Doctors come on to Twitter nearly every day.  Sharing ideas is now simple: Medium and LinkedIn have made ownership of blogs almost obsolete.  We’re all using these connected tools.

But none of it means anything unless you do something with them.  Sure we can pass along the flashy tweets about the latest smart diaper.  ‘Breaking’ news of the tattoo that detects cancer before it forms is easy.  And cheap.  But doctors with shiny tools are nothing more than 100,000 connected lemmings mindlessly passing along senseless information.  A digital bucket brigade.

The last few years have been about the shiny tools.  Now we’ve got to put those tools to work. Chicago cardiologist Wes Fisher recently used his tools to shine a garish light on the American Board of Internal Medicine.  Once started he found lots of helpers.  But he was brave enough to start something.  This is how our public presence can be used to change things.

Clay Shirky described our point of transition this way:

As with previous revolutions driven by technology—whether it is the rise of literate and scientific culture with the spread of the printing press or the economic and social globalization that followed the invention of the telegraph—what matters now is not the new capabilities we have, but how we turn those capabilities, both technical and social, into opportunities. | Cognitive Surplus, 2010

A voice is worthless unless you use it for good.  What are your tools?  What are your opportunities?

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