Social Media as Prescription for What Ails You

I’m back from the AMA Houston SIG meeting on healthcare and technology, presented by:

Plus Katie Laird, from Schipul, moderated the panel.  

We had about two hours to present, take questions, and wrap it up.  I felt the Q&A could have gone on for another two hours, the audience was so engaged.   The most helpful aspect was that each presentation built on the previous.  Ours was focused on why healthcare was changing due to social media and then Chris and Jennifer followed up with the successes and challenges of from an inside the hospital point-of-view.  (Chris does it because it’s a clear passion, in the midst of other jobs; Jennifer is fortunate enough to have this be her full-time position.)  Jay, from CareFlash, finished up with a demo of sorts to show the benefits of social networks to the caregiving community.

My favorite thing about speaking at conferences — aside from my desire to one day be a talking head over a blue screened city backdrop on CNN – is that it’s a rare time when I can be completely honest with my opinions since the room is not full of clients at varying stages of engagement with what we’re doing.   That resulted in a neat exchange with an attendee (Richard Laurence Baron) on his blog over his concerns that I predicted the death of the written word (I didn’t, but you could take some comments that way) and what it meant for his life as a freelancer (hopefully, more work for more innovative.)

Most of all, this conference forced me to examine our embrace of social media for the company — we now have a MedTouch Twitter page; thank you Jennifer — and our clients.   For example, I’ve had this blog sitting outside our main site because I wanted to make sure that I’d write enough to keep it up (it’s been a year!) and also, I wasn’t sure our point of view would warrant exposing it to every visitor to our site.  Thanks to this conference, I’ve figured it out, so in a few weeks, we’re going to tear this down and rebuild it stronger.

Until then, feel free to talk to us about your hospital’s social media needs.