e-healthspace.com.au
- Image by Richard Clement via Flickr
Since its inception six short years ago Facebook has accumulated in excess of half a billion users who regularly use the site to keep in touch with distant family, rekindle past friendships, share photos and videos and plan events.
The social networking concept can work well for doctors in providing a collegiate environment to share ideas, work through case studies and access specialist support. Of course, a doctors life is not just about medicine so a good social network should provide the ability to share personally, confident that only medical professionals have access.
Such sites have had great success overseas with the US site, Sermo, claiming over 115,000 members with 50,000 posts and a million plus comments.
The difficulty in starting any social network is that you begin with something of a chicken and egg conundrum. Without members you cannot generate sufficient content, without content you have nothing to attract new members. This was the experience of Dr Stephen Bartlett, a Bowral GP who started multimedix.com.au a couple of years ago. After getting to around 400 users and finding that he was largely responsible for driving activity, he realised that he needed some assistance to progress the project further.
eMedia have been working in the online continuing medical education area for some years with their flagship e-healthlearning.com.au website. They have in excess of 12,500 registered medical professionals with about 70% having been active in the last three months. They had been looking to extend value to their users by creating a social network and so was born e-healthspace.com.au – with Dr Bartlett as the projects Medical Director.
All currently registered users of e-health learning are automatically enrolled in e-healthspace and so critical mass has been achieved and the elearning content provides great opportunity to act as a catalyst for conversation. The site is secure and restricted to doctors only allowing for frank and open discussion.
The community “allows users to draw on the extensive knowledge and experience of the network to strengthen clinical decision-making, positively impacting patient outcomes.”
It is my belief that e-healthspace has all the right ingredients to greatly impact on the practice of medicine in Australia – especially for more remote GP’s for whom an effective support can only be a benefit.
- Image by notoriousxl via Flickr
While I would usually consider myself leading edge when it comes to web and technology uptake, I have been very slow with social media technologies. Take Facebook for example – it wasn’t until my wife showed me how she was reconnecting with many old school friends that I saw any benefit to it (and I still only use it to share images and as an address book).
Twitter can best be described as a cross between an IM client such as MSN Messenger, an RSS feed and SMS. Messages must be less than 140 characters and can include a link. The essential point is to answer the simple question ‘What are you doing?’ You can follow individuals’ messages or search on topics. At the time of writing, swine flu is getting a lot of play.
Twitter has been growing rapidly for a couple of years now, but I was always ‘put off’ by vacuous drivel – really, I have little interest in what Ashton Kutcher had for breakfast. Lately however, more news agencies and websites have been using it as a tool to disperse news in real time such as @cnn and @abcnews, along with some of my favourite tech mavens such as Leo Laporte (@LeoLaporte) and John C Dvorak (@therealdvorak) share their latest tips.
In essence, when used correctly, Twitter has much to offer in terms of keeping up with the latest news as it breaks. If you would like to keep up with the latest tips and tricks from Dr Gadget follow @drgadgetonline
Digg.com
- Image via CrunchBase
For some time now there has been an explosion in social media – MySpace and Facebook are well established and are in fact bigger than many countries in terms of membership.
Another growing trend is the concept of social news gathering. We all come across interesting websites from time to time and send the link around to our friends. Social news gathering is the same idea, and one of the first of such sites is www.digg.com.
The idea behind Digg is that users submit links with a summary to digg.com and other users vote or ‘digg’ the story to the front page.
In reality it is more complicated – algorithms are used to speed up the process, but you end up with a fascinating news/trivia service well worth a look.
Recently Digg launched a new service called the Digg Bar. Simply put digg.com/ before any web address and you will see a toolbar at the top of your browser window that creates a shortened URL, allowing you to submit stories to Digg as well as share the page via email, Facebook and Twitter.
