Another night surfing to discover the wonderful world of podcasts. And oh my I meet this fabulous trend of medicasts: medical podcasts. Podcasting is a practical way to keep in touch with a center of interest: you only need to subscribe to a podcast to receive a regular flow of information.

nevertheless we have various kind of medicasts: the ones that talks about complex medical procedures, for specialists only, and the other one talking about self care, health awarness.

Tech medecine and its author Joshua Schwimmer has recently posted extensive desciptions of some of these podcasts. the most interesting examples I have come through being: the Health Update podcast made by Jane Brody, columnist of the New york Times and the John Hopkins Health News podcast by Dr. Rick Lange, chief of clinical cardiology at Hopkins, and Elizabeth Tracey, director of the Hopkins Health NewsFeed. These are two interesting podcasts as they offer non technical information that can be used to monitor ourselves the evolution of our health status or get information about medical practices.

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before getting to the PRM, let’s here from MY hospital

What is interesting beyond the existence of such podcasts is the array of utilisation of the latter most notably from a marketing point of view. The podcast has generated what some has called ‘narrow casting’ (Dr. Johnathan Sterne - Mc Gill University) namely, podcasts bty imposing an active elective step (subscribing or not), implicates in heavier mode the podcast auditor. Podcasting helps to better target a more attentive audience.

Marketing of private hospital through basic advertising channels perhaps has met its limitations and medical podcasting could be a new way to market an hospital as a whole and its doctors and surgeons. the direct ripple effect could be to accentuate the identity of an hospital by promoting a community effect that goes beyond the patient doctor relation.

However, this practice is not risk free: the expectations that a podcast should meet in terms of quality is way higher than what an add in a magazine should reach. The qualitative work that sustains a podcast has to be satisfactory enough to generate positive feedback or the backlash could be impressive… Medicasts propagated by hospitals should hence focus on one objective: bring practical and simple information to its audience while still keeping at bay its promotion scheme.

Still we can ponder over the possibility of using podcasting/videocasting for the sake of promoting medical tourism activities….