#HAWMC Day 23.
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I was at the UPMAS CME last Wednesday where I talked about #HealthXPh. It was nostalgic, recalling how it all started December 2013. I told the audience right away – I’m a Twitter evangelist! #HealthXPH is a tweet chat I co-founded with Dr. Gia Sison, Dr. Narciso Tapia and Dr. Remo Aguilar. We’re on every Saturday 9 pm Manila time.
I added a few slides here and there to this old presentation.
I realized I’ve been talking about #HealthXPh quite a lot. First was May 2014 at the Health IT Conference organized by Dr. Mike Muin. We were only a few months old. Then last October 2014 at the Philippine Society of Medical Oncology. Then last Wednesday at UPMAS. I’ve a few more coming up. At the Philippine College of Physicians annual convention on May 11. And yes, most awaited at Doctors 2.0 in Paris in June!
Recently, Dr. Alvin Marcelo has also invited #HealthXPH to host an AeHIN hour. AeHIN is Asia eHealth Information Network and it holds webinars twice a month. He asked me an intriguing question. How about #HealthXTH for Thailand? Or #HealthXAsia? Apparently, #HealthXPh is a strange creature that others in the region may wish to copy. 🙂
At my recent talk, the impressions we generate every week dazzled a few. Here’s an example –
A whopping 7 million impressions! Our very first tweet chat had only 13 participants and around 200 thousand impressions. Last Apr 18, we had 42. That’s a great improvement and I’m always very happy to welcome our regular chat mates from the US, Canada, Ireland and Australia. However, I still wish more Filipino healthcare providers will join us. Sometimes, the nursing students of Health Informatics Inc CEO Kit Sumabat join the chat – because it’s an assignment! I used to ask my MS Health Informatics grad students to do the same. We need more Filipinos, both patients and healthcare providers at #HealthXPh. How many in my audience last Wednesday will be at our tweet chat on Saturday, I wonder.
The #HealthXPh team has a fifth member now – Dr. Helen Madamba. Each of us take turns writing the pre-chat blogpost at healthxph.net and moderating the chat every week. How we’ve managed to get it going this long with all of us having our day jobs (!) as doctors and educators, is a minor miracle!
What has been fulfilling in this continuing saga of #HealthXPh is the translation of online activity to offline action. The first Philippine Social Media and Healthcare Summit last February is proof of that! But how do we move forward? Plan the next summit? Get more signatures for the #HealthXPh social media and medical professionalism manifesto by making the rounds of the medical societies? Publish the conference proceedings of the first summit? Offer a Twitter workshop for healthcare professionals? Publish a paper on social network analysis of #HealthXPH? Summarize all the #HealthXPH chats (by theme?) in some form?
So many things to do! It’s hard to imagine that this team of five want to do these things and more. People often ask me what I get out of it? It’s fun!! It’s an advocacy. #HealthXPh is why I believe Paulo Coelho when he said –
And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.