iMedExchange’s posterous

I spent the day today at HealthCamp Boston with some 150 medical thinkers.  It was my first experience at a HealthCamp.  If you’ve never been, it’s best described as an organic, roll-your-sleeves-up, stand-at-the-whiteboard, open source, ad lib meeting centered around health 2.0.  Come with your issues and create an argument.  Lots of discussion, talent and passion.

But unfortunately, no doctors (actually, there was a small handful).  Yes indeed, health care is in the midst of an cataclysmic shift and we can’t get a little medical representation.

“But they’re busy.”  We’re all busy.  We have no choice but to be involved.
“They’re late adopters.”  Now is the time to adopt, if not to innovate. 
“They can’t see the value.” Funny…everyone else does.

While we’re all lucky to have such passionate patient advocates, health policy experts, IT professionals and allied health workers who are willing to take a day to help sort out issues, physicians are the missing link.

There's no getting around it... our society is massively adopting *social* enabling technologies... why? Because *we can*. Human behavior is genetically programmed to be social. Language, is humanity's primary enabling technology. Language reveals our thoughts, concepts, ideas, mood, emotions and suggestions. It is our desire to be social and our ability to communicate that is enabling a platform of networked communication never before available to so many people at the same time.

Why now, why is social networking taking off with such breathtaking scale? Until recently our means of communication was limited in capacity and scale. Now our pre-programmed desire to socialize has migrated to the internet...an enabling technology with limitless scale and enormous capacity.

Health care reformers, Health 2.0 advocates, participatory medicine developers, and patient activists have embraced social media technologies and are transforming the way patients utilize their physician providers and ultimately the role of the physician in health care delivery.

The health care landscape is changing very rapidly... As an active participant on the social media *stage*... the most glaring *pertinent negative* I have witnessed is the lack of physician participation.

Physicians need to understand that these changes are going to take place whether we are at the table or not. Burying our collective heads in our charts and our stacks of paperwork is not an excuse for our lack of participation. The value of our input is enormous. Social media can/will enable physicians in many ways. Will it be *too late* by the time *we* wake up, adopt and utilize a platform that hundreds of millions of people use to communicate on such a routine basis???

The physician members of iMedExchange.com are already taking advantage of the enabling nature of social media. iMedExchange is a unique social media platform designed specifically for physicians....with physician input.

With all the changes taking place, and the speed at which this is happening, the physicians of our country need to utilize their pre-programmed ability and desire to communicate... to articulate our concepts, suggestions and concerns... to teach one another and share with one another... and to have an active, collective voice in shaping the future of our chosen profession. Can you afford NOT to be involved?