February is quickly nearing its end, but I couldn’t let the month close without doing a quick recap on the last Social Media Club DC event.
On February 11th, Alex Rampy and the folks at IQ Solutions hosted the group and led a discussion titled “Engaging the Health World through Social Media”. Alex served as the moderator for the night and there was a great group of guests on the panel:
Dr. Val Jones, Physician & Blog Entrepreneur, Staying UPstream of MAINstream Media.
(http://getbetterhealth.com/)
Christian Olsen, Online healthcare specialist. Connecting companies with communities. (http://www.apcoworldwide.com)
Mark Scrimshire, Change Agent, Blogger and Visionary. Organizer of HealthCamp. (http://ekive.blogspot.com/ or http://barcamp.org/HealthCamp)
Joel Selzer, Entrepreneur and Innovator in Health Care and Social Media.
(http://www.ozmosis.com)
It’s always great to go to these events when there is an active conversation going on between the panelists and the attendees. The group tossed thoughts around on a number of topics including the definition of Health 2.0, adverse events reporting, the current state of doctor/patient relationships, communities of color and the lack of trust and thoughts on potential social media adoption by medical professionals.
At one point in the conversation, an attendee offered online literacy training as a solution to problems we are currently seeing with patients getting inaccurate health care information online. In her mind, the problem was caused by people not knowing the difference between blogs and credible health information sites. Not exactly accepting her point of view, I had to chime in. I think the issues we see today in this area are directly tied to two areas:
1. A breakdown in the doctor/patient relationship
2. A lack of “social-media literate” medical professionals
The latter is being taken care of (to an extent) as Gen Y-ers begin to enter the medical field, but they still need to come up with strategies for ways to include social media in their practice. Depending on the health condition under discussion, I think health professionals should try to work with patients to help them sift through what they find online and help provide them with appropriate online resources. (Might need to run that by my friend at GW Med – might just be seen as extra work)
If you’re interested in the world of Health 2.0 and what is to come, you definitely need to check out HealthCampDC coming up on February 27, 2009.
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Hi James,
Great recap and thanks for attending the event. I still find myself thinking back to conversations that night as it gave many great points to think about and eventually, act on as well.
Best,
Alex
So glad that these conversations are going on. So important for figuring out solutions to these problems. Sad that I won’t be at HealthCamp, though. I’ll be looking out for recaps and/or live tweets from you guys!
I’m late — but thank you for posting this
I wish that this event had been streamed so we would all have it for future reference – lots of great points were made.
I always enjoy the conversations started by these events. Glad to do it. I couldn’t make the last meetup, but I’ll be on the lookout for the next SMC-DC event.