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So just what is healthcare social media 'street cred', thought leadership or transformational modeling? What are the boundaries and potential applications of these technologies to the acknowledged shortfalls of the US healthcare system? Recently the Mayo Clinic announced an initial 'Board of Advisors' for their revolutionary and material commitment to innovation via their Center for Social Media. Shortly thereafter both Kevin Pho, MD aka KevinMD, and Bryan Vartebedian, MD, aka Doctor_V, opined that the initial list of 'advisors' was somewhat light on physician participation.
So the thought occurred, why not create an initial list of known physicians who 'tweet' i.e., engage (vs. solely push content) on Twitter. Couple this with Howard Luks, MD aka @hjluks previous query to the #hcsm (healthcare social media) community: is there a need for a 'physician tweetchat?; and recent events suggest the answer to this question may be yes.
Since being active in the space for two years, and somewhat able to identify 'real docs' on twitter via both direct personal interactions, as well as secondary source validation - though no warranties are suggested or implied, I thought why not take a stab at it?
The intention is to attract and support increased physician participation in this rapidly evolving communications, and social connectivity paradigm. Survey after, survey suggest that patients and/or consumers want the health information floating around the net minimally influenced if not curated by credible, i.e., credentialed, authorities in medicine. This is a first pass at an effort to build a physician curated 'tweetstream' (aka conversation), and in no way a criticism of the many useful and thriving empowered or e-patient communities.
My thoughts are to build this list via 'crowd sourcing' (nominations both self and third party), as well as ties to various objective 'benchmarks; which rank twitter influence, reach, veracity of engagement, followers and even evolving notions of 'social capital', or in the words of Chris Brogan, as 'trust agents'. A recent tweet by @DrVes revealed that some docs are resorting to purchased testimonials to 'optimize' their Google ranking, and page authority standing. Perhaps another sign of the times (caveat emptor) warning, and need for docs to get involved in this space, imj!
'Doctors paying for web testimonals and SEO to rank #1 on Google to drive traffic for plastic surgery via @'
So why not build physician social media core competencies via open engagement in a curated physician 'tweetchat' conversation? We can do this!
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