Note: I can’t win the contest, and neither can any other Mayo Clinic employees. But others can win Mayo Clinic books, pedometers or other prizes, including a trip to next year’s Social Media Summit. And teams can win a one-year Social Media Health Network membership for their organization.
In the last few months I have had an exciting opportunity to be part of a Mayo Clinic project using social networking tools to assist in the study of a rare disease, and last week we reached a milestone with publication of a study in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
One of our key team members is Dr. Marysia Tweet, so it’s almost poetic that we’re working with Dr. Tweet to use social media in medical research. You can’t make that up!
At any rate, the paper on our pilot study of SCAD (spontaneous coronary artery dissection) is published this month in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, as reported in the Wall Street Journal and described in this Mayo Clinic news release.
The really exciting part of this story is how the research was initiated by patients, and this Mayo Clinic Medical Edge story tells how it happened:
We’re continuing to use our social media tools to help with the ongoing research into SCAD, as the Mayo Clinic research team led by Dr. Sharonne Hayes is creating a virtual registry to study SCAD. This SCAD research post on our News Blog provides the information physicians and patients need to take the first steps to be included in the study.
The pilot study showed that this kind of virtual registry is feasible; 18 women signed up for the pilot within a week, and the initial 12-person study included participants from New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada as well as the United States. Dr. Hayes discusses the rationale for and the implications of the study:
Finally, here are some additional sound bites about the pilot study and its implications, from Dr. Hayes, Dr. Tweet and yours truly:
Our Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media mission is to go beyond the public relations and marketing uses for social media and find ways to apply these revolutionary tools in education, research, clinical practice and in the administration of health care organizations. I was really excited to have the chance to be involved in this first publication, and that we are having an ongoing role in facilitating this patient-initiated research into a rare disease.
I’m working on an interesting new project, and we want to include some Mayo Clinic-related widgets in the sidebar. Here’s an example of one for Twitter:
I look forward to sharing information on the project as we’re ready to roll it out. For now, this is just my way of showing colleagues how this widget would appear. Note that the dimensions of the widget can be changed.
Here’s where you go to create your own widget. This one looks for tweets mentioning “Mayo Clinic” OR mayoclinic.
I’m in Seattle this morning for #SwedishRagan, and sharing our experience with social media at Mayo Clinic, as well as information about our Center for Social Media and the Social Media Health Network. As is my custom, I will move really quickly through lots of slides in my presentation, so I post them here for reference. This helps participants engage and relax instead of furiously scribbling notes.
It also lets me show and tell instead of just telling. If a picture is worth a thousand words, showing this many slides may be one way I can keep up with @SeattleMamaDoc. 😉
By the way, she’s knocking it out of the park in her presentation this morning.
Here are slides from my presentation to the Scripps Oncology Nursing Advanced Practice course in San Diego. One of my points is that the title I was given for the presentation, To Network or Not, is really a false choice.
Given the growth of social media and social networking, it isn’t a question of whether health care providers will participate, but rather how they will, and how soon.