When was the last time you were sick but avoided going to the doctor because of all the hassles, from scheduling the appointment to filling out forms and answering medical history questions?

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. …

Amidst all of the industries utilizing social media in unique and innovative ways–from technology firms to consumer products manufacturers–there is one flying under radar. Rohit Bhargava, on the Fresh Influence blog, points out that hospitals are quietly but actively involved on the social web.

Today in the US, there are 367 hospitals that are actively using social media. Collectively they are responsible for 186 YouTube Channels which include over 5,000 videos. They have created 267 Twitter accounts and published more than 10,000 tweets. …

These days, almost every organization or business has become a publisher of content on the web. A recent post on Dose of Digital blog points out that healthcare organizations are no exception, publishing healthcare content about diseases, treatments, dieting and exercising. But is there an information overload? Are you publishing healthcare content for the sake of publishing?

In many cases, we include this type of information because we think we have to. Our competitors do, so in order for our site to be as “good” as theirs, we do it also.

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”?

We’ve scoured the web and found a great mix of healthcare blogs covering science, medicine, pharma and healthcare marketing topics:

Dose of Digital
This healthcare and pharmaceutical e-marketing blog offers news and thoughts on how the heathcare industry can leverage the digital technologies available. The blog offers information on how patients and doctors find out about products and determine if they are right for them, as well as how digital technologies can make this all simpler for everyone involved.

Is social media in healthcare on the rise? As a technology, social media is primed to become the next big tool for improving public health and educating patients, according to data presented at the 2009 National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing & Media.

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.

What if there were no rules in pharma marketing? That’s the question Jonathan Richman asks in a recent post on the iMedia Connection Blog. For healthcare digital marketers—like marketers in every field—innovation is often inhibited by themselves, by external forces and by their own interpretation of external forces. Richman says it’s the interpretation of external forces (regulations, guidelines, etc.) that’s the most menacing.

Most of us are aware of our own limitations. At the same time, most of us know the rules and are forced to live under them. However, many times we don’t really know the rules or understand them. Worse still is when we think we know the rules, but really don’t. When this happens, we essentially create a set of “ghost rules” that inhibit our thinking and that of our colleagues.

According to a recent report “Pharmaceutical Marketing Online: Stuck in Web 1.5″ from eMarketer, despite significant growth in pharma online ad spending, there’s a bit of a disconnect between how pharmaceutical companies view the internet (information delivery channel) and their customers (interact with one another and with brands).

Having restricted their brand sites to mere online information centers – often pages of text and a slow-to-load TV commercial – pharma marketers are missing big opportunities to engage consumers and boost confidence in their brands, eMarketer said.

(Reported by MarketingCharts)

Pharmaceutical and healthcare market research company Manhattan Research released a new research report, “Pharmaceutical Search Engine Marketing” that explores how to leverage health topic searching behavior to fulfill brand goals amidst the new FDA regulations. The report also looks at emerging trends and technologies like mobile search, personalization, and real-time search.

Key questions that are answered in the report include:

• How is the use of search engines for health information evolving?
• What role does search play in the online health and pharmaceutical landscape and how does pharmaceutical information searching vary by demographics and different points in the treatment continuum?

On the Wall Street Journal Health Blog, Anna Wilde Mathews wrote an interesting post about health insurers’ slow entry into social media:

Lots of companies are starting to track social-networking tools like Twitter and Facebook to keep an eye on negative comments, put out their own happier spin and interact with consumers.

But in the health-care business, there are some special challenges because of privacy concerns — notably the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, aka HIPAA. Insurers, hospitals and other entities can’t say much publicly about what they’ve done for patients.