If you plan to use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube, you might heed some of the following tips for your own credibility and job insurance:

• Learn the platforms: Learn how to use each social media tool to your advantage, which means learning how to use privacy controls and other customizations.
• Keep professional and social relationships separate: By dividing social and business lives, a healthcare professional can maintain a professional demeanor on one hand and socialize with friends and family on the other. It is not appropriate to “friend” patients on Facebook or to follow them on Twitter.
• Watch your associations: You may want to connect with a patient on a blog, but you may not want to connect with that patient on Facebook or LinkedIn. On the other hand, you don’t want a friend with an offensive user name to appear on your list of people you follow on Twitter, unless you Tweet anonymously (possible by not revealing your real name, but a user name when registering).
• Keep politics and religion quiet: Unless you plan to be a journalist or an activist, it is best to keep those two topics in the personal realm, rather than the business realm. Activism, however, is up to you — if you, as a healthcare professional — want to campaign for clean water, then use your professionalism to temper your activism.
• Use social networking to say “Thank you” and to set up meetings in person: This Mashable article explains that social networking provides the perfect medium to extend your hand in business situations appropriately.
• Keep comments civil and don’t use social media while under the influence: The article about medical students explains succinctly how these comments can lead to expulsion from school — and in professional situations may lead to job loss or loss of clients.

Read the full post citing the Jobvite survey and Mayo clinic advice for healthcare professionals and their use of social media at: The Health Express

It was the perfect storm: As social media sites were gaining in popularity, health care was becoming more expensive and doctors’ time was becoming more finite and valuable.

It was only a matter of time before patients and their families began turning to health care social networks for medical information and even emotional support.

The Wall Street Journal discusses the trend in an insight article:

Online health sites have been booming in the past five years … Many of the sites have recently experienced heavy traffic from users seeking information on the H1N1 virus. Officials of the Health 2.0 Conference, which tracks the industry, estimate that the number of such sites climbed to nearly 500 from about 35 four years ago.

The sites generally have evolved from the encyclopedic-styled WebMD, becoming more interactive and case-study- oriented, such as Inspire, PatientsLikeMe and CureTogether.

“You’re seeing right now an expansion phase of the relatively early part of the technology cycle,” said Matthew Holt, co-founder of the Health 2.0 Conference. “There’s a significant advance in what sites are doing.”

The article discusses in detail how several patient-focused health care social networks are evolving:

• WiserTogether: This site was created by a mother in the D.C. area to allow expectant parents to share the experiences of other parents in their age group and who have experienced similar circumstances.
• Inspire: This social networking site was founded in 2005 and currently consisting of 130,000 members. It allows members to share their health problems and experiences with different treatments.

Doctors visits might soon be painless thanks to social media in health care, A Smarter Planet blogger Josh Catone points out.

Web-based and social media tools are making it easier to get health information, find doctors, make appointments, keep records, and get support. These tools are revolutionizing the healthcare field and the way people approach the practice of medicine. …

One of the most obvious ways that the web and social media are making our lives healthier, is in the proliferation of health information. I can remember getting sick when I was a child and watching my mother haul out a huge thousand-plus page medical encyclopedia to try and figure out what I might have and whether I needed to be taken to a doctor (or what sort of questions to ask when we got there). Today, though, health mega-portals like WebMD, Revolution Health, and Yahoo! Health contain more information than that big book my mom used to own ever could — and it’s all searchable and available instantly.

In addition to illustrating how social channels are helping provide health information for patients, Catone goes on to describe several other uses of social media in health care:

• Locating doctors. Sites like Vitals and HealthGrades provide doctor ratings and help patients locate a good doctor. Sites like FindaDoc and RateMDs.com allows patients to chose a doctor based on their peers’ recommendations.
• Providing care. Sites such as American Well, BreakThrough and DoubleCheckMD allow patients to assess their symptoms or consult with doctors online.
• Keeping records. With online personal health record systems, patients can access their health records over the Internet and send them to authorized doctors and other medical personnel.

Healthcare IT News – Offers healthcare IT executives coverage of new technologies, IT strategies and tactics, statutory and regulatory issues, as well as provider and vendor updates. Published in partnership with HIMSS.

Alltop Healthcare IT –  Aggregation of over 40 healthcare IT blogs.

HITSphere Healthcare IT Blogs – A network of premium weblogs about the healthcare, medical, and clinical informatics and information technology (IT) industry.

Of all the companies out there playing in the healthcare IT space, I’d like to see a blog from MPT.

Which HealthCare IT news sites are your “must reads”?

During the conference, themed “Participation Powers Prevention,” Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet & American Life Project offered these facts and figures on social media in healthcare:

• 79% of adults in the U.S. use the Internet, up from 46% in 2000.
• 56% of adults have accessed the Internet wirelessly via laptop or mobile device.
• Of healthcare patients who look for health information online, 89% are wireless and 88% use broadband.

Fox also offered two successful social media examples from the healthcare world:

1. Patients Like Me: This website, created in 2004 by 3 MIT engineers, provides patients with access to the tools, information and experience needed to take control of their diseases. The site’s goal is to allow patients to share information about their own experiences to improve the lives of others diagnosed with the same or similar life-changing diseases. Visitors can join specific disease communities, search for patients who share their illness or partake in one-on-one discussions.

2. Center for Connected Health: This community site is a resource for healthcare providers, policy leaders and healthcare executives. It provides them with the ability to engage in discussion of best practices, new ideas, controversial topics, industry events and research. Visitors can either partake in current healthcare discussions or start their own.