The new live streaming app Periscope, launched by Twitter at the end of March, is causing much excitement. I was on my Twitter feed and a local TV station tweeted “join us on #Periscope”. I was curious so I clicked on the link they had provided to join on Periscope and there they were live streaming local news and tweeting at the same time. How awesome is that! So I downloaded the app on my iPhone and have been playing around with it all day.
Periscope allows users to follow each other, like Twitter, and receive notifications when a person being followed begins to stream content. The user can broadcast live from their devices, interact with viewers and end the streaming whenever they like. The best part of Periscope is that you can see reactions from people following them while they stream, in real time! It’s almost like having an actual conversation with many people at once.
Ok I can already see the journalists, the citizen journalists, the copy infringers (see “Game of Thrones”) and probably brands and celebrities using this app. My next thought was how are healthcare professionals going to use this?
So I started brainstorming and came up with these possible uses:
- Conference live reporting; Twitter is already one of the most used social media tools during conferences for sharing information.
- Education and training purposes; for example continuing medical education
- Letting the consumer get personal with the healthcare professional; For example pick like a once a week, a medical team gets personal with consumers to ask questions around a medical topic or therapy area.
- In disasters provide medical support / crisis communication; For example communication updates on Ebola and providing correct information on vaccines
- Get inside access and let people in behind closed doors. For example, preparing for an organ transplant.
- Healthcare professionals can control their own news. for example broadcast healthcare news instead of writing.
- Live tours of the areas where they work in. For example what is like to work in an ER.
- Live streaming as a tool for self marketing and promoting
- A tool for transparency and community building; for example building online communities
- Get inside new product launches, for example new pharmaceutical drugs entering the market
We don’t know yet which live streams will catch on. So I guess we will just have to wait for ingenious and creative uses for Periscope to emerge.
