As a member of the Integrated Media and Technology Committee of ASCO, I have tried to champion the benefits of social media, whether it be on blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, or otherwise. As I have become more engaged in various outlets, it has become apparent that these channels offer more than an opportunity to discuss the latest research and meet or ...
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1. You will have to move a lot. I went to medical school in Cleveland and did my pathology residency in San Francisco at UCSF. I was on the medical school faculty at UCSF, Iowa, Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, and Michigan State.
Since leaving academic medicine, I have worked at a bio-tech start up in Cambridge, an educational and research institute in Grand Rapids, a $2 billion integrated delivery system ...
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I recently tweeted asking about favorite patients, physicians, and students on Twitter and was met with a plethora of shocked tweets at my inclusion of patients as potential Twitter interests.
Perhaps other medical friends interpreted this as being similar to meeting people in clinic and asking for their Twitter handle (which is not something I do) or maybe people really think it’s wrong to follow patients on Twitter, I don’t know. However, I do ...
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This month is an anniversary of sorts. About a year ago, I joined Twitter. It started when I noticed that after a few of my blog posts were tweeted, my stats climbed. Thinking I could build a larger readership, I jumped in.
I took the first steps with trepidation. I signed up for NetworkedBlogs which simultaneously announced my posts on Twitter and Facebook upon publication.
It took a few days to understand Twitter lingo. At first I struggled ...
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Though I've personally been writing online for coming up on eleven years—basically the span of my entire medical career—I've never purported to be a pundit or expert when it comes to the topic of social media in medicine. In some ways actually, I feel like Willy Loman, who built his little house in the middle of a field and later found himself surrounded by skyscrapers. But the Internet ...
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It happened exactly one week ago today. I was sleepily putting my phone down to take a shower after a long night of call. I can't explain the exact sequence of events, but in the blink of an eye my mobile fell into a full sink of water. I grabbed it with lightning fast reflexes and blotted it dry with a towel. As I expected, it was dead.
After an extensive ...
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Key opinion leaders (KOL) are still one of the most important corner stones for the marketing machines of pharmaceutical companies. Their network, expertise, reach and authority is what pharma is interested in. We’ve written about KOL stardom in the past and how to attain it. In this post I’d like to take a closer look at the implications social media has on KOL’ism.
First off, let me tell you one ...
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The patient satisfaction industry needs to be disrupted.
This old, legacy industry, with it's outdated and overpriced technology needs a serious makeover. I work for a large physician group that uses a well-established patient satisfaction vendor. And I have had no end of frustration trying to figure out how the data I get back can be used to actually improve my practice and the overall patient experience.
Don't get me wrong; I ...
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Traditionally, a physician’s reputation was best established and passed along by word of mouth. Discussions among friends or at church, sporting events or civic groups often provided the information necessary for potential patients to choose a healthcare provider. Today, most patients and consumers of healthcare get information about medical conditions and physicians online.
Some ...
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In a previous post on the Social Media Healthcare blog, I made an argument as to why physicians should be involved in social media—especially on Twitter. The purpose of this post is to describe how I use social media as a busy clinician and teacher of family medicine to keep up to date with clinical and policy information and also how I find the time to use social media. ...
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-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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Past 6 Months
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