MDS + SOCIAL MEDIA. WHAT DO WE WANT AND WHY?

This week on #hcldr we are excited to have a healthcare social media star as a guest – Bryan Vartabedian, MD (aka @Doctor_V).

Dr. Vartabedian is considered one of health care’s influential voices on social technology and medicine. He has served as a consultant to a number of health care start-ups and has independently advised health care organizations and national physician groups in the area of policy and digital strategy.

His unique expertise lies in understanding the emerging digital culture of medicine and how new media can be leveraged by organizations and individual stakeholders in health care. At Baylor College of Medicine Dr. Vartabedian directs programs in digital literacy and advises leadership in the area of training and emerging technology. He is the co-founder of the Medical Futures Laboratory, a Rice University based collaborative for insight and solutions into the problems facing medicine at its intersection with technology.

Present in the health blogosphere since 2006, I’ve been an active witness to the social health revolution and its influence on doctors and patients. I write about the intersection of medicine, social media and technology here on my blog, 33 charts.

33 charts, a site which has come to serve as a center of community and thought surrounding physicians and their transition to the digital space is often cited as an example of 21st century thought leadership, 33 charts was recently chosen to be archived in its entirely in the National Library of Medicine.

Dr. Vartabedian recently released his book “The Public Physician” – a practical guide designed to help doctors survive and thrive in our digital age. The book, fittingly, is available for download via tinypass.com

If you follow Dr. Vartabedian you will know that he has been blogging and speaking passionately about the challenge that physicians have in creating/managing their identity in an online world. Although many of his early posts are on the topic of the online tools (Twitter, Facebook, Doximity, etc), many of his more recent posts have centered around a fascinating question – what do we (as patients & physicians) want to get out of all this online interaction?

I’m truly excited for this upcoming #hcldr chat with Dr. Vartabedian. He kindly wrote the following blog to set up the chat and in it he poses some truly interesting questions that should generate a lot of discussion within the #hcldr community.

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Dr. Vartabedian’s blog.

I am excited to be guest hosting Health Care Leader chat this coming Tuesday, February 10, 2015. We’ll be talking doctors and some of the issues surrounding doctors in the public space. This topic is timely as more and more physicians make their way out ‘in public.’ While physicians may have the tools to create and publish, few know the rules and boundaries. So as physician peers or communications professionals, we need to do our part to educate and mentor our new generation of public physicians.

Hopefully we’ll be able to get into some of the real value that comes with public engagement. I see a lot of discussion about the wonderful shiny tools at our disposal, but I’d like to see more examples of specifically how those tools have been used for good. I’m sure you have stories and experiences and I hope you’ll bring them along to #hcldr.