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The medical blogosphere: how social networking platforms are changing medical searching.

Article Excerpt
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

About a year ago, I noticed a significant change in media monitoring requests from my clients, mainly healthcare public relations agencies, whose primary clients are pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

The PR firms started asking us to supplement traditional media audits with searches of social networking and blog entries. By traditional media, I mean print and electronic newspapers; newswires; consumer, business, and trade magazines; medical journals; national television broadcasts; and highly regarded websites such as Medscape, Doctor's Guide, HealthDay, MedPage Today, and WebMD. I'm not certain if the addition of social networks to our routine media outlet lists stemmed from Google beginning to capture a significant number of postings through its Blog Search feature (which went live in September 2005) or whether the modification came about as a result of escalating reports about a decline in the pharmaceutical industry's reputation. Augmenting our traditional searches with social networking searches seemed to come around the same time that we saw an increase in requests about reputation management. The very public and widespread reports of faulty (and secret) clinical trial data, drug deaths, and the continuing rise in prescription costs appeared to spur a vituperative outpouring of patient, caregiver, and physician postings in the blogosphere.

Initially, we were asked to include just a few top-line blogs in our searches, principally The Wall Street Journal Health Blog [http://blogs.wsj.com/health] and Pharmalot [http://www.pharmalot.com], spearheaded by reporter Ed Silverman with the Newark Star-Ledger. But then, the list grew to encompass the top 25 newspaper blogs by readership, as well as blogs written by patients and consumers with personal interests in specific diseases and medications (for example, http://www.DiabetesMine. com and http://sayingnotovaccines.blogspot.com).

In some cases, we were required to include every blog mentioning the company/nonprofit organization, brand, or disease under review. To say the least, this kind of searching can be a daunting and overwhelming task. I think it's in our natures as librarians and information professionals to approach searches systematically, but when we work with clients who live and breathe news stories as they break (especially true in the fast-paced and competitive world of medicine and pharmaceuticals), there's little time to contemplate and evaluate what's really going on. Until now...

The Terminology

The first internet generation lived in Web 1.0 or the "read-only web." Users could search the internet and read content controlled by a website owner, but with no or minimal ("Contact us") interaction allowed. The current generation internet, Web 2.0, makes it possible for everyone to post and share nearly any type of media on the internet (including text, videos, music, photographs, etc.). We all know about the most recognizable and popular social networks--YouTube and MySpace--but various news organizations, physicians, patients, and caregivers are gaining similar notoriety within the healthcare industry blogosphere. In keeping with the Web 2.0 name, those covering internet trends have named blogs and other forms of medical information-sharing networks Health 2.0.

In early December 2008, CBS and BusinessWeek collaborated in reporting on medical social networks, defining Health 2.0 as "the use of social media and other technologies to improve communication in healthcare." These platforms were developed "to connect patients with patients, doctors with other professionals, or patients with doctors." In keeping with this definition, Health 2.0 is sometimes referred to as the "patients-as-partners model."

BusinessWeek highlighted the platform PatientsLikeMe [http://www.patientslikeme.com], in which 23,000 users share...