American Diabetes Associations Twitter fiasco: Does it matter to patients?
ADA , American Diabetes Association , Intellectual property rights
Michael Joyce produces multimedia at HealthNewsReview.org and tweets as @mlmjoyce
The American Diabetes Association (ADA) sparked a social media uproar at its annual conference in San Diego earlier this month when it restricted participants from posting photographs of slide presentations on Twitter:
ADA Twitter response to an attendee who posted a photograph from a slide presentation.
The response by conference attendees especially those quite active on social media was brisk, passionate, and hinted at Orwellian censorship. Medscape, who broke the story on the second day of the meeting, mostly focused on the response by physicians.
It would be fair to point out theres some selection bias at play here; after all, the survey was done via social media, and completed by people who use social media. Many like Kevin Campbell MD, a cardiologist in North Carolina with a substantial Twitter following felt the ban was ill-advised for these reasons:
many who cant attend the meeting rely on social media to follow new findings in real time
most other major medical associations actively encourage live tweeting during their meetings
online engagement facilitates dialogue from a variety of perspectives from around the world
Whether these rationale hold water or not will likely be debated frequently in the coming years, as more people attending medical conferences turn to social media.
But these arguments center on health care providers.
What about patients? Could such a ban affect the roughly 1 out of 10 Am
Continue
reading
