Brian Mcgowan*, Self-employed, Blue Bell, United States Dana Lewis, Swedish, Seattle, United States Phil Baumann, Owner, Health Is Social, Philadelphia, United States Jody Schroger, Communications Consultant, The Woodlands, United States Ryan Madanick*, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, United States Pat Rich*, Canadian Medical Association, Ottawa, Canada Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Digital Learning Presentation Type: Panel Submission Type: Panel Presentation Building: Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School Room: Auditorium Date: 2012-09-16 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM Last modified: 2012-09-12

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In recent years new models of learning and sharing have forever changed access to and availability of healthcare-related information. This is important for two reasons: 1) historically information flow was poorly engineered and largely left to chance. Outside of formal education programs, those seeking healthcare-related information were left to their own devices to find, evaluate and integrate new information on their own. And, 2) the flow of information was overwhelming the end-user (patients and clinicians alike). Social media provides new avenues for information management, but how best to leverage these new avenues is just beginning to be understood.

Twitter in particular has provided a unique flattening of the information hierarchy. Healthcare information, advice, and counsel flow freely across the tweetstream. So freely in fact that, without new devices to manage the flow of information, the overload problem may seem to get worse before it gets better. Tweetchats have emerged as a simple means of organizing this information flow and tweetchat-related hashtags have provided the broader community a simple means of centralizing and curating the healthcare-related conversations.

This panel will 1) introduce strategies for improving the signal-to-noise ratio of healthcare-related information on twitter; 2) describe best practices in planning and implementing a tweetchat, 3) discuss strategies for leveraging tweetchats and hashtags to empower new communities across the various siloes of healthcare from prevention, to patients, to healthcare professionals; and 4) begin to organize a research agenda by which we may measure the impact of tweetchats/hashtags in healthcare quality.