Consider the following…(From Manhattan Research and Greystone.net)

1. 99% of physicians are online for personal or professional purposes, and 83% consider the Internet essential to their practice.
2. Physicians are turning to the web and their Blackberrys for clinical information, increasingly using them to replace physical sources such as journals, textbooks, drug references and conferences.
3. Physicians who participate in social networks today tend to be PCPs, female physicians and slightly younger than the average doctor. However, some older physicians are beginning to post and share their wisdom. They have the potential to be exponentially valuable in terms of the voice they’re going to gain in the coming years.
4. A baby Boomer turns 50 every 8 seconds. As a generation, they are vastly more Web-enabled than their parents.
5. 75% of all Internet users watched at least one video last month. A good portion of these are seniors, and its possible that a site like YouTube provided many of those videos.
6. Nearly half of those who use the Internet for health purposes (which is 80% of all Web users) are doing so on behalf of somebody else.
7. The fastest growing demographic on the Web are seniors. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is over 25.

Thought # 1: “What’s the best way, in this millennium, to produce portable knowledge that can be used by others?” asks Ted Eytan, physician blogger.

Thought # 2: “Fluid collaboration ……happens in small spontaneous interactions, over time, anywhere that involves different people thinking about and working on the same thing in different ways. This kind of collaboration happens when people are in sync, on the same page, linked in thought.It is a state of being”. See the video from Yugma

Thought #3: “Consider that a patient traveled from Virginia to Green Bay, WI, for a fairly routine shoulder surgery because he saw the doctor doing the surgery on YouTube. The patient was in his 50s, and in case you were wondering, was not a Green Bay Packer fan. Or consider that Aurora Health Care’s podcast strategy was triggered by a woman in her mid-40s listening to one on alternative treatments for her breast cancer while gardening.” From Greystone.net

As you can probably tell, I have been on walkabout in the Medicine 2.0 blogosphere and there are some interesting things emerging out of the chaos out there that I thought I would share with you. These three thoughts all address in some ways part of the Medicine 2.0 phenomenon - what makes it wonderful, what makes it radical, and perhaps what makes it downright scary. As we know, part of what Medicine 2.0 and its accompanying technologies are about is medical education (of patient, of provider and also of healthcare organizations) as well as the opportunity for interactive learning. Sometimes these forms of “education” take place within web based collaborative communities such as SpineConnect, other times they occur in patient driven communities like Patients like me or Organized Wisdom; and often they present themselves within physician based social networks such as Sermo or Within 3. But they are also taking place through technologies like Twitter, the microblogging phenomenon, allowing that spur of the moment question or comment as you stroll the hallway.

Given that the SpineConnect is a large and ever growing community of successful surgeons, we thought it might be worthwhile to see where you stand on these issues and your involvement in social media. If 99% pf physicians are using social media in some form, we wonder how many of you in SpineConnect are doing the same…..

1. How do you participate in social networking and media forms such as Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, Flickr, Youtube?
2. Moreover, how many of your patients are using these forms of social media to find you and your practice? (You might be surprised!).

Good things happen when we connect. What has social media done for you lately?