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This week May 28, 2014 at 9 pm ET, the Canadian Physiotherapy Association’s Manager of Policy and Government Relations, Kate Rexe (@CPA_Kate) will moderate the #hcsmca discussion. Kate Rexe is an engaged advocate of public health care and has been working in health policy and promoting knowledge exchange for the last 12 years.

By Kate Rexe (@CPA_Kate) 

Kate Rexe

Choosing Wisely
I was excited when the Choosing Wisely Canada campaign launched in April 2014. Modeled after the American Choosing Wisely initiative by the ABIM in 2012, this campaign educates physicians and patients about unnecessary tests and encourages patients to make informed choices. I believe this is a critical step towards improved health literacy because it gives patients and providers the evidence necessary to start conversations about tests and treatments. Why is this important? Because we’ve always been taught to trust the recommendations made by our doctors…

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler , co-authors of Connected: How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Think, Feel and Do, have been studying the power and influence of social networks for a large portion of their careers. The concept of ‘six degrees of separation’ took on a whole new meaning thanks to Kevin Bacon, but Christakis and Fowler turned this party game into a science and have shown through peer-reviewed research that social networks can also influence the health status and behavior of the group.

Using the Framingham Heart Study data set, Christakis and Fowler found health and related behavior reflects ‘three degrees of influence,’ meaning your health behavior can indeed be influenced by a friend of a friend. As Christakis puts it in the following TED talk, “If a friend says, ‘let’s go have muffins and beer,’ and you do…and more friends join you, a new norm of…

Recently eMarketer released a new report that purported to cover Social Media Tactics and which work best. Though the report has a lot of valuable information, most is based on a highly misguided view of social media to begin with. In this post I am going to outline two of the points in the report and attempt to give you some straight talk about them that is intended to help you adjust strategy and be more effective.

Engagement:

Early in the report there was a statement that stood out to me as a huge red flag:

“the greatest percentage of respondents from both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies considered customer engagement to be the primary purpose of their social media marketing.”

With so many marketers seeing engagement as the primary purpose for their social media marketing, it is no wonder why the respondents answered the way they did on other segments in…

So we need to talk about Social Media.

I helped to present at the Women In General practice conference a Social Media familiarisation session for Female doctors.  This was held on June 1^st 2013 at Yarra Valley Lodge about an hour north of Melbourne Victoria, Australia.  This by the way is my first blog too so the adventure into the online medical space continues.

My talk segment was about Medical Education via Twitter.

 I puzzled over how to introduce SoMe Med Ed to the non-convinced.

Medical Education on Twitter

I discussed 140 characters with links to be saved or short articles as an ideal way for time poor female GP’s to broaden their range of access to medical journal articles and international medical opinion.

I demonstrated the great medical organisations on Twitter; I demonstrated the fabulous Medical Drs both international and local that I follow; I demonstrated all…