Health Professionals on Twitter

I'm going to put down some rambling thoughts here on how health professionals use Twitter (and other social media) to communicate. It's been inspired mainly by a recent blog post by Mike Baldwin on boundaries on social media.

Health professionals share some particular characteristics, and yet there are a number of variations I've noticed between how they communicate through "social media". The main similarity is that we're people communicating reservedly. There's certain information we must hold back and there's certain information we should hold back. Patient confidential information, of course, is a big no-no and so is information that might, in the eyes of the public and of patients, damage the trust in healthcare providers. There are certain learning experiences that I've been involved in which might, to a lay-person, appear a shocking failure of health systems; and I would need to be careful how I explain those to put them into context. There are many healthcare organisations that have explained to staff that posting bad comments about their employers is a disciplinary offence.

But on to the variations, firstly twitter users vary between how much they involve their personal and professional lives. There are some pharmacists I follow that rarely mention their professional life. There are others who rarely mention their personal life. Part of this is identity (this is who I see myself) and part of this is digital persona (this is how you should me). Some show a wide variety of interests, some show a sharp focus of attention.

Secondly there's the element of control in how people communicate. Some twitter feeds are soulless outpourings of public relations speak, and some healthcare professionals appear to want to imitate this in a rose-tinted twitter feed of blissful professional satisfaction. Others love to hate their jobs or want to share their highs and lows, putting truth first. I follow both people of whom I'm sick of their whinging and people of whom I wish they'd be a bit more honest. Some of the extremely honest decide to mask their true identities behind pseudonyms, which is another big kettle of fish.

Thirdly there's the degree to which being a health professional affects their use of twitter. Communication to and from patients has been tried, others use it to share professional information or ICT knowledge and skills. Others just use Twitter for the standard hashtag games and musing about their lives.

Of course as well as these specific health professional traits, there's the usual variation in terms of how much new content people put on twitter as opposed to retweeting or posting links to existing websites; how chatty people are (how much they engage in conversation rather than just talking or just listening); and how people use twitter as part of a package of social media tools or in isolation from them.

Please leave a comment below if you've got any thoughts on things I've missed.

Having my cake and eating Apple: Music withme review

I make little secret that I'm not keen on Apple. I find their business approach a bit too controlled, a bit too "you can only play with your toys this way, we can't trust you not to break it".

I like breaking things, it's the best way to make new things. And so the more laissez-faire approach of the google-android side of the internet is a natural home for me. Whilst it is still controlled to a degree, it's more open to people questioning things like "why do I need to use iTunes to put music on my phone?"

Unfortunately for me, I wasn't always so much a disciple of the Cult of the Droid. I have songs on an iTunes account which for one reason or another, I'm having difficulty sourcing on CD or MP3. So they're in limbo, as my iPod touch (long story) broke a year and a week after purchase and I despair of iTunes as a media player.

Whereas on my Android phone I have 2 brilliant music players - ³ (aka cubed) and Spotify. But it narked me having purchased (sorry, contracted as a licensee or whatever the legal term is, I certainly don't own the music) these with gift-vouchers aplenty, I couldn't get my ears on them.

Until today. Today I started using an application named Music WithMe. Unfortunately it's the most clunkiest android application I've ever used, but bearing in mind it has to get around Apple protectionism, I can forgive it that.

Musicwithme requires the Android app first, then a Windows plugin which does something(not sure what) to upload data via Facebook to it's servers. If the service wasn't recommended to me by a Very Trusted Source, I'd be worried. In fact, I was still worried; so I created a fictious facebook account just to handle this process. It wasn't clear or intuitive how to put these details in - but eventually I worked it out. Well it didn't, but that was because the service was lagging without any indication that it was, but eventually it worked.

Add to the klunkiness that musicwithme application is an incredibly basic song player. It plays a song - that's it. It won't play many songs, just the one song you select. That's it.

But it does work. I can now sync every song on my purchased playlist wirelessly and for free to my android phone. So I am very happy bunny.

Of course 12 hours later, Google announced they were releasing an app (alas not to us outside the US) that does exactly the same - so it's probably worth holding out for their offer. But never mind that now, because on my android device, I can listen to my Tunes, having finally dropped the ubiquitious i.