Twitter is not just a way to stay in touch with friends or a social group. It's starting to emerge as a way to share and receive health care information and medical alerts.
In the article "Twittering Telemedicine," in the latest issue of Telemedicine and e-Health, Mark Terry explains the potential of Twitter for physicans. He says it's not a fad, but a way to communicate with people simultaneously. Sure, you can do that with emails to text messaging, but because other applications feed in to Twitter, users can manipulate it or customize it for their specific needs.
Terry cites a bunch of different doctors who are already using Twitter or see its advantages. Some of those advantages include:
- Communicate with other team members
- Gather and share medical information (for example, a physician might twitter about his/her experience with a particular medication)
- Acquiring information about conference updates
- Disaster alerting and response
- Diabetes management
- Drug safety alerts from the FDA
- Biomedical device data capture and reporting
- Rare disease tracking
- Follow up care with patients who have been recently discharged from a hospital
It's interesting to think about how Twitter could be tied in to an electronic health record system. Terry talks about the service TrialX, which helps patients find clincial trials. It creates a match between a patient's health profile and the trial.
Twitter is also a way to notify people of disease outbreaks, such as the H1N1 flu. If you want to sign up for Twitter alerts from the CDC, you can with the following:
- http://twitter.com/CDC_eHealth
- http://twitter.com/CDCflu
- http://twitter.com/CDCemergency
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