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Digital culture, Featured, Physicians

100,000 Connected Lemmings

February 4, 2015 By Bryan Vartabedian · Reading Time: < 1 minutes

Streetart aus aufgeklebten grob verpixelten Figuren, die an das Computerspiel "Lemminge" erinnern.

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?

Image via Flickr

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Bryan Vartabedian, MD

Bryan Vartabedian, MD
Bryan Vartabedian is the Chief Pediatrics Officer at Texas Children’s Hospital North Austin and one of health care’s influential
voices on technology & medicine.
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With a mashup of curated and original content that crosses the spaces of digital health, media, communication, technology, patient experience, digital culture, and the humanities, 33 charts offers unique insight and analysis on the changing face of medicine.

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