A Tweet A Day Can Keep A Doctor Away

I am really fascinated by Twitter. That's cause for both joy and concern. To be fascinated is to be charmed and I do feel that way about Twitter. When I first came across it last year, I thought it was just a pastime networking site. But then later I started "following" some pretty interesting people (to follow someone is to sign up to receive a feed of that person's tweets). " Personally I believe one way to look at twitter is as a method of mass communication”.

Twitter is instant knowledge. I'm betting that over the next few years, Twitter will graduate from satisfying our teenage instincts for social acceptance to being a business tool, much like instant messaging has.

It's the increasingly popular social networking tool that was at first merely a convenient way to stay in touch with friends and family, is emerging as a potentially valuable means of real time, on the go communication of health care information and medical alerts.

Physician groups, hospitals, and health care organizations are discovering a range of beneficial applications for using twitter to communicate timely information both within the medical community and to patients and the public. Short messages, or "tweets," delivered through twitter go out from a sender to a group of recipients simultaneously, providing a fast and easy way to reach a lot of people in a short time.
This has obvious advantages for sharing time-critical information such as disaster alerts and drug safety warnings, tracking disease outbreaks, or disseminating health care information. twitter applications are available to help patients find out about clinical trials, for example, or to link brief news alerts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to reliable websites that provide more detailed information.

The use of social media and Internet-based outlets such as twitter to communicate medical information requires a high degree of caution, however, to preserve confidentiality and patient privacy in the clinical care setting, and to ensure that information sources are accurate, reliable, and current.