient empowerment with agency means the patient can actually direct some of this and control information flows.”
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