Category: Uncategorized

I spent a couple of days last week in Leeds, attending the Digital Health Conference and Hack.  I wanted to fill in some initial reflections today and write more about some of the sessions I attended over the coming week.

The Conference

The first day – the ‘conference’ part – was put together with thought and care towards the participants with an excellent balance of speakers, workshops and opportunities to talk to one another (or ‘network’).  Having been to many conferences which have overdone the ‘being spoken to’ elements – particularly in a day – I was genuinely delighted by the opportunity to feedback.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the day was the other participants and attendees. There were people from across the health and social care sector, including users of services provided (although as was pointed out, we are all users to a degree), voluntary sector…

Symplur came up with a metrics system in order to analyze the top influencers regarding healtchare hashtags.

A popular feature on the Healthcare Hashtag Project is the customizable healthcare analytics page. You select a time period, we give you analytics with participation metrics, influencer metrics, and some beautiful graphs. We’ve mostly seen it being used for healthcare tweet chats and healthcare conferences. It’s just a simple way to quickly see what an impact an event had, and who was involved. Great for use in proposals and reports. We’re now adding some new features to this analytics page.

I was glad to see I’m second in the global top 10 list.

It’s been a while coming, but it makes me no less proud to present to you #hcsmca’s 18-month report card. A big thank you to Alaina Cyr (@AlainaBCyr) for creating the beautiful infographic and to Yaser Alyounes (@YaserAlyounes) for writing the accompanying commentary below. PS: #hcsmca is 21 months old today. 

Look at how far we’ve come since the inception of the Canadian chapter of the global Healthcare Social Media community. From 511 participants in December 2010 to 4,533 in March 2012, our community continues to exhibit tremendous growth both in numbers and diversity of topics and participants. (Compare to our 6-month report card.) In my opinion, this had a lot to do with the culture of the community as its been open, inviting, and supportive. This can be clearly seen in two points:

1. allowing any participant to submit a topic and
2. having different members moderating the chat as…