Think Outside the Conference Room ~ Social Media & Health Care

Day two of the Critical Care Rehabilitation Conference was fantastic! Yesterday I spoke about the importance of engaging a diverse interdisciplinary team for improving patient outcomes in the ICU. Check out yesterdays post for more info about how to get involved.

Today, I want to change focus a bit because something rather exciting happened at the conference this year. We made a push to utilize social media, specifically twitter. Many conferences have begun using this virtual medium to enhance attendees’ experiences through live updates, document & resource sharing and to reach individuals unable to attend the conference, engaging people in a dynamic conversation about the issues online. Ultimately, our goal was to spread the relevant messages to as many individuals as possible. Consider these numbers:

In Baltimore we had ~ 300 participants from all over the US, Canada, UK, Panama, Brazil, Nigeria, Singapore, and Korea! How fantastic is that?!

However, look at this analysis of only the last 50 tweets using our conference hashtag #icurehab:

That is approximately 42 times more people engaged in the conversation about early mobilization than were able to participate in person.

The landscape of healthcare and social media is changing and I would argue they are becoming inextricably intertwined for the better.

This was only our first year attempting to engage virtually with social media so there was a little bit of a learning curve for everyone. However, it was terrific how eager people were to get engaged using this platform…even if they had never heard of a “hashtag” or “tweet” before (I admit it can feel like a foreign language). It wasn’t dismissed, just explored which is truly the way to learn new things!

Here is a visualization of who all we reached this weekend, yellow were the people present and the blue represents individuals who engaged virtually through twitter: