Social media in healthcare is all the rage these days. You can’t visit even one physician-oriented website without someone breathlessly advising you to be on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and now Pinterest. Yet the only reason these talking heads can give you is, “because they are really popular and everyone is doing it.”
Social media consulting is a bubble economy at the moment.
Don’t listen to them.
1. There is no return on ...
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Want to understand social media? Physicians wanting to learn about social media must learn transparency. We must learn transparency on a personal level and also learn how to operate our medical practices with the same transparency as any other small business.
Our patients (and our prospective patients) now define “great” doctors as those who are willing to display transparency, that is, doctors must be willing to show a human side.
For us ...
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It was my first ER shift in charge of the resuscitation area. Needless to say, my adrenaline and nerves were firing like crazy; being responsible for the sickest of the sick that rolls through our doors is a daunting task, especially since we were the local trauma center.
The shift was going relatively well, and with only a few hours left I was beginning to breathe a sigh of relief.
BEEP!
There is ...
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Stephen Wolfram’s essay, The Personal Analytics of My Life, begins, “One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves.”
A Pew Internet survey suggests we have a long way to go: a September 2010 survey found that 27% of internet users age 18+ track their own health data online. There may be more self-tracking happening offline — please post any measures of that phenomenon in ...
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I have been asked to write up some of the core takeaways from the health care social media presentations I have been giving recently, so I am sharing a version of this narrative on HealthBlawg, in two parts. This is Part II, you may wish to begin with Part I.
The American Medical Association has promulgated a social media policy; so has the Veterans ...
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At the end of the day, I do not see social media as an end to itself. I enjoy the conversation and the opportunity to learn outside the walls of my medical school without having to put in too much effort. I relish the (illusion of?) freedom that it provides by drawing together the world’s most technology and innovation-driven minds. It allows high-level discussions of even the most esoteric topics ...
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As Match Day for the Class of 2012 quickly fades into the background and residency applications for my class begin to appear on the horizon, I find my classmates starting to disappear from Facebook and other socially-oriented websites.
"Are you taking your blog down for application and interview season?" someone innocently asked, "I mean, some program directors just may not appreciate the social media involvement as much as you do."
The question, ...
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Humans have invented tools to solve problems for themselves since day one. We need to bang something into the ground. That rock over there will work. We need to communicate with one another over a distance. Hey, how about some smoke signals?
The social web is just another tool to solve our communication problems in addition to smoke signals and the telephone. It’s absolutely wonderful at spreading new ideas, new being ...
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Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
- Bertolt Brecht
In prior posts, I have discussed the issue of professionalism and social media. I have also taken issue with medical organizations' extant social media guidelines. In some of these posts' comments, it has been noted that there is no corresponding guideline or document that expressly discusses ...
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There's no question that social media is taking root in the healthcare field, and will only continue to grow in importance. According to a recent Pew Internet survey, four out of five Internet users have searched for health information online, making health one of the most searched topics on the internet. While on the one hand, this is good news for doctors since patients are often using the information they ...
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"A comprehensive and extremely useful roadmap for doctors."
-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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