"Twitter understands Web 2.0 better than Facebook," Tim O'Reilly told a group attending a Launchbox start-up confab in early June 2009.
Two weeks prior, I had offered testimony to the privacy subcommittee of the National Center for Vital and Health Statistics responding to the question, "What Will Consumer-Facing Health IT Look Like in five or 10 Years?"
In a nutshell, I said that health citizens (whom you can alternatively call consumers, patients, caregivers or people) would be engaged with their health and their health data, which would be more liquid, accessible, engaging, actionable and user-friendly.
While it may or may not be with us five or 10 years from now, Twitter has become a useable, engaging platform in health care. It's accessible, useable and fun.
One Tweeter Counts 140 Health Uses
The uses of Twitter in health are multiplying like crazy. Phil Baumann, a registered nurse who blogs at Health Is Social, came up with 140 uses for Twitter in health care.
John Halamka wrote on The Health Care Blog, "If I can reach my staff and colleagues via the means of communication they find best -- IM, e-mail, blogs, microblogs, phone/voicemail, fax and Plaxo/LinkedIn -- then I've met my goal of overcommunicating with all my stakeholders to ensure they understand my strategy, priorities and important health care IT news of the day."
In late May, Twitter brought to light the story of Regina Holliday. Regina met offline with a group of health tweeters in Washington, D.C., to share her experiences in accessing her husband's paper-based medical records in the course of their managing his treatment for cancer. Once a link to her blog appeared on Twitter, the D.C.-based offline social network of the handful of people who first met with Regina grew to countless tweeters, and continues to attract new 'friends of Regina' who understand the challenge of electronic health records' lack of personalization, accessibility and usability.
There are innumerable health stories emerging on Twitter, along with countless hospitals, health providers, policy wonks, and clinicians tweeting about global medical news stories and local community health events. In April 2009, Boehringer-Ingelheim, the German pharmaceutical company, was the first pharmaceutical manufacturer to use Twitter to broadcast its annual meeting live, in both German and English. B-I was among the first pharmaceutical companies to adopt Twitter in November 2008.
Where Twitter Shines for Health
Here are a few of the venues where I find Twitter very useful in health:
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Twitter for meeting reportage.
At the recent Health 2.0 Conference in Boston in conjunction with the Center for Information Therapy, more than 100 tweeters were in the hotel ballroom's audience whose tweets, collectively, conflicted with the audio setup. Twitter is being used, with its hashtag (#) function, as a way for people not attending a meeting in real time, to keep abreast of the meeting's content as participants take virtual notes on the service and share them with anyone following their tweets.
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Twitter for medical education
. Hospitals have begun to tweet surgical procedures live on Twitter. This is a way for institutions to make the most of teachable moments as well as promote the hospital's technical competency in breakthrough areas. Earlier this year, Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit tweeted a kidney tumor operation, Children's Medical Center in Texas tweeted a transplant procedure and Aurora Health Care in Wisconsin tweeted a bilateral knee replacement. In October 2008, Robert Hendrick, co-founder of change: healthcare, live-tweeted his own surgery to remove varicose veins.
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Twitter for a quick motivational hit.
Qwitter is a Twitter group that helps support people who want to quit smoking. A short supportive message can be powerful, as mobile health advocates have discovered with SMS texting for health applications. Some people are using Twitter as a health diary to record observations of daily living (ODLs). SugarStats, a diabetic support service, integrates with Twitter to help people track diabetes via Twitter.
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Twitter for organizing. An article in PR Week is titled, "The coming PR battle over health care will be won in the trenches of social media." Forget the Clinton era's Harry and Louise campaign launched on expensive broadcast TV by the health plan lobby. This time around, health care reform debates are happening on blogs, in Facebook and, increasingly, on Twitter.
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Twitter as conduit to medical information.
Notwithstanding the constraint of the 140-character limit of tweets, a short message can capture attention for a specific medical issue that can link the follower to a Web page with deep, engaging and informative content. Ed Bennett, a hospital Web manager who blogs at Found in Cache, has compiled a list of 201 hospitals on Twitter, from Adventist Healthcare in Rockville, Md., to Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Twitter for Public Health
State and county health departments have joined Twitter to communicate messages of local and regional health import. With cuts in state and federal government budgets, Twitter can be a cost-effective platform for public health messaging. Arizona health officials are developing an asthma alert system that will send messages to Twitter and other social networks when particulate pollution in a certain area reaches levels that could trigger an asthma attack. The University of Iowa developed a swine flu monitoring map built on Twitter messages on the H1N1 virus (http://compepi.cs.uiowa.edu/~alessio/twitter-monitor-swine-flu).
When the H1N1 swine flu epidemic erupted, tweets immediately signaled to the public in real time where initial breakouts were happening. On April 28, 2009, swine flu-related posts on Twitter exceeded 10,000 an hour, according to Mashable.com. "This is a good example of why (Twitter is) headed in that wrong direction," Brennon Slattery, a writer for PC World, wrote in the magazine. "It's just propagating fear amongst people as opposed to seeking actual solutions or key information."
While Slattery and other critics commented that tweets on the swine flu may have raised hype among health citizens, the information platform continues to be adopted by medical emergency services and law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S.
The American Red Cross, CDC and the World Health Organization all actively participate on Twitter. So do the American Medical Association, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, the Mayo Clinic and a host of academic medical centers.
Twitter's not just about Ashton and Oprah and CNN. Twitter is supporting engagement for all sorts of stakeholders in health. It's easy-to-use and quick search interface embodies useful traits for EZ-HIT.