December 12th, 2010 by Bryan Vartabedian, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion
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I suspect that in the next couple of years we’ll see the emergence of a viable social network for physicians. It hasn’t happened yet, but I suspect that we’re getting close. Physicians are increasingly dabbling in mainstream social sites.
But maybe that’s a problem. After all, a doctor can only hang in so many places. If you have “The Facebook for Doctors,” do you expect us to spend our time there instead of on Facebook itself? Maybe we will, and maybe we won’t.
Beyond the obvious requirement of a network to deliver value, I think the rate-limiting factor is old-fashioned bandwidth. You can only be one place at a time. If I spend my days on Twitter, I’m not likely to spend my days on said doctor’s network. I will go there for particular things and to talk to certain people about specific issues, but like most doctors I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what I want. I’ll know it when I see it. (Actually I do, but I’m keeping it tip-top secret.) Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*
September 18th, 2010 by Bryan Vartabedian, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion, True Stories
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When it comes to the social media landscape, doctors are scarce. Few on Twitter and fewer with blogs. Maybe we’re socially lazy. Or maybe we’re just taking it all in.
Mitch Joel of Six Pixels of Separation caught my eye last week with his article “In Praise of Lazy” and reminded me that despite the how we may want to see things, most of us aren’t interested in creating content. In fact, he describes a 1 percent rule — only 1 percent of the audience will take time to actually create content.
I suspect that if we were to take the time and do the survey properly, we would find that physicians too are largely new media consumers — or spectators, joiners or collectors in the Forrester sense of the word. Physicians, in fact, might adhere to something of a 0.1 percent rule. Like Peter Sellers as “Chance the Gardner” in the 1979 classic, Being There, we “like to watch.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*
September 14th, 2010 by Berci in Announcements, Better Health Network, News
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I got the honour to be included in the list of the top 5 [Twitter] doctors in medicine published by The Independent. The list was based on Twitterdoctors.net which uses the Klout algorithm for determining the influence of tweeting doctors:
TwitterDoctors.net updates hourly the influence of doctors tweeting based on their activity, RTs (retweets) and followers. The site began its list at the end of July and boasts “1287 doctors with more joining every day” from around the globe including Australia, Belgium, India, UK, Jamaica, Japan, Colombia and the USA.
On September 7, the top five most influential doctors are:
1. @DRoftheVaJayJay
2. @drdrew
3. @brontyman
4. @Berci
5. @hrana
It doesn’t mean that much, but it’s good to know people like the content I share day by day.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
August 31st, 2010 by Bryan Vartabedian, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
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Lately there’s been talk of a tweetchat for doctors. The issue has surfaced on Twitter over the past couple of weeks. The idea is out there –- the genie’s out of the bottle. There will be a tweetchat for physicians. But I’m not sure we need it. We may want to think about why we need a Twitter discussion group and what we’d like to get out of it.
I look at tweetchats like I look at medical meetings: I go to see old friends in one place. Most of what’s discussed was public long before the meeting. The most interesting stuff happens in the hallway. With that said I still go to medical meetings. But it’s usually to cultivate relationships. And tweetchats do accomplish that.
I like to participate in tweetchats to see who shows up. I like to look at how people behave, how they meet the challenge of open-ended questions in the limits of 140 characters. It’s really interesting to watch those who think they have the answers. I like to see who actually takes the process so seriously that they can’t crack a joke and have a little fun (this tells me the most). Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*
August 26th, 2010 by GarySchwitzer in Better Health Network, News, Opinion
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Why are so many stories so unquestioning about these runaway surgical Twitter practices? Just look at this frame grab from a Google search showing all of the stories (so far) on one hospital team’s surgical Twitter exploits. One story stated:
“Senior hand fellows…when not actively involved in the surgery, sat at a laptop just outside the operating suite and tweeted real-time updates during the procedure, according to a hospital press release. According to the Twitter feed, expert teams of hand surgeons rotated in and out of the operating room throughout the surgery.”
Oh, phew, their hands were tweeting when their hands weren’t operating! I might rather that my surgeons — even when not actively involved in the operation and when rotating out of the OR — would just rest their digits and not flex them digitally. But what an old-fashioned guy I am.
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
I suspect that in the next couple of years we’ll see the emergence of a viable social network for physicians. It hasn’t happened yet, but I suspect that we’re getting close. Physicians are increasingly dabbling in mainstream social sites.
