Patients like me and one mind are collaborating to create an online community experience for
active and veteran service members living with post-traumatic stress, PTS, and or traumatic
brain injury, TBI.
Here's a tour of how you might experience the website if you join today.
First, let's start at the homepage. This is one way someone with PTS and TBI might come
to patients like me. Maybe you've heard about us through word of mouth or at a presentation
and you decide to go directly to patientslikeme.com. Another way you might come to find us is through
a targeted ad on Facebook or Google or Bing. These ads only show up for you based on your
relevant experiences such as condition, location, age, gender, interest, etc.
Here are a couple of sample ads. The first one might appear on a Facebook feed if you're
a female service member living with PTS. And here's one targeted at male service members
living with TBI. If you see one of these targeted ads, you will be taken to a relevant landing
page like this. We're always testing new imagery and content to serve up the resources
that could most help people living with PTS and TBI. Now if you click join from this landing
page or the homepage as we showed you earlier, you'll be taken to a three-page guide to
sign up for an account. Here's where you'll enter information about your military status
and disease experience. At the bottom of the third page is what we like to call a choose
your own adventure. It's a way to start using the site based on what interests you most.
You have the option of join the conversation, meet people like you, or add to your health
history. We'll show you what happens when you choose each.
If you choose join the conversation, you'll be dropped off in the forum. This is where
others living with PTS and TBI start conversations, ask questions, and connect with others about
anything and everything related to their condition. There are disease specific forums as well as
interest-based forums. Even if you don't want to participate in a conversation just yet,
the forum is a great place to lurk and read about others' experiences. Now to go back,
if you choose meet people like you, you'll be dropped off in the member journals and
this will show you all of the recent activity for people living with your condition on the
site. Here you'll see all the recent activity for members with your condition. You can select
the journals for each different condition. You can go through and leave comments for
others or ask questions. You can even give people a thumbs up if you want to give them
a little encouragement. Finally, if you choose add to your health history, you'll be taken
to a guide that helps you fill in and complete your health profile. Your profile is where
you can track everything, from what treatments you're taking and what dosage you're on,
to frequency and severity of symptoms, to labs and tests, and your weight. It's a snapshot
of your entire experience living with PTS and TBI. At any given time after you've chosen
your adventure, you're just a click away from finding ways to track your health, connect
with others just like you, and learn more from real-world experiences of others living
with PTS or TBI. So that's the sign-up process and your initial experience on the website
once you've joined patients like me. Now we're going to take a look at how and when
you might come back to the site after you've joined. Every new member receives a series
of nine welcome message emails during the first 15 days to introduce you to the website,
the people, and the experience. Here's a sampling of some of those emails, which are
designed to give you a guided tour around patients like me. Let's start with the message
sent on day one, which includes a video tour of the site to help you get oriented and introduce
you to the basic tools. There's also an introduction to your profile. Here is the message sent
on day two, which gives a little more detail about what you can do on your profile. We
give you links to easily go back and track treatments and symptoms and fill out quality
of life measures to see how PTS and TBI is impacting your day-to-day life, things like
social, physical, and emotional well-being. We also showcase a tool we call Instant Me,
which is an easy way to track how you're doing at any given time. Next up is a welcome
message from our co-founder talking about a concept we call Data for Good. He explains
how sharing your experiences impacts everyone living with PTS and TBI today, and how every
piece of data you share to capture those experiences is a meaningful contribution to the research
of tomorrow. On day five, you'll receive a message all about starting forum conversations.
This email will direct you back to the site where you can ask questions in the forums
and read about the experiences of other members with your condition. For some, the forum is
a home away from home and a daily go-to resource. Then on day seven, we'll tell you all about
what we call the Doctor Visit Sheet. It's an easy way for you to print all of the information
you tracked on your profile and bring it into your next doctor's appointment. This lets
you have everything in one place, which can lead to a better and more efficient conversation
with your doctor. The email we send on day nine is a fun one. It's the welcome wagon
where we introduce you to other members and we tell you a little bit about where people
are from and what they like to share about. If you have any questions or you're looking
for someone to connect to, you can reach out and send a private message to any one of these
members. If any questions arise, day eleven introduces the customer support team, community
moderators and website experts who can answer any and all of your questions about using
patients like me and participating in the community. Don't be shy about asking for
help. It's what we're here to do. All of those messages are part of Patients Like
Me's initial tour of the site. Along the way, you can also sign up for email alerts
and reminders about things that are important to you. These are triggered emails. Here's
an example of a triggered email for you if you'd like to be reminded to update your
instant me, the tool that tracks how you're feeling day to day. Here is another example
of a triggered email if you've asked to be reminded when to update your profile. This
person wants to get a reminder to update all of these items on their profile, which comes
in handy if you want to have a complete profile before your next doctor's appointment. In
this case, if you receive this email and then clicked on Update My Symptoms, you would
be directed back to the site to fill out your symptom information. In addition to triggered
emails, we also have monthly newsletters. There's so much to learn and there's so
much great sharing that happens on the site, so every month we like to feed that back to
the community with our newsletters. Here's an example of the general newsletter, which
features content that resonates with the entire Patients Like Me community. It doesn't matter
if you're a member with PTS or a completely different condition, like ALS, Parkinson's,
or epilepsy. The general newsletter topics cover issues we know are relevant to everyone,
including the benefits of tracking your health, how to best learn from what others are sharing,
and how you can make the most of your connections. While the general newsletter is, well, general,
we also have some more specific newsletters for certain communities. Here's an example
of a PTS-specific newsletter, which features stories, forum posts, and other content from
that particular community. These newsletters may also feature content that is specific
to something we know about you. For example, if you've indicated your service status or
branch of service, this newsletter may have content just for you and others like you,
and all of these newsletters bring people back to the website. You can see here, this
one clicks back to the Share Your Story thread in the Veterans Forum. This is the guided
tour for active and veteran service members living with PTS and TBI, but there's so much
more to come. The more we can customize our community experience to help people better
identify with the group of individuals most like them, the more impactful patients like
me can be for everyone. So, thanks for joining us. That's the end of the tour, but stay
tuned for more exciting developments to come.
