More ER physicians are tweeting. Are you?
Posted by Guest Blogger on Fri, Dec 04, 2009 @ 02:11 PM
By Chris Hannan
Paris Hilton does it. President Obama famously did it.
And now for an increasing number of emergency physicians, "Twitter" is becoming the technology of choice for gathering and sharing a wide variety of up-to-the-minute medical information between colleagues and even patients. Twitter - whose 140 character format encourages brevity - enables physicians to have real-time discussions from the emergency room, or virtually anywhere.
I encourage you to read an excellent article from the Annals of Emergency Medicine http://bit.ly/jJRLp that discusses the growing uses for Twitter - and why it's fast becoming an important "tool" in the ER.
For the uninitiated, Twitter enables physicians to communicate with colleagues and provide instant feedback on everything from emergency procedures to discussions on medical trends. Twitter allows for more transparency to what goes on in the physician's world, and enables both patients and other doctors to interact with one another in a quick, convenient way. And an important point for non-techy types, it's easy to join and easy to use.
So should medical professionals be adapting and using emerging technology such as Twitter? In my opinion, the answer is yes.
Have you gotten on the bandwagon yet? If so, how are you using it? Are you finding it beneficial? And if not, why not? I'd appreciate hearing your experiences.