I must confess I’m not much of a tweeter – and I don’t read my tweets nearly as often as I should. But Twitter is rapidly becoming one of the most popular – and helpful – ways to communicate, in the world of healthcare.
As Nirav Desai posted, “Twitter is like a ‘drive-through’. People ‘drive by’ their Twitter feeds at differing times and frequencies. People scan it at different times, in different places, all at their own pace and speed.”
Desai noted that Twitter is so popular because “users can quickly scan through recent tweets, which really amount to headlines designed to grab your attention, and figure out what they want to share, respond to or explore further.”
Think what this could mean for healthcare.
As Desai suggested, a telehealth program could announce a new clinical service. A telehealth vendor could talk about a product. A rural hospital that provides a telestroke service could educate its community about stroke through a link distributed via Twitter. Surgery suites are now using Twitter to update a patient’s family on the status of a surgical procedure.
If you want to get information to patients, what better way than a place they can get what they need quickly, in one small dose, see where they can go to get more, all in 140 characters or less, quickly and painlessly?
Today, when people’s attention spans are so much shorter, Twitter can grab and grow people’s knowledge about healthcare in almost a split second.
Twitter is even taking on public health. The social networking site will post news about disease outbreaks, HHS officials announced last week, as they released a new Web-based application tool available to public health officials, MappyHealth, the winning submission in a developers’ challenge, data obtained through the app will complement other health surveillance systems in identifying emerging health issues and as an early warning of possible public health emergencies in a community.
The top diseases being tracked by MappyHealth right now are the common cold, STIs, mosquito-borne disease, pertussis, tuberculosis, influenza and gastroenteritis. The five top locations where these diseases will be tracked are São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Orlando, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
