Cochrane Collaboration on Twitter
According to Alan at (the) health informaticist, "The Cochrane Colloboration have had a sudden rush of blood to the head - they are now on Twitter." They just started on Feb. 9th and already they have 55 followers. It appears some of their tweets are actually from their news feed which displays at the top of their web page. Interesting method for getting news out to people, I never quite thought of that.
This has me wondering about what other medical/health organizations or groups are using Twitter. I did a very unscientific and quick search on Twitter for anything with hospital. Here are the results. There are 26 Twitter accounts with hospital in the name, and some have quite a following.
Examples:
- HospitalGroup / Hospital Group This list is managed by Ed Bennett of @ummc and follows all official U.S. Hospital accounts - 363 followers
- erlangerhealth / Erlanger Hospital Erlanger is a non-profit, academic teaching center affiliated with the University of Tennessee College of Medicine. -272 followers
- MHA / MS Hospital Assoc. Serving those who serve us all - Mississippi hospital employees. - 205 followers
- stmarysmadison / St. Mary's Hospital Tertiary care hospital located in Madison, Wis. -155 followers
- Doctors Hosptial in Columbus has two Twitter accounts OH_Doctors - 105 followers and doctorshospital - 96 followers
- LakewoodHosp / Lakewood Hospital Lakewood Hospital is a community-oriented hospital located in the city of Lakewood on Cleveland's west side. -23 followers
Typing medical into the search produces 66 accounts, including medlibs - 178 followers.
I am not sure what to do with this sort of information or what it means for the future of medicine, libraries, and Twitter. I just find it interesting and something that I like to keep an eye on in case the future does produce something. The one bummer thing about Twitter is you kind of have to know the name of a person or group to find them and follow them. So unless you know an organization like the Cochrane Collaboration is on Twitter (and frankly I would have never guessed that they were) then you aren't going to find them very easily if at all.
Labels: Social Software, Technology
posted by The Krafty Librarian @ 6:56 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I'm sure that Twitter can be a really useful tool, just how and when needs to be worked out. It's a good advertising/public awareness tool, but we've already got the technology to do that through RSS etc. Of course, with Twitter though, it's potentially a two way process, and it's managing that two way, peer to peer process that institutions have such great difficulty with.
Or do they? I don't know, I'm just making this up off the top of my head... :)
Interesting post by the way. Keep them coming.
Did you see the story on CNN.com about surgeons using Twitter during surgery? Here's the link to the newstory: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/17/twitter.surgery/index.html; and the link to the tweetsteam during the surgery: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23hfhor
Interesting stuff.
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