2010 Spring Semester Week 7: Social Media in Healthcare

I launched the world’s first elective course at a medical university focusing on web 2.0 and medicine for medical students in 2008. Now this is the 4th semester and the 7th week was dedicated to social media in healthcare and online collaboration. Here is the outline of my presentations.

First slideshow: Medical practices online

• What is social media, web 2.0 and the difference between them
• Focusing on 3 topics:
• 1) hospitals in social media
• How Mayo Clinic uses social media

Lee Aase’s slideshow about Mayo Clinic

• 2) doctors promoting practices via social media
• Describing Hello Health

• Why doctors must organize their practices properly?
• Homepage = reputation
• 3) science 2.0
• problems with impact factors and presenting article level metrics

Take-home message: Doctors, hospitals and scientists use social media for different purposes. Find your strategy and the proper tools.

Second slideshow: Collaboration Online

• Collaboration so far: mails, e-mails, etc.
• Now: docs.google.com (how to edit, open, save, publish, etc)
• Zoho.com
• What kind of offline tools we have to substitute online?
• Table = wiki
• White board = Twitter
• Notes = Google Docs
• Talk = Skype
• And many more: Google Groups, blogs, Friedfeed rooms, Ning.com, Flickr.com…
• Sharing examples: writing manuscripts with Google Docs; finding collaborators on Friendfeed.com, etc.

Take-home message: There are no boundaries of collaboration any more.