Using social media for medical purposes offers great advantages but also comes with great responsibility.

At Webicina.com, we receive thousands of suggestions week by week about which social media channels should be added to our database and many times we have to provide authors with the same suggestions in order to improve the quality of their resources.

Therefore we thought we should come up with a list of tips and pieces of advice about improving a medical social media channel. We hope you will find these useful!

You can read the guide here or download it in PDF.

Medical Social Media Guide to Webicina.com

Here is the opinion of Howard J. Luks, MD, a social media star and also surgeon about Webicina.com in a recent interview.

What do you think about the curated Surgery and Social Media selection on Webicina.com? For what reasons did you use it?

I think that you and your staff have done a wonderful job at curating some very useful feeds on Webicina. I refer patients here often. Many patients do not understand RSS feeds, etc so your platform enables them to benefit from the fact that the information is curated for them. As your platform matures, I would also like to see concentration on more keyword based searches and somehow provide a mechanism for the cream to rise to the top as determined by your readers and subscribers.

Healthcare IT News published a list of physicians who have mastered the art of using Twitter for medical purposes and it's a great honor for me to be included. Here is the short list without descriptions.

1. Kevin Pho, MD – @kevinmd

2. Mike Sevilla, MD – @drmikesevilla

3. Val Jones, MD – @drval

4. Tim Sturgill, MD – @SymTym

5. Bertalan Meskó, MD – @berci

6. Shelley Binkley, MD – @healthewoman

7. Mark Browne, MD – @consultdoc

8. Joseph Kim, MD – @DrJosephKim

9. Jay Parkinson, MD – @jayparkinson

10. Mehmet Oz, MD – @DrOz

You will find plenty of quality Twitter users focusing on medical specialties or conditions in our curated collections.

We had an amazing year and it's time to look back a bit by featuring some of the main events, developments and successes of Webicina.com in 2011. We published many new curated social media selections focusing on many medical topics; launched new national versions and introduced new features such as Facebook login or the clustering search engine .

Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media appoints Webicina founder
(January, 2011)

Webicina.com was selected by the Kairos Society and was exhibited on Wall Street, New York. (February, 2011)

The free iPhone application of Webicina.com was released in iTunes. We wanted to let you access the curated social media resources we feature on mobile and also provide an interesting and educational game that discusses issues related to quality medical information online and the health 2.0 field. (March, 2011)



Webicina was featured by the Stanford University. (March, 2011)

Webicina iPhone app won the 2011 Medical App Awards in the Most Innovative App category. (April, 2011)

We were featured by Al Jazeera English live about using social media tools for crowdsourcing in medicine! (April, 2011)

We released the free Android version of Webicina. (July, 2011)

New design, new search engine, new era! We worked extremely hard to redesign the whole site and introduced a brand new search engine that is powered by Weblib PolySearch Search Engine. (August, 2011)



Basil Strategies and Webicina partnered on Doctors 2.0 & You Social Media Platform. (October, 2011)



We launched a social campaign in which we asked medical professionals and e-patients to tell their story about how social media helped them improve their health management or helped them get better in their specialty in order to win grand prizes. (November, 2011)

WHO Global Observatory for eHealth series Mentions Webicina.com! (December, 2011)



We presented the winners of the Social Media Story Contest, amazing stories were submitted! (December, 2011)

Finally, we published the Open Access Social Media Guide for Pharma on Webicina.com! (December, 2011)

Webicina.com launched a challenge in which stories from patients and medical professionals about how social media helped them were invited with grand prizes (Lenovo Thinkcentre, iPad2 and Amazon Kindle Fire, among others) to win. A special prize goes to someone who can tell his/her story at the Doctors 2.0 and You conference in Paris with registration fee and accommodation covered.

Now all the fantastic stories presented through Prezi, slideshow, video, Twitter, Facebook and blogs are in and the members of the jury, Lucien Engelen, e-Patient Dave deBronkart, Denise Silber, Kerri Morrone Sparling, Dr Mike Cadogan, and Dr. Ves Dimov made their decision. Here is the final list of winners!


Congratulations to everyone who submitted their stories which will be featured on Webicina one by one as each story must get its attention, each one represents real and clear values of using social media in medicine and healthcare.

The Winners!

1) The winner is Katherine Leon from the US with her story The “Tap Code” of Social Media in which she shared how she managed to cope with postpartum spontaneous coronary artery dissection by joining Inspire.com's related community. She won a brand new, Lenovo® Multi-Touch m90z ThinkCentre, an all-in-one powerful computer with a 23” full HD monitor. An excerpt from her fantastic and inspiring story:

While forging relationships on the community, I wasn’t aware of the term “social media.” I would talk with my husband about “my SCAD friends” or “my online friends with SCAD.” They were just as real and important as any “in-person” friend in my life. Even today, our taps on the cell wall usually don’t translate to our families or social circles. But in the world of social media, we truly communicate and gain understanding of our fears, confusion and struggles.

2) The silver medal goes to Susan McKinnon from Australia who told her story about Transient Global Amnesia and Social Media on Youtube. A really moving story illustrated with many pictures. She won an amazingly thin and light iPad 2.




3) The third place belongs to Sarah Ezekiel from the UK who discussed her diagnosis of motor neurone disease and her journey through social media. She won an Amazon Kindle Fire, the newest model of the world's bestselling e-reader. An excerpt from the story:

There are great MND communities on both twitter and facebook. We share research news which gives hope and keeps us upbeat and positive. Without social media, everyone would sit in isolation and feel hopeless. I actually find tweeting very cathartic and can voice frustrations as well as share good moments. I've made connections with wonderful people all over the world. Some have helped me to fundraise or raise the profile of MND. Life with a terminal illness is a veritable rollercoaster but social media has made everything much easier and more enjoyable for me.

Special Prize goes to Dr. Tamás Horváth from hungary who can present his story at the upcoming Doctors 2.0 and You conference! He described how he built the online presence for his medical practice through a Prezi slideshow.


Everyone who submitted their entries receive a Webicina T-shirt (either an e-patient or a web-savvy physician format).



We hope you enjoyed this contest and based on the success of it, I'm pretty sure Webicina will launch similar competitions soon.

Until then, please keep on using social media for good reasons and let's prove that social media can facilitate the developments of medicine and healthcare. And the best way to demonstrate this is sharing your own story!