Tell HN: You know who needs content? Patients in hospitals | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: You know who needs content? Patients in hospitals

9 pointscaseyalbert3 comments

I just met an elderly woman in the hospital today. She has been bedridden for a month, in serious but stable condition. In speaking with her, the thing she longs for the most, besides company, is something to read. Books, magazines, anything positive, uplifting and informative.

What I'm suggesting to all entrepreneurs is you could be doing a service in your community, by handing out magazines and books to the many patients who enjoy reading. They have the time to read it.

It would also be an opportunity to bring awareness to your own brand. If it's content you produce, maybe you could package that up and distribute that with a stack of other magazines and books (as long as it's not too esoteric).

The main reason you would want to do this is to bring relief and a smile to the faces of those who are sick and injured. They are often bored and lonely. Yet, depending on what you love to do and what your passion is, you might be able to share that as well.

Maybe someone here can work with this idea.

Honest questions (and from these questions you can probably tell that I haven't spent much time in Hospitals):

1 - Are you saying mere access to content is the problem? Do Hospitals have limited reading material? Do libraries not provide outreach services to patients? Do friends/family not bring content?

2 - Is there a need and/or market to create/aggregate content specific for this audience?

3 - Anything more specific about the content besides being uplifting? Seems like a broad range of content is needed, which is proving a challenge to my brain.

4 - Is there a technology angle to this at all? Hospitals aren't well connected, old people (who account for a lot of people in Hospitals I'd assume) aren't very tech savvy. I mean, given your audience here, is there something we can do at a technical level to help?

As someone who has spent a lot of the last year in and out of hospital:

The problem for me was that all content distribution in the hospitals... the TV, the magazine trolleys, the "library" (another trolley)... were all controlled by small private companies who have made deals with the hospital.

The content is old, seriously lacking in variation (you can have any magazine you want, as long as it's a women's gossip/variety mag), and it's always the same stuff (a few basic cable TV channels that have been recorded, and set on loop).

I had ENDLESS ideas while laying in the beds about technology-based ideas that would make patients a LOT happier, from tablets filled with RSS-fed content from major media companies (+ blogs), to a free WiFi service (if they bring their own laptop/tablet/phone) that is sponsored by marketing, to a subscription-based WiFi connection that gives them proxied web access and where part of the profits go back to the hospital as a donation.

The truth of the situation is, the hospitals won't allow it. They're scared of technology because of interference with equipment, and they're scared of any new content providers in the form of books/magazines/etc because they'll upset the decades-old partnerships with the current partners, and they're pretty much just unable to even comprehend or process any "new ideas" due to the size of the bureaucracy involved at your average hospital.

Again, this is just my view, from my local hospitals. It's different all over the world, and maybe elsewhere there are hospitals that are more open to experimenting with new ways to entertain patients.

FWIW in the UK all hospital beds have their own TV/Internet/Phone device that is attached to the wall and swings over the bed to where you want it. It costs money to use, but you can at least watch what you want, browse the web, send emails etc etc.

My time 'inside' was made much easier having that.

We're lucky in the UK though.

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