Lessons Learned in Healthcare Social Media

Slideshare: Lessons Learned in Health Care Social Media 2010 (#HCSM):
http://www.slideshare.net/umhealthscienceslibraries/lessons-learned-in-health-care-social-media-2010

Most Sunday evenings, when other folk might be putting their kids to bed or organizing things to get ready for the next week of work, a stalwart group of people passionate about healthcare and social media meet for their weekly conversation on the topic. The #hcsm community includes doctors, nurses, patient advocates, patients, nonprofits, hospital marketing folk, pharmaceutical reps, teachers, students, and much much more. It is a rich inclusive cross section of the stakeholders in healthcare. Most are from the United States, but we also have regular attendees from the UK, Canada, Europe, and other international places, many of which of spun off their own #hcsm communities and conversations. Usually, this is happening on Twitter, and believe it or not, the tweets fly fast as snowflakes in a blizzard, the conversation is ALWAYS rich and engaging, and the content is always thought provoking and stimulation.

Each time I am able to attend, I pop open windows like crazy, trying to capture the concepts that most captured my attention. Each week I spend an hour or so capturing screenshots and marking favorites, and each week I wish I had the time to do a series of blog posts in reaction to the #hcsm discussions.

#HCSM (pronounced Hic-Sum) happens almost every Sunday, at 9pm Eastern Time, 8pm Central Time, and lasts one hour. Officially. Individuals often continue the conversation long after the official hour is over and most people have gone to bed. People find friends, they develop relationships, and these may have begun during our weekly #hcsm but they sure don’t end there. We prowl each other’s blogs, commenting, friend each other on Facebook, and when we travel to another part of the country, we track down our #hcsm friends to meet over coffee or dinner.

A few times I’ve mentioned wanting to do a slideshow of the screenshots to try to show people who aren’t #hcsm members what it is and why it is so important and relevant. People have said, ‘oh, do it!’ but I never seem to have the time to do either the slideshows I plan or the blogposts I envision. Then, December 12th, the first topic (out of our usual two or three per hour) was on lessons learned. What has been learned by this group of healthcare social media folk over the previous year that was most important to them and which they wanted to share.

This content was just TOO priceless not to preserve. Not that I don’t feel that way every single blessed week, but of the thousands of screenshots I’ve captured from various #hcsm conversations, this week’s collection practically jumped up and down and said, “Me! Me!” It took me a full week to collate, too, which is probably why I don’t do this every week.

What I did was capture the screenshots in real time of comments that captured my attention. Then I backtracked and tried to figure out how they connected to the rest of the conversation. I also captured the chatlog from the discussion (which you can find at the blog). I renamed files, sorted into topics and themes, connected chronologically sometimes and broke sequence others. For the record, this slideshow represents only selected tweets from the 1st twenty minutes of the hour long conversation. I wanted to include ALL of them, but for the most part did not include retweets, and simply didn’t have time or space to include everything. The main topic threads I pulled out of the “Lessons Learned” discussion were:

– Dos and Don’ts
– Relationships & Community
– Patients & Professionals
– and closed with the most important bits to remember.