Use #hcsmeu to join the European healthcare and social media discussion

Andrew Spong from STweM and I had a great discussion about the state of the European social media landscape in healthcare at the beginning of this week. We realized a couple of interesting things:

1.We had both gathered a lot of interesting bits and pieces concerning national advances in social media and healthcare, but we were lacking an overall EU perspective of it.

2. We noticed that we each knew other people that blogged and/or tweeted about healthcare and social media in EU, but neither of us had encountered an existing place online where we could meet, exchange ideas, and debate with them.

3. Finally (and most importantly), we were jealous. It seemed like our US colleagues were tweeting, meeting, and barbecue-ing much more than us! This had to change!

We thus would like to invite all EU healthcare blogger, twitterers and social media users to join us in a European healthcare and social media discussion:

How?
Every Friday, 12:00-13:00 GMT, we will twitter using the #hcsmeu hashtag. Each session will last one hour and address three topics/questions.
For those of you who are aware of the current #hcsm, our goal is to create a European version of this successful US healthcare and social media discussion.

To participate, simply add the #hcsmeu tag to each tweet. If you would like to send us suggestions or remarks in advance of a session, you can do so, by following us on Twitter (@whydotpharma and @andrewspong) and sending us a DM.

We will mainly tweet in English, but you are welcome to tweet in any language you are comfortable in and we as a community will do our best to translate for you if needed. Please mark a TR for translate at the beginning of any tweet that was translated and use @mention, so we know who it was from (like an RT only for translation ;-)).

Why?
We hope to gather together EU healthcare, pharma, patient, legal and medical content tweeters.
We would like to create a platform to promote the adoption of social media use in healthcare in the EU and find ways in which we can support this activity.

What?
In the spirit of reciprocity that the effective use of social media should nurture, we would like to leave this up to you. Please send us your suggestions ahead of each session and we will use them to set the agenda.

For this first session though, we would like to suggest these three topics:

1. Tell us about the use of social media in healthcare in your respective countries (better still, send us links to sites and articles of interest that you have encountered).

2. What are the most important differences between the use of social media EU vs. US?

3. What is the key driver of healthcare social media adoption in your country? Patient advocacy, health care professional bloggers, or national health systems?

Of course, while focused on EU, we do not wish to exclude our US and Rest of the World colleagues! Everyone is very welcome to join and quite frankly, we need your input. We would hate to reinvent the wheel after all the great things that have been achieved so far.

Finally, now you’re thinking: “OK, but where’s the barbecue?”

On September 25th, 12:00-14:00 GMT, Andrew and I will host a live tweetup meeting in London. Location TBD (but if you have a cool place to offer, let us know ;-)). Please join us, if you can, if you can’t send someone you know ;-). And we will make sure we get to go for drinks and food afterwards.

We thus are looking forward to a great discussion with all of you this Friday.