Chris Paton*, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand Peter Murray*, IMIA, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom Margaret Mary Hansen*, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, United States Francisco Grajales*, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Building virtual communities and social networking applications for health professionals Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Panel Presentation Building: LKSC Conference Center Stanford Room: Paul Berg Auditorium Date: 2011-09-17 02:30 PM – 03:15 PM Last modified: 2011-08-15

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This international panel discussion aims to explore issues relating to the use of social media in academic research and to hone in on social media applications that may align with research methodologies. While use of social media is growing in health care and academia, there has been, to date, little exploration of or research into its use toward various communities (e.g. providers, patients, educators, learners). This is an appropriate time to discuss the issues and begin the process of developing suitable research agendas that strive to address questions about issues such as validity and data quality of virtual social interactions and respective platforms. The panel members will present introductions to four topic areas, which will then be opened up for discussion with attendees. We recognize that there are many other potential issues to explore, and the discussion will also offer opportunities to touch on these. Conducting evaluations of social media applications and implementations in healthcare The process of including social interactions in software applications generates some interesting and difficult research conundrums for academic evaluations. The success or failure of these projects has less to do with the technical suitability of an implementation and much more to do with network effects and how users interact with each other. We now need new tools and procedures for conducting evaluations of social media implementations and need to recognize the increased uncertainty involved in conducting evaluations in the social realm. Data-mining social media health-care applications for academic research very large quantities of data are being generated by social media applications. Online patient communities are generating data, not just about individual patients, but also about the social connections between the users in the community. We will discuss some of the academic research issues resulting from this exponential increase in data including issues of data-storage and anonymization and how to use natural language processing to make sense of the content stream. Using social media for enabling academic research: collaboration tools for researchers and leveraging social tools for data collection Research groups spanning multiple countries and time-zones often conduct academic research. Social media tools enable academics to connect and collaborate in both synchronous and asynchronous communications. Using these tools, research collaborations can form Virtual Organizations (VOs). Where next for social media and academic research? Which tools have the panel members excited? For the final section of the panel discussion each member will hypothesize on where the trends are leading us and open a discussion with congress attendees about the use of social tools for research purposes.