There's lots of talk about the need for doctors to communicate better with their patients, and social media is taking off as a medium for doing so. At this year's meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology, which ends in Chicago today, Matthew Katz, MD, a radiation oncologist at the University of Texas' MD Anderson Center, exhibited a poster displaying a new series of hashtags for different types of cancer. There are at least 20: #leusm for leukemia, #melsm for melanoma, #blcsm for bladder cancer, etc. Patients and doctors alike can use them to be more accurate and specific in sharing information.
As reported in a MedCity News piece, Katz is a big believer in social media as a way for patients and doctors to communicate. He developed the hashtags to provide better access to reliable, high-quality health information for both patients and providers, and he's quoted as saying:
Hashtags are a filter that can make it possible to make Twitter less noisy. Twitter has a lot of discussion of healthcare, but finding reliable information is not as easy... Patient-physician engagement is important, but the purpose is not to enhance therapeutic relationships. The disease-specific tags may be a way to adapt Twitter’s open platform to focus conversations and bring people together for education, advocacy and support.
Katz's "cancer tag oncology" is based on research begun in 2013, which found that a wide variety of people did use the Twitter hashtags. Katz also founded Rad Nation, an online community of radiation oncologists.
Previously: Upset stomachs and hurting feet: A look at how people use Twitter for health information, Finding asthma outbreaks using Twitter: A look at how social media can improve disease detection, Advice for young doctors: Embrace Twitter, Twitter 101 for patients, and How using Twitter can benefit researchers
Photo by Michael Coghlan
