Discussing the Imapct of Social Networks on Healthcare with @EricTopol on Friday #VoieoftheDr

I am excited to be joined by one of the keynote speakers from HIMSS13 conference Dr Eric Topol - Author of
The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care and has been named in the list of the Top 100 Most Influential Physician Executive in Healthcare, 2012 by Modern Healthcare

We will be discussing amongst other things the impact of Social Networking Impact on Medicine: Topol on Social Networking’s ‘Big Impact’ on Medicine.

Patients are moving in droves to online interactions and not just to access medical information online but also to interact with other people experiencing the same conditions or symptoms. But it is the opportunity for the positive social influence of people:

If you combine the capability of monitoring such things as blood pressure or glucose with social networking, then you can have managed competitions with your friends, your family, or your social networking cohort, and you can start to compete for such things as who has the best blood pressure or who has the best glucose level. This, of course, is beyond competitions as simple as who has the best weight or does the most activity in terms of number of steps

That is really exciting. I have had great positive experiences of this using a manual tracking system with colleagues for fitness and health monitoring and has now moved ingot he digital world in the form of FitBit tracking - you can see my FitBit Profile here. Sadly I lost my FitBit device (it fell off while I was running) about a month ago so the profile and activity is a little light but it is central to my constant focus on personal health management

Will you be joining your friends and other patients online or are you still concerned about sharing your personal data or troubled by the security or impersonal nature of online interactions. Join me on Friday at 2:30 ET on VoiceoftheDoctor when I will be talking about this with Dr Eric Topol

Join me on Friday at 2:30 ET on VoiceoftheDoctor
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