Alex Howard has composed a nice entry detailing five key ways in which social media help promote good health. (The post is in response to a recent report from Pew Internet titled "Chronic Disease and the Internet.") He identifies online communities, Twitter, wikis, mash ups of community health data and open source software as being particularly useful. And Howard even gives a shout out to Medpedia, which we frequently use to provide context here on Scope:
While Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook may be grabbing most of the social media headlines of the moment, relatively old forms of social media like wikis continue to play a major role in online healthcare communities. As Jenna Wortham reported in the New York Times last year, Medpedia is a collaborative encyclopedia for health care that combines information from medical professional with forums for engagement with consumers. Medpedia was created in association with Harvard Medical School, the Stanford School of Medicine, The University of Michigan Medical School, the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and more than a hundred other health organizations around the world.
