Leonor Roa*, Medical consultant Personas que, Madrid, Spain Maite Ortega, Medical consultant Personas que, Madrid, Spain Laura Mata, Medical adviser Personas que, Madrid, Spain Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Building virtual communities and social networking applications for patients and consumers Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2014-10-03

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Background
Since the beginning of the professionalization of the medical duty the education of the patient has been on the agenda of the medical personnel.
Tools like online communities, info portals, mobile tools or content archives help to leverage the power of educating persons.
Objectives
“People who” was established in order to create and promote a multi service digital platform to improve life quality of people who live with an illness: people who suffer, who take care or who are interested in this illness. Approaching it from people´s reality.
Solution:
Segmented by diseases it was developed with an specific visual identity and URL for each of the different illnesses and includes 5 different sections (Community, Data Center, Apps, Experiences and Magazine) which represent three different dimensions: social, tools and information.
Doctors participate actively in the community answering direct questions, moderating conversations or giving advice. They also curate and create content for the magazine thinking on people´s interests and using easy and understandable language.
“People who” has different stakeholders like patients associations who are able to find a new channel to spread their mission. Pharmaceutical and other companies, who are able to sponsor communities and are able to find new ways to understand the patients. They can listen to patient´s conversations, access statistics but cannot take part in the conversations
Specific country regulations are followed to protect personal data and people´s privacy. Commercial names are automatically replaced by the active principle in order to avoid un proper prescriptions.
Figures:
9 diseases, 4 doctors,1 psychologist, 1 personal trainer and 1 nutritionist. 7 partners, more than 50 patients associations and more than 8700 users in 24 months with: 37,000 visits/month, 1,200,000 pages seen, 57,395 Facebook likes and the following video reproductions 98,693: 36,348 in bipolar disorder, 27,187 in Alzheimer, to 1590 in Leukaemia (Sept. 2014).
In order of users: Diabetes, Bipolar Disorder, Arthritis, Epilepsy, Alzheimer, Psoriasis, Transplant and Leukaemia.
Total number of interactions with Doctor 2.0: in community 1692 ( 51% general practitioner, 29% psychiatrist, 19% endocrinologist, 1% hematologist)
The main topics in the platform are: support, treatment, food, exercise, jobb and health system.
In May 2014 started Italy( Diabetes) and Germany ( skin cancer). New countries will start in November 2014 with new communities.

Conclusions:
“People who” is a digital platform for patients in collaboration with associations, partners and organizations that want to built a society able to cope better with an illness. This opened a new dialogue with people, not only patients, dealing with an illness making them feel comfortable at home.
How medical doctors are able to interact in this environment is a natural step of augmenting their dialogue into the virtual world. Working on these communities has been beneficial also for the development of medical professionals in order to get in contact with people who suffer illness. This information is valuable for health care professionals and gives a fresh view on how to educate and improve the patient’s life.