How Can Facebook Use Its Resources To Improve Public Health?

This past month, the big news out of Silicon Valley was the Facebook IPO, when they agreed to trade more access to capital for more public responsibility and scrutiny.  While most of this responsibility is financial, it’s hard to ignore the opportunities to improve social welfare.  Given how much data they collect and how many people they influence, it’s fair to ask if they should use that information to benefit health causes.

Facebook has already taken a first step with their organ donor initiative, which gives users the ability to sign up to become a donor and share their decision online.  In the first day, state registries saw nearly 15 times more people enroll than on a typical day and over 33k new members registered in the first week.

While some people may question the effectiveness and ethics of this, I think it’s a good illustration of how massive tech companies such as Facebook and Google can use the core foundation of their products (users and data) to benefit healthcare.  Broader opportunities for Facebook may fall into a few categories:

1) Resource Portal: With a dizzying array of healthcare non-profits, for-profits, government agencies, and homegrown support groups, Facebook could act as a curator for indexing user resources.  While this idea is very Web 1.0, having a personal improvement / health portal could spark greater awareness by promoting these links rather than relying on users to find them using Facebook’s clunky search tool

2) Personal Data Management and Analysis: Given the wealth of user data, Facebook could act as an aggregator of personal health information and predict future outcomes.  Privacy concerns aside, algorithms could analyze changes in behaviors based on posts or user-generated data and provide advice if that person was looking to change health behavior.  Google tried to collect digital health records with Google Health, but it required active management by the user.  By making it passive (i.e., collecting data already entered into the system), Facebook could build a large user base that might gain traction

3) Engagement Support for Healthcare Companies: Facebook is just beginning to realize its potential as an effective outreach tool, but there are some basics that healthcare companies need to understand to be effective.  As a public service, Facebook could offer free courses on the best way to utilize their tools to more effectively engage users

Obviously there are concerns and issues with each of these ideas and a strong business case against pursuing them.  But as their influence and scope grows, and as the healthcare landscape evolves, it will become more critical to harness their product to influence health changes