What’s Your Health Ecosystem Twitter Reach?

I was in Austin, TX for the last couple of days for The Conference Board Council on Social Media, and on getaway day had the opportunity to attend parts of the W2O group’s PreCommerce event.

It was great to connect with several folks I’ve known for a long time via social, including Chris Heuer, Serena Ehrlich and Jeremiah Owyang, and also to see current and former #MCSMN External Advisory Board members Greg Matthews and Dana Lewis.

Greg and Dana debuted a neat project based on their MDigitalLife platform. They call it the MDigitalLife Snapshot. It lets you see how many Twitter connections you have in the health ecosystem, and in which categories, such as U.S. or non-U.S. physicians, journalists and media outlets. It also highlights the most-connected nodes in your network. Lots of other fun elements to explore, too.

Here’s my report. You can get yours by clicking the “Create Your Own” tab on mine.

I hope MDigital Life will be keeping this updated. I’m taking a screenshot of my Snapshot so I can see how my connections in various categories change over time.

American Medical News highlights hospital social media

American Medical News has a nice profile this morning of Dana Lewis, who exemplifies the new role, in an article titled “Hospitals’ new specialist: Social media manager.” The article begins:

For otolaryngologist Douglas Backous, MD, Twitter and blogging were “like speaking a foreign language.” So he went to his hospital and got himself a translator: Dana Lewis, hired by Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center to handle all things social media.

Lewis is part of a trend in a new and growing type of hospital employment: the social media manager.

Technically, she’s called the interactive marketing specialist. But she, and others like her, are being charged by their hospitals to handle such duties as overseeing their social media presence, communicating with patients through social media — and, in many cases, teaching affiliated or employed physicians how to use social media. The idea is that by having a person dedicated to social media, the hospital can use the technology to strengthen its connections with all of what organizations like to call their stakeholders, which include the physicians who refer patients through their doors.

Check out the whole article: Ed Bennett’s Hospital Social Networking List also is featured, as are my 35 Theses here on SMUG. It also has a nice compilation of social media best practices for hospitals, which author Bob Cook apparently synthesized from several guidelines documents.

Here’s more information on what we’re doing at Mayo Clinic, with our new Center for Social Media. I’m excited that we’ve hired candidates for four of the eight new positions with the Center, and that we have interviews this week and next for two more. I’m also honored that both Ed and Dana are on our advisory board (with 12 more members still to be named). We’re going through about 120 applications from some really strong candidates to ensure broad-based and diverse membership.

When the official online publication of the American Medical Association devotes an extensive article to the topic of social media staffing for hospitals, that’s a good sign the activity is going mainstream. We’re glad to contributing to that through the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media and the Social Media Health Network.

Meredith Gould: Great Humanitarian

Here’s a little story about the power of Twitter and the communities it helps to create, and the nice people it enables you to meet.

Earlier this week I attended the e-Patient Connections conference in Philadelphia, where I presented our Mayo Clinic social media case study.

Unfortunately, when I got to the airport (I had to leave just after lunch), I realized that I had left my Flip video camera on the podium at the conference. The video below tells what happened next, and expresses my gratitude:

The conference was a great chance for me to meet lots of great Tweeps with whom I had only interacted via Twitter and our blogs, including, in addition to @MeredithGould@danamlewis, @daphneleigh, @philbaumann, @ePatientDave, @whydotpharma and @SusannahFox. I met several more with whom I hadn’t interacted previously, but look forward to getting to know in the coming months.

Thanks to @kevinkruse for organizing a great conference, and again to Meredith for her Philadelphia airlift.