Social Health 2010: The Breakout Sessions (Part 3 of 3)

This is the third in a series of posts recapping the Social Health 2010 un-conference in Austin. Part 1 covered the morning speakers, and Part 2 covered the afternoon speakers.

I’ve said a lot about what a great event Social Health 2010 (aka SXSH) was as a pre-conference to South by Southwest Interactive, but I wanted to wrap things up by sharing impressions and thoughts from the breakout sessions I attended.

Bryan Vartabedian, MD (@Doctor_V)

Dr Bryan Vartabedian Bryan spoke about what he sees as an obligation of providers to participate in social media, and posed some suggestions for how doctors can continue to stay relevant in the future. The most interesting to me was the idea of doctors as digital shepherds of health literacy, in response to the overwhelming amount of misinformation and even propaganda around health issues on the web.

As an example, he explored the misinformation surrounding the issue of whether vaccines can cause autism. The study that initially raised this concern has since been retracted, yet 1 in 4 parents still believe there is a causal relationship between vaccines and autism. Bryan proposed that if each of the 60,000 doctors in the American Academy of Pediatrics were to write a single blog post on the subject (especially if they each linked to medically-sound resources), it would go a long way in combating the spread of this misinformation. (You can read more of Bryan’s views in this piece in Oncology Times.)

It raises an even larger question: is health an area where the democratization of information on the web is actually detrimental? It seems to me that the more outrageous or sensational some piece of health content is, the more likely it is to capture links and thus rank higher in Google results on related keywords.

Phil Baumann, Creator of #RNchat (@philbaumann)

Phil is the creator of the #RNchat, a weekly Twitter conversation for and among registered nurses, and he joined the event virtually via WebEx/Skype.

In addition to providing a forum for RNs to share information and resources, #RNchat has a secondary goal of improving web literacy among RNs. Phil sees this as an opportunity to get RNs using Twitter, which may then serve as a “gateway drug” to other forms of social media. Follow @RNchat to stay up on the latest discussions.

Rather than try to summarize Phil’s session, I thought I’d share the deck he presented:

Dana Lewis, Co-Organizer of SXSH (@danamlewis)

I got lost in two other sessions on my way to Dana’s, but I was glad to catch as much as I did. Talk about passion! Diabetes management is a topic that’s very personally relevant to Dana, and her own experiences engaging with others diagnosed with Type I Diabetes in online communities are quite interesting.

Ash Damle, CEO of MEDgle (@ashdamle)

Ash spoke about the company he founded, MEDgle, and the clinical decision support tool he created primarily to help nurses in emergency rooms perform triage. Unfortunately I can’t link to that tool (it goes into its first hospital testing soon), but I encourage you to explore MEDgle.com and HealthierMee.com (an online health and fitness tracking tool).

Jen McCabe, Founder and CEO of Contagion Health (@jensmccabe)

I caught the tail end of Jen’s breakout session on practical tools for business, where she was leading an enthusiastic discussion around “gaming” your health to produce behavior change in incremental steps. Jen is the creator of Get Up And Move, and ended her session by playing this video that Wired editor Joe Brown had posted just that morning of his 60-second wall sit in response to a G.U.A.M. challenge.