Medical institutions and experts are using Twitter to relay information to patients

Aug 25, 2009 12:57 GMT  ·  By

A study by the American Telemedicine Association published in the Telemedicine and e-Health journal revealed the impact Twitter had and continues to have on day-to-day human tasks and interaction. According to the study, doctors and patients have been benefiting from the technological advances when it comes to keeping up to date and receiving medical information.

Technology has rapidly evolved in the last few years and new branches are forming in all classic activity domains. In medical science, e-Health and Telemedicine are slowly growing in usage and practice on the United States territory. More and more doctors are organizing video conferences to consult patients, more and more send out newsletters and many more have Twitter accounts from where they operate on their spare time.

Doctors respond to patients’ tweets providing information on how to treat certain diseases or simply arranging an appointment. Twitter accounts have become places of daily pilgrimage in the quest for precise or accurate medical information.

Many medical institutions have Twitter or Facebook accounts where they publish news and studies on their most respected experts. Institutes are using social networks to redirect users from and to their official website homepage, in an effort to boost public awareness and knowledge.

"One way to look at Twitter is as a method of mass communication," says Joseph C. Kvedar, MD, Director of the Center for Connected Health (Partners Healthcare System, Boston, MA). “It’s a bit like having a group of people you can instantly send a blast fax or blast e-mail or a blast communication to because it’s real-time and because it was designed for mobility. Instead [...] I might now text 30 people or 50 or 100 people, whatever the number is who are following you.”

In the long run, Twitter and other social networking websites have proved, until now, that their impact has been a positive one, offering information previously hard to get but in a lighter way than a medical journal could ever do.

The complete study can be found here.