IMIA Best Research Paper Award: Jackie Bender @benderjack - for her paper: What Is the Role of Online Support for the Supporters? a Multi-Method Study Examining the Use of Online Communities among Breast Cancer Peer Support Providers

Stanford University/IMIA SMWG Best Poster Award: Osman Ahmed @osmanhahmed – for his poster: iCon: Utilizing Facebook to Deliver Best-Practice Concussion Management

Peter Murray (@peterjmurray) made the introduction of the workshop and provided a very nice overview of all the activities of our working group. He also was very active taking notes of all the comments from the audience. Most of this blog post is based on his notes.

Chris Paton (@DrChrisPaton) introduced his experience on using social media to improve interaction with students. He explained the role of social computing applications and not just Web 2.0. For example, Wikipedia can be a great example of social computing application where there are already more than 3.5 million articles created by millions of volunteers. Another aspect addressed by Chris Paton was usability. User friendly website have higher chances to success. However, there are cases where websites with poor usability can be a huge success (e.g, Criaglist). However, the complexity of social media makes nearly impossible to predict what will be successful.

Chris also mentioned that social media is more than content. Content is social media platforms increase its value by the amount of users. The value goes up as more users come on board and create more value.

In the healthcare domain an interesting development is the combination of Web 2.0 and data collection. He explained the case of PatientsLikeMe where users are not just sharing information in traditional forum but also structured data, also within patient-led experiments. Another example was the application TuAnalyze run in collaboration between the online community TuDiabetes and the Harvard Medical School.

Margaret (@m2hansen) is a leader in the use of social media for nursing education and she enligthed the audience with many of her experiences using these new technologies to enhance the education of professionals and more recently also with patients. Already in 2005, they introduced satisfactory blogging as a vehicle for the education of clinical and nursing students. They have been also using wiki technology in education. She showed some examples of how they have used WikiEducator to setup courses.

More recently she has been exploring the use of mHealth for education. For example, her students have been testing the use of iPod and videos for learning nursing techniques. The results of these experiences are quite positive and support the idea that those technologies can enhance education. She also showed how medical apps in the iPad could be used for medical education.

Peter L. Ekin was not able to travel to Oslo. However, his topic human factors and health social media was also addressed in the workshop.

Luis Luque (@luisluque): I focused in the use of video sharing platforms (such as YouTube) in the health domain. First of all, I explained that videos are becoming extremely important in the new Web 2.0. In fact, YouTube is the 3^rd most visit website in nearly all the world. Most of those videos are shared in social networks among friends and relatives.

I showed many examples of videos for health promotion (e.g, The Big Blue Test, and channels created by health authorities (e.g, NHSCoices). Since not everything is good in YouTube I also showed examples of videos promoting un-healthy lifestyles (pro-anorexia videos) and I explained how difficult is to find good videos in YouTube without finding disturbing content (e.g, amputations).

General Discussion

Many interesting aspects rose during the discussion, such as:

•  When is a problem a societal issues and not just an Internet Issue? For example, some non-healthcare professionals like to watch anatomical demos both offline and online.
• Open access within academic publications is putting the burden of cost on the authors, closing the door to many good researchers from developing countries.
• Despite the possibilities of Social Media we use sparingly these tools to upgrade the quality of research articles. Could we improve the situation using tools such as Wikipedia?
• What is success in social media? Can be low quality more popular than high quality? Should we take into account traditional quality or just hits?

There were many other topics discussed in the workshop that are not addressed in this blog post.

NOTE: the timing is based on the sessions and not the listed presentations. I also based my selection only on the titles since I don’t have access to the abstracts.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Check the printed program, the preliminary program contained errors.

MONDAY 29th August

• 09:45 (S4 Oslo): The value of role model in design of social media for elderly, Toril Knutshaug Nervik, Yngve Dahl, Anders Kofod-Petersen
• 09:45 (S2 København): Healthcare Adaptive Architecture – User-configurable web 2.0 EHR, Yalini Senathirajah, Suzanne Bakken
• 17:00 (N6 Finmark):  WG Social Media Meeting

TUESDAY 30th August

• 09:45 (N3 Bergen): Workshop: Towards a Research Agenda for Social Media in Healthcare and Academia, Peter J. Murray, Chris Paton, Margaret Hansen, Peter L. Elkin, Luis Fernandez-Luque    
• 11:00 (N2-Eidsvold): A new concept of Knowledge and Information management in an Imaging Department: How to make use of a Wiki. – Volker Lapczynski
• 11:30 (s4 Oslo): Mobile Peer-Support in Diabetes, Taridzo Chomutare, Eirik Årsand, Gunnar Hartvigsen
• 12:00 (N2-Eidsvold): Connect 2.0:  Supporting Self-management and Collaborative Care – Cornelia Ruland, Deede Gammon, Gro Berntsen, Haakon Bryhni, Jelena Mirkovic, Per Tømmer, Eva Skipenes, Ellen Kristiansen ,Tor Andre Skjelbakkene, Tone Nordøy, Idar Lettrem, Karin Sørli, David Kaufman, Justin Starren, Suzanne Bakken
• 12:30 (N2-Eidsvold): MedWise, a Highly User-configurable Web 2.0-based Electronic Health Record- Yalini Senathirajah, Suzanne Bakken
• 15:30 (N5 Finnmark): Web 2.0 in Healthcare: State-of-the-Art in the German Health Insurance Landscape, Mirko Kühne, Nadine Blinn, Christoph Rosenkranz, Markus Nuettgens
• 13:45 (N5 Lofoten): Challenges for Signal Generation from Medical Social Media Data, Johannes Dressman, Kerstin Denecke

WEDNESDAY 31th August

• 9:45 (N2 Eisvold): A cloud-based semantic wiki for user training in healthcare process management

29th August, Monday at 17:00 (room Finmark): we will have the meeting of the working group.

30th August, Tuesday at 9:45 (in room Bergen): “Workshop: Towards a Research Agenda for Social Media in Healthcare and Academia” with the participation of Peter J. Murray, Chris Paton, Margaret Hansen, Peter L. Elkin and Luis Fernandez-Luque.

Some of the confirmed attendees (no particular order) include: @peterjmurray (CEO, IMIA), @eysenbach (Founder, Medicine 2.0 Conference), @berci (Founder of Webicina), @migcabrera (Founder Medting), @leika_bcn (Director, Forumclinic), @mcabrer (Founder, Medting), & @clarabermudez (Researcher, Andalusian
School of Public Health).

During this official breakfast, Dr. Peter Murray will be giving a short intro on the group. This will be followed by individual introductions, coordinated by the Vice-chair (@ciscogiii) and secretary (@luisluque). Finally, we hope to begin planning on how the group can collaborate on new and existing research projects.

More on the IMIA SMWG can be found below.

We look forward to seeing you there,

Francisco Grajales (@ciscogiii) Vice-Chair, IMIA SMWG

Luis Luque (@luisluque) Secretary, IMIA SMWG

The Social Media Working Group (SMWG) aims to be IMIA’s vehicle for stakeholder engagement in Social Media. Its membership will be international, inclusive, and multidisciplinary.

The IMIA SMWG will engage members from the international health informatics community, across sectors, to identify, explore, collaborate, and disseminate research on the use of social media for health. Of particular interest are the drivers of change, barriers, facilitators, and policies necessary for the application of the various social media categories in the health domain.

These categories include:

1. Social Networks (e.g., Facebook)
2. Professional Networks (e.g., LinkedIn)
3. Thematic Networks (e.g., PatientsLikeMe, TuDiabetes)
4. Microblogs
5. Blogs
6. Wikis
7. Forums/Listserv’s
8. Social Photo and Video Sharing Tools
9. Collaborative Filtering Tools (e.g., RSS, recommender systems, tagging)
10. Multi-User Virtual Environments (e.g., Second Life)
11. Social applications and games
12. Integration of Social Media with Health Information Technologies (e.g. EHRs, PACS, SNOMED)
13. Other (e.g., FriendFeed)

The sectors that will be engaged and invited to participate in this group, include (but are not limited to):

1. IMIA Member Organizations
2. Academic Bodies
3. Industry
4. Governmental research institutions (e.g, US CDC)
5. Intergovernmental Organizations (e.g., WHO, PAHO, ITU, WMA).

The applications of social media will be explored with particular applications to:

1. Health care delivery
2. Health care professional education
3. Public health
4. Clinical and disaster medicine
5. Research

We celebrated the creation of our new Working Group with a meeting in Second Life. Finally, we attended five members from different disciplines and countries (Spain, Norway, Canada, USA and New Zealand). We discussed future steps ahead, such as collaboration in projects, publications and events. To know more about the discussion take a look into the minutes which have been published in our mailing list

The next meeting will take place at the end of November during Medicine 2.0 NL.

Luis Fernandez-Luque
Secretary, IMIA Social Media Working Group

Please check back here for regular updates about our meetings and activities.

Chris Paton

Chair, IMIA Social Media Working Group