Edward Alan Miller*, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, United States Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Building virtual communities and social networking applications for health professionals Presentation Type: Rapid-Fire Presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School Room: B-Bray Room Date: 2012-09-15 04:00 PM – 04:45 PM Last modified: 2012-09-12

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The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law (JHPPL) is one of the nation’s leading health policy journals, serving as a primary source of communication across multiple disciplines, including Political Science, Economics, Public Policy, Public Health, Health Services, and Law. The journal focuses on the initiation, formulation, and implementation of health policy. It also provides a forum for analyzing health politics—past, present, and future. The goal is to promote interdisciplinary engagement in health policy research while providing a forum conducive to exploring new ideas, rethinking old theories and frameworks, and encouraging outside-the-box thinking about the health sector. Currently, the journal maintains a “News and Notes” webpage that tracks the latest personal news, jobs listings, fellowships, internships, training, and other professional opportunities, meetings and conferences, calls for papers and grants, organization news, and publications in the fields of health politics, policy, and law. The webpage is organized as a blog, with typical blog-like features such as posts that appear in reverse-chronological order, opportunities for reader commentary and sharing, a list of affiliated organizations, and archives of previous posts. JHPPL is in the process of reimaging “News and Notes” as the Social Media section of the journal with the aim of actively engaging the broader community of scholars and professionals interested in health politics and policy. This will involve aggregating a variety of Web 2.0 technologies—blogs, microblogs, social networking sites, mobile applications—into an integrated platform that facilitates an ongoing interactive dialogue among the journal’s editors, board members, authors, and readership. Through the proposed changes individuals and organizations will be provided with opportunities to respond to journal content, either continuing discussions begun in the journal, say, in its Point/Counterpoint section, or engaging in new discussions stimulated by what was published. The proposed changes will also raise interest in and awareness of specific JHPPL articles while enabling real-time emersion into current issues and debates in health policy and politics. The purpose of this presentation will be to describe progress towards moving News and Notes towards a more interactive, user-friendly social media-oriented platform. It will also place this effort in the context of other initiatives to build virtual communities that promote collaboration, debate, and the dissemination of ideas and research findings among health professionals more generally.