It’s Not Your Kids’ Facebook Anymore
Facebook was founded in 2004 by several Harvard University students as a social networking utility primarily for college students. The term “facebook” actually came from the Harvard student dorm directory that the founders initially used to combine photos with identities. Now there are over 350 million users worldwide with over 45 million users in the United States.
According to InsideFacebook.com, Facebook is growing in every age/gender demographic, but the following statistics of U.S. Facebook members are of particular interest:
- 56 percent are female. Women outnumber men in every age group.
- 61 percent are 26+. The largest segment of this group is the 26-34 year olds that make up 23 percent of all users. They are the fastest growing age group by total users.
- 29 percent are 18-25. They are the largest age group at 17 million but are down 7 percent over the past 6 months.
- 19% percent are 35-44. They represent the largest increase at 276 percent growth over the past two years, doubling their numbers every two months.
- Fastest growing segment is women 55+, up 175 percent in September 2009, doubling the amount of men 55+. Women 55+ are over 3.5 million.
With respect to health care, there are over 1,000 hospital social media sites, according to the social media resource for health care professionals, “Found In Cache” @eb site. According to “Watcher’s World,” a blog site for hospitals, medical records need to become more like Facebook.
Agreeing with this concept is the recent publication “Future Scan 2010, Healthcare Trends and Implications” by The Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development of the American Hospital Association, The American College of Healthcare Executives, and Health Administration Press.
According to Future Scan 2010, “Patients and Gen Y caregivers will not wait for appointment meetings. Give your younger clinicians, management staff, and patients the tools to meet up online, and you’ll be amazed at how much better your organization works. Watcher was right: Clinical IT needs to look, feel, and work a lot more like Facebook, or our younger people will simply kluge their way right around our systems and create their own.”
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-- Raed F. Mansour
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