Monday in DC was the first Healthcare Blogging Summit nestled into the much larger Consumer Health World event. This is Dmitriy Krugliyak's baby. He runs the Medical Blog Network which is both an aggregation of health-related bloggers and an attempt to bond them around common concerns related to the heavily regulated and sensitive world of healthcare.
He told me that they will hold 3 more of these next year bundled into larger events like this one. that's actually a great model and may do more for spreading the word than holding a little specialty event on blogging.
I spoke on a panel that featured public health professionals, a CEO of a hospital system (who was very on-message about his "brand" - nice work), a communicator from March of Dimes who like me was a pre-bubble Internet professional.
Dr. Jay Berhardt from the CDC's Office of Health Marketing spoke about the small steps taken by his group with his blog. I actually blogged about this when he launched it and despite the few posts applaud his initiative. Small wins like this can be influential in an organization as large as the CDC. Clearance is an issue. Every post is reviewed and scrutinized before posting - mostly for accuracy. He does write all his own material(never doubted that). Time is the biggest challenge. He did share about launching the CDC podcasts which are now available. (A neat resource within his team's site is a list of the public health/social marketing campaigns currently running at CDC.)
He also shared about an initiative to reach out to mombloggers regarding flu communications and actually allowing them to communicate directly with scientists. We do a lot of work with moms and mombloggers and this is a great idea. There is no reason the CDC couldn't form a group of moms online to help guide them on health communications that impact the family and then actually become ambassadors of that message. The question is will they ask them for that level of involvement or only look at them as messengers.
Patricia Goldman from MOD shared about shareyourstory.org where they connect NICU (preemies) families into an active community. If you dive inside to the Parent to Parent boards there is a lot of posting activity. This is a great example of hosting a dialogue that really helps people (and was probably happening in some other, less powerful way).
Great stuff. More later.....
h
steve rubel's keynote video:
http://health.scribemedia.org/2007/01/15/blogging-revolution/
Posted by: peter | January 18, 2007 at 08:59 AM