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November 14, 2007

Why Patient Opinion is not another blog

Occasionally people say that Patient Opinion ‘is just another blog’. Which has made us to think whether we are and if not why not.
Blogs of course are a way to get your opinion out into the public domain which is of course part of what Patient Opinion does. With the added value that we aggregated lots of similar conversations into one place and tag them according to hospital service or disease for handy use.
But James (Munro who is a very major part of the wizardry behind Patient Opinion) points out that what we do is more subtle and useful than just providing people with a blog-like voice.

Because we give data feeds to a wide variety of other organisations (patient groups, MPs, Overview Committees to name a few) what we are actually creating are multiple conduits where a single blog comment can get mainlined into the ears of key stakeholders.
Of course all these people could just set up RSS feeds to do this for themselves. But it turns out – like so much on the web – that even if you give the core product away for free as we do by publishing opinions so anyone can see them, there is still a living to be made selling add-ons that make life easier for these stakeholder organisations.
An ordinary blogger publishes and hopes that someone will listen (i.e. their blog gets linked to and lots of traffic). By contrast Patient Opinion provides newbie bloggers (who mostly never want to make another comment again) with a ready made audience consisting of just the right clutch of local and national organisations who, on occasion, will really value what they are saying and even turn it into better local services.

Some useful similar thoughts came from William Heath’s excellent Ideal Government blog where William recently discussed ‘Customer Relations Management’ – which is the software and techniques developed to help companies manage us customers better in the hope that happier customers will buy more of their stuff.
William asks what it would be like if we citizens had VRM – Vendor Relationship Management. This would be a set of tools and information to turn our relationship with ‘them’ on its head and help us manage our relationships with public services in a more sophisticated and efficient way. What would a set of VRM tools look like? How could we enable citizens to get heavy handed bureaucracies and unresponsive commercial outfits to respond with speed and effectiveness?
I’m not quite sure but I think that something like Patient Opinion’s ‘blog-linked to just the right 5 key stakeholders’ would be part of the toolkit.

Posted by Paul at 8:42 PM