The Blog

I've been interested for some time in the role of online identity in healthcare on the social web. Why? Because on the one hand "transparency"  is key to quality and on the other, the social web has introduced us to the possibility of developing as many identities as we can manage. So, where do we go with this question? Well, it...

Doctors 2.0 & You Paris June 6-7, 2013 | Infographics...

It took:  Lucien Engelen, Berci Mesko, Larry Chu, Sean Ahrens, Roberto Ascione, myself Denise Silber, and first and foremost the patient herself, but one single tweet did change a life and remarkably so! Here is the story. In the fall of 2010, someone in the United States, whom I didn't know of or meet until recently, suddenly developed an inflammatory...

In the first few days of the New Year, we are always smothered in summaries, insights, and perspectives on the year past and the trends to come, especially in the fast-moving area of digital communication.  What and who will succeed on the web, in Social Media, in Mobile Apps? What's going up? What's coming down? You get the picture. But,...

Have you heard of the digital fork? Jacques Lépine, the man who wants us all to be "eating slowly" is the founder of ‘Slow Control’. He created a concept, a product, and a company, in order to help us manage the speed with which we eat. And many people are listening to him at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las...

Berci Mesko and I keep in touch regularly through many Social Media channels and even via old-fashioned email to discuss Doctors 2.0 & You, Webicina, and how all of this can or cannot improve…life for patients…You'll see Berci in Paris next June :-). Perhaps you know through Facebook that Berci recently celebrated his birthday. Well, there is an even bigger...

Berman Bioethics Institute, at  Johns Hopkins has just published a new article with a striking title, Physicians, social media, and conflicts of interest. If we need to eliminate the piece that doesn't fit, it would have to be conflict of interest. The author suggests that social media cannot function without the elimination of conflict of interest, because, in his opinion,...

Those of you who are interested in healthcare social media must have given some thought to the questions posed by research regarding healthcare social media. What happens when we use traditional research methods to study Healthcare Social Media  ?  Do we publish the results according to the principles of traditional scientific journals? Do we, given the subject, avoid paid subscriber-only...

The "Doctors aren't stooges" movement in France (les médecins ne sont pas des pigeons) shows that French physicians have come a long way in using healthcare social media. You may recall that the French government had to give them financial incentives in the late '90's to acquire their first computer.  And now, Dr Philippe Letertre, founder of the movement, has...