Chris Paton*, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Building virtual communities and social networking applications for health professionals Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: LKSC Conference Center Stanford Room: Lower Auditorium 120 Date: 2011-09-18 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Last modified: 2011-08-15

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The Health InnoVation Exchange (HIVE – www.hive.org.nz) is a social networking platform designed to support and foster innovation in the New Zealand healthcare sector. The HIVE is funded by New Zealand Ministry of Health (MoH) and is operated by the team at the National Institute for Health Innovation (NIHI) at the University of Auckland. Based on the Drupal Open Source platform, the HIVE brings together clinicians, health IT professionals, government officials, academic researchers and the health technology industry. The key to bringing together the disparate user groups targeted by the HIVE is a careful effort to cater to each group and offer a neutral ground for discussion: The homepage blog, created by the community and curated by Dr Chris Paton, targets the Health Innovation industry and technical workforce – such as IT managers for hospitals and CEOs of Health IT companies. Clinicians are drawn in by the HIVE e-Learning platform, used for Post-Graduate clinical courses at the University of Auckland. During their studies, clinicians can use the HIVE to communicate with other students and teachers, and hold discussions in private forums specifically set up for their courses. Senior government officials are brought into the discussions through a series of coordinated consultation efforts. For example, the Chair of the NZ Health IT Board at the NZ Ministry of Health used the HIVE to facilitate discussion about a new “Health IT Plan” for the country. In another example, the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology (MoRST) used the site to promote a range of videos it produced to support a new multi-million dollar grant scheme to foster innovation in the NZ health sector. As these communities begin to discuss and form networks, they can use the HIVE to track their new connections by “friending” and posting private messages to each other. Fostering innovation in the health sector requires a careful building of trust across a range of different and difficult to access groups. The HIVE appears to be successfully achieving its objective of using a social media platform to build trust and to allow new innovation to flourish.