e-healthspace.com.au

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.