John Sharp is an IT Manager for a major medical center in Northeast Ohio. Areas of expertise include: ehealth, personal health records, Web 2.0 technologies, social media and project management. He is active in the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society and the American Medical Informatics Association. The opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author.
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Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
Uses of Twitter for Hospitals and Physicians
March 27, 2009
In a post by Michael Lara, MD, he proposes several potential uses of Twitter for physicians most of which are quick updates on CME, medical news, etc. He also goes into great detail about how it should not be used in medical practice because of potential privacy violations and the need to respond to medical emergencies in other ways.
One comment I have is that physicians who practice in multiple sites could use it as a communication tool with their offices similar to how pagers have been used until now. One way to manage such accounts is to protect updates and only allow a limited number of colleagues or office staff to view updates.
Ed Bennett’s catalog of hospital use of social media continues to grow. This will encourage hospitals to have a standard list of social media tools to manage their brand and their message: Facebook page and/or group, YouTube channel, Twitter account as a minimum.
Finally, I posted slides of a recent presentation on social media. Keep fine tuning this for two more presentations coming up in April.
Twitter for Healthcare
January 18, 2009
Phil Baumann has posted 140 uses of Twitter for healthcare. He does preface the list with challenges including privacy and the oath to do no harm. Yet his main point is the true potential for innovation using microblogging in healthcare.
It reminded me that my hospital has used text paging actively for years through the phone directory lookup, anyone can send a text page. But with the growing pervalence of smart phones, email and twitter are becoming more prevalent.
Two-way paging never caught on. The transition to smart phones has mostly meant a greater dependence on email. How to make the shift to Twitter’s possibilities in an organization that blocks YouTube and Facebook? As with blogs, the innovation will need to be outside of the official channels with individuals as champions on new technology by demonstrating its usefulness.
Perhaps I’m as optimistic as Phil. The outcome remains to be seen.
Twitter in Healthcare
January 2, 2009
Twitter’s popularity continues to grow. My main use for Twitter is hearing and sharing the latest trends in Health 2.0. It began at the Medicine 2.0 Congress with several people actively twittering during the conference and afterward. Since then my blogging has suffered as my activity on Twitter has increased.
John Halamka has posted about his adoption of Twitter on The Health Care Blog. He concludes that:
“then I’ve met my goal of overcommunicating with all my stakeholders to ensure they understand my strategy, priorities, and important healthcare IT news of the day.”
I am not sure overcommunicating is an appropriate goal for me. Hoping for some efficiencies in the near future as a result of social network aggregators like FriendFeed improve and offer new features.
Twittering for Public Health
October 19, 2008
Came across this slide show by Patricia Anderson of the University of Michigan, one of the first I’ve seen on the use of Twitter in Health Care. More health care organizations are joining Twitter as a communication tool including MD Anderson Cancer Center and the CDC. The real effectiveness of microblogging is yet to be demonstrated in any studies but like any tool in can have potential in this business sector. MD Anderson, which is in Houston, also used Twitter after the recent hurricane to notify the public of the status of the hospital.
