Social Media Guidelines for Medical Professionals: Summary June 2, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Video, Web 2.0.add a comment
In the past few weeks, some amazing articles, reports and videos have been published focusing on the social media guidelines for medical professionals. At the end of last year, we crowdsourced an open access social media guide for and about pharma. I thought I would publish a summary of the most important thoughts and articles dedicated to this subject.
- Guiding Principles for Physician Use of Social Media my Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media
- A 12-Word Social Media Policy
Having noted this, among the most common concerns that seem to limit participation are those regarding professionalism. So let’s make this as easy as possible, with 12 words to light your way:
- Don’t Lie, Don’t Pry
- Don’t Cheat, Can’t Delete
- Don’t Steal, Don’t Reveal
- Doctors warned not to use social media with patients
- When it comes to doctors and social media, hospitals fail miserably
European healthcare professionals on the Social Web: Self-service Directory June 2, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Crowdsourcing, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, twitter, Web 2.0.2 comments
You may remember when I wrote about a self-edited directory of European healthcare professionals on Twitter which was launched by Andrew Spong after I tweeted that I’m the only European doctor in the top 25 of the global list of doctors on Twitter. Here is the interactive map version.
This project is getting more and more attention and hopefully this movement will result in a very useful list of European medical professionals being active on Twitter.
Now over 60 medical professionals are listed and the list is getting bigger and more detailed every day.
This was one of my crowdsourcing examples in my keynote at the recent Doctors 2.0 and You.
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Visualizing a medical Twitter hashtag: MD_Chat June 1, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in eHealth, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, twitter, Visualization, Web 2.0.add a comment
I’ve recently got in touch with an amazing group, the Thesys Group. They invited me to their HQ to show me what kind of projects they are working on and we started a bit of brainstorming about what we could come up with together.
In our first project, the Thesys Group analyzed the network of discussions focusing on one of the most popular medical Twitter hashtags, MD_chat. In the figure below, a dot represents a Twitter user, lines connecting the dots represent their relationship. The bigger the dot is, the more tweets the Twitter user had. The thicker the line is, the more tweets the two users had with each other. Based on this, here is the network graph (click on the image below to access the interactive graph):
Dots in the middle account for active users, while dots in the periphery did not participate that often in these discussions. Graph includes only tweets including user names, therefore representing discussions. Here is a zoomed version of this graph just to show you how the dots are connected to each other on a smaller scale with @doctor_v and @jodyms in the focus.
A few numbers and facts:
- Tweets are dated between October, 2010 and October, 2011 (4815 messages).
- Data tables were obtained from a public Scridb database containing all the MD_chat discussions and can be downloaded in doc or PDF formats.
- 282 users are represented in the graph with 1972 connecting them to each other.
- Graph was visualized with the Gephi open-source platform.
The top 10 most active Twitter user using the MD_chat hashtag in discussions (largest dots in the graph):
| Rank | MD chat user name | Number of addressed tweets |
| 1 | richmonddoc | 559 |
| 2 | ellenrichter | 204 |
| 3 | gailzahtz | 190 |
| 4 | peds_id_doc | 181 |
| 5 | mdstudent31 | 178 |
| 6 | apjonas | 159 |
| 7 | ability4life | 155 |
| 8 | westr | 145 |
| 9 | chukwumaonyeije | 140 |
| 10 | md_chat | 139 |
The aim of this short study was to point out the importance of medicine related hashtags and the growing popularity of these. The dynamic growth of MD_chat is a good example for the changes that we can see now in the everyday communication among peers. Therapeutic experience, news and opinions spread without geographical or linguistic limitations.
Please let us know what you think of this analysis and feel free to contact me or the Thesys Group for more details.
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Farris Timimi: The Role of Social Media in Healthcare May 25, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Video, Web 2.0.2 comments
Farris Timimi, MD is an amazing leader in the social healthcare space, also he is a cardiologist and Medical Director of Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media. In this short video he says very important things about social media and medicine. One example:
“If we can trust doctors with scalpels and lives, we can trust them with Twitter or Facebook”
“This [social media] is not an addition to your job, this is a part of your job!”
#HCSM Leaderboard May 24, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, twitter, Web 2.0.add a comment
Clinical Current came up with a leaderboard of the most active users using the Twitter hashtag #hcsm (healthcare social media). I’m glad to be on the top, but it only means I’m active in this area. The scores are a mixture of Klout scores and activity.
The reason why I’m showing this to you now is that next week, I’m going to publish here a very detailed and thorough analysis of a particular medical Twitter hashtag and also visualize the results. Stay tuned!
iDoo, Your Personal Mobile Trainer is Looking for Beta Testers! May 23, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Mobile, Sport, Video, Web 2.0.1 comment so far
iDoo that I came across at the recent Smartmobil conference aims to become a mobilized personal trainer who even measures your performance. In order to reach this goal, the developers are looking for beta testers. It looks great and I hope a lot of people will sign up through the link below.
iDoo gives you the flexibility to perform the perfect training, anywhere, anytime. The app is based on a patent pending algorithm that uses several sensors of the smartphone to compare the movement of the user with the perfect motion desired by the exercise. The app features several exercises, targeting different muscles and body parts.
We are looking for testers to try out the first 15 warm-up exercises! Apply for the test following the link here, and be among the first users to try this revolutionary fitness app ever.
Next Stop: Paris! May 22, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Conference, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Video, Web 2.0.1 comment so far
Just like last year, I’m a keynote speaker again at the upcoming Doctors 2.0 and You, the event of the year in the medicine 2.0/health 2.0 space. This year, I will come up with a brand new topic.
On Wednesday, I will be the moderator in the session about big data in healthcare.
And on Thursday, I will speak about how crowdsourcing helped my way through medical school as a real geek.
Here is a great summary about what’s coming up in Paris. Until my keynote is published online, here is my speech from last year when I talked about the favorite social media tools of a physician.
See you in Paris!
Mayo Clinic Releases Patient Mobile App May 17, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Mobile, Web 2.0.1 comment so far
Mayo Clinic proves again that it has the best social media approach among all healthcare institutions worldwide by releasing a new mobile app for its patients.
The Mayo Clinic Patient app is an easy-to-use tool for navigating your visit while at a Mayo Clinic campus. The app also provides community information, including directions to local restaurants, entertainment, and much more.
Some of the features include:
- Access to request an appointment
- Navigation to amenities on the Mayo Clinic campus as well as in the community
- Up-to-date appointment schedule
- 24/7 access to your lab results and medical record
- Notifications regarding important information
- Up-to-date Mayo Clinic news, publications, and videos
News: From Doctors on Wikipedia to Twitter Guides May 15, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine, Web 2.0, Medicine 2.0, What's on the web?, Mobile.add a comment
Every single person in the world has a health story. As a doctor, my job is to help people edit the story that your health is telling and to treat your story as unique to make you healthier. It’s our signature challenge to become more efficient and accurate editors as digital healthcare begins to scale worldwide, which can create 8 billion health stories.
According to recent research that has been shared with Wikimedia UK, use of Wikipedia for medical information is almost universal among a sample of doctors. Many of them praise its accuracy, but they are aware of its faults and that it needs to be read critically.
Good Medical Practice (2006) is our current core guidance for doctors. We review it every five years to make sure it is up to date and reflects what doctors and patients think are the important principles and values of good care. Good Medical Practice is supported by a range of shorter statements which explain some of the principles in Good Medical Practice in more detail. You can read all our current guidance on our website at www.gmc-uk.org/guidance
Through innovation and technology, California think tank Singularity University aims to push the frontiers of progress. But what happens when high-tech advances end up in the wrong hands? Economics correspondent Paul Solman raises some disturbing questions as part of his ongoing reporting series, Making Sen$e of financial news.
The difference stems from a fundamental difference in the construction of the networks. In Facebook, both parties must agree on the relationship. Once you have “friended” each other, you are on roughly equal footing. This mutual agreement to exchange information gives people a sense of privacy that Facebook is repeatedly jeopardizing as they lurch from dorm room experiment to world changing company.
Teaching Older Physicians About Social Media May 11, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine, Medicine 2.0, The Social MEDia Course, Video, Web 2.0.2 comments
Yesterday, I gave a talk at the Congress of the National Society of Cardiology and the president of the Society had some interesting questions after my talk. Basically, I presented many ways and examples of medical professionals using social media in an efficient and safe way. He asked me about what he should do now as a 55 years old physician. Is there a way he could learn about social media?
And luckily, there is a great way to help him get through the most important aspects of social media from the physician’s perspective.
The Social MEDia Course, a free online course with 16 Prezi.com formatted presentations, badges and tests. I hope he will enjoy it.
He also noted that he doesn’t have hours a day to use the internet, as he thought that’s comes with using social media. I told him he could save hours a week by using a few social media resources to keep himself up-to-date, interact with colleagues and crowdsource. So using it saves time and efforts!
