Health Care Twitter Conversation Community HCSM Launches 2009 N1H1 (Swine) Flu Website

Up-to-date social media & news feeds aggregated in one location for use by health care professionals

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The Health Care Communication and Social Media (HCSM) community from Twitter has launched a web site 2009 H1N1 (Swine) Flu (http://swineflu.blokcast.com) to aggregate information feeds from social media, government and traditional media.

“After discussing 2009 H1N1 (Swine) Flu communication strategies on Sunday night, the HCSM Twitter conversation community decided that having related social media and news feeds aggregated in one place would be useful for HCSM members and organizations,” said HCSM co-founder and moderator Dana Lewis.

The 2009 H1N1 (Swine) Flu website requirements were suggested by the HCSM community and implemented by Tom Stitt, Stew Apelzin and Aperial, developers of BlokCast, an RSS feed aggregation service focused on healthcare markets. HCSM participants include physicians, administrators, public information managers, web services managers, editors, bloggers, writers and consultants. (788 followers of @healthsocmed as of Weds 29 April 2009, meets Sunday 9pm Eastern US time, search on #HCSM using a Twitter client.)

“We thought it would be useful for healthcare organizations and state/local healthcare departments as well as local government offices that manage emergency services to have one website that aggregated relevant RSS news and social media feeds about the 2009 N1H1 (Swine) Flu,” said Stitt.

The 2009 H1N1 (Swine) Flu website was built using Drupal, an open source content management framework. Followers in the HCSM community suggested authoritative RSS news feeds from governmental organizations and traditional media regarding the 2009 H1N1 (Swine) Flu epidemic, as well as suggesting social media feeds from Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

“Twitter isn’t about “what are you doing?” anymore. This is the second time the HCSM community has identified a communication issue in health care on Sunday night and has had a credible solution a few days later,” said Lewis. Previously, the HCSM community sparked the implementation of an Alltop web page with hospital news feeds: http://hospital.alltop.com.

For more information about the 2009 H1N1 (Swine) Flu website, contact Tom Stitt: tstitt@aperial.com or +1.650.276.0460. More information about the Health Care Communication and Social Media (HCSM) community can be found at http://healthsocmed.com.

Contact Information

Dana Lewis

Founder/Moderator

Health Care Communications & Social Media

Contact via E-mail