There's one thing John McCain and Barack Obama agreed on during their presidential campaigns: Health Care Reform. Partisan politics aside, they both agreed that the US healthcare industry was losing money and losing ground by being slow to adopt digital technology.

Multiple companies, including Microsoft, have developed products intended to take medical files online so that they may be securely accessed from anywhere immediately. The benefits — and risks — of such technology are obvious.

But that's internal stuff. What about marketing? What about networking patients who have been served by your hospital?

James Heywood is the cofounder and chairman of PatientsLikeMe.com. Think of it as a Facebook for patients who form social networks around common diagnoses and illnesses instead of interests. Here, people share insights about medication side effects, new treatments, and, yes, the quality of the various treatment facilities they've been too. Heywood thinks, even with the tight security around healthcare and medical records in this country, people are nevertheless gravitating towards online communities where they can openly share with people with similar interests or experiences.

Another new product, called HealthVault, enables people to store their medical records online, where they can be securely accessed by doctors and hospitals, and even synched with meidcal devices like heart-rate monitors and weight scales. The movement to get our healthcare system into the digital age is clearly underway, and it's mostly coming from outside the healthcare world.

There's an enormous potential here for hospitals and other healthcare facilities. Most healthcare marketing tends to stick to mainstream media, but comsumers clearly want interactive options as well.

Imagine creating for your healthcare facility an intranet where inpatients can talk to each other about their doctors, nurses, experiences, even post status updates for loved ones to follow who are too far away to visit. Or imagine a place on your hospital's website where area residents can upload their medical information to your hospital's system in case they're ever rushed there in an emergency and want their medical history to go before them.

This is the kind of digital world we're entering. Consumers, clients, and now patients want communities that connect them with eachother and with information, and if hospitals, clinics and private practices don't work with their marketing teams to come up with these solutions on their own, someone else will do it for them.

Incidentally, Meyer&Wallis is chalk-full of progressive healthcare marketing ideas. Perhaps we should talk?