@SeattleMamaDoc @ePatientDave @EndoGoddss @drmikesevilla @MeredithGould @LeeAase @westr @RAWarrior @jsperber @jamiesundsbak

Friday Evening. I’m home from the Third Annual Social Media Summit at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. By my calculations, I tweeted about 500 times during the week and picked up about 100 new followers. I am exhausted, but the experience won’t be complete until I do a shout-out to various people I saw at the summit.

Starting off the list is @SeattleMamaDoc. She’s a pediatrician from Seattle who is big on social media. People have always told me about her. I’ve looked at her tweets and her blog, and they’re good so I was looking forward to hearing her speak. However, her speaking far surpassed anything I’ve read by her. She was incredible, talking about the moral obligation physicians and other experts had to be on social media to counter celebrity driven misinformation. To help with this she called on medical journals to make embargoed material available to doctors so they could speak intelligently about new reports when they hit the mainstream media. She received a well deserved standing ovation.

One of the people who helped instigate the standing ovation via Twitter was @ePatientDave. He spoke the next day, and was also great. He started off by talking about when he was diagnosed with cancer. When someone is dying, he said, try and keep them off the internet. He spoke about his search for information and how it empowered his battle against cancer.

Some doctors I know seem to dislike it when a patient comes in, having studied their condition and with lots of opinions. It challenges the myth of the all knowing superior being called a doctor. Yet with 6000 medical journal articles a day being published, doctors cannot stay on top of all the medical advances, let alone the lethal lag between when research starts and when something is published in a medical journal.

I remember years ago hearing the saying, “A man of quality is not threatened by a woman of equality”. As I think of @ePatientDave’s reaction to @SeattleMamaDoc, the saying comes back in a new form. A doctor, committed to finding the best for her patient, like @SeattleMamaDoc, is not threatened by an empowered patient. Indeed cooperation between empowered patients and committed doctors are exactly what is needed confront the health issues we face today. It makes sense that @ePatientDave led the standing ovation for @SeattleMamaDoc

Two other doctors particularly jumped out at me as examples doctors that truly understand how to use social media the way @SeattleMamaDoc described. @EndoGoddess is a pediatric endocrinologist who is an incredible and compassionate mix between geek, doctor, and communicator. She was another star of the summit. @drmikesevilla didn’t have as much of a chance to shine in the spotlight, but I had several chances to interact with him, from our first Foursquare enabled meeting in Starbucks, to exchanging tweets back and forth throughout the summit.

I am glad to add @drmikesevilla to the list of other luminaries in health care social media that I’ve had the opportunity to meet, several of whom were at the sumit. These included @MeredithGould, @LeeAase, @westr, and @RAWarrior. I had met each of them at a previous #MayoRagan event at the Mayo Clinic’s Jacksonville, FL campus.

Added to this list, I want to include @jsperber and @jamiesundsbak, two people that I’ve met online via the Social Media Health Network and was very pleased to finally get a chance to meet face to face.

Ah yes, the power of writing. I was pretty tired when I sat down to write, but the words came into a much longer blog post that I expected, and even with that, there are plenty of people I would have liked to have mentioned. Perhaps I’ll write more about the conference and the people there soon.