Use Twitter Like a Health IT Pro

Twitter. It seems everyone’s tweeting nowadays. It may not have the popularity of Facebook, but it’s not too far behind.

Here at HIMSS we have found a great benefit from this Internet service. So much benefit, in fact, that we now use it to help us support our mission to improve healthcare. We have several staff who tweet, and I am very proud of the quality of their updates.

There’s no mystery about how to tweet. In the case of HIMSS, we update our posts in various areas of our expertise, and we try to share our knowledge by posting links to publications, websites, news events and even other Twitter accounts that are leading the way in healthcare IT. More importantly, we believe in responding to your questions and engaging in discussions with the community through our Twitter accounts.

Today’s post is a pro tip for those of you who are looking to go a little bit further in Twitter.

In Twitter you can update your status, share links, but also, interact with others by using mentions and direct messages, but did you know you can join group chats? They’re not always easy to find, but once you do, you can join these regularly scheduled discussions.

Today, I’d like to point you to RN Chat (#rnchat), which Phil Baumann runs and happens on a regular basis to bring together the voices of nurses from all parts of the Web.

I participated (via the @HIMSS twitter account) with the help of the HIMSS Nursing Informatics Community in #rnchat on National Nursing Informatics Awareness Day on May 12, making it the first Twitter chat in which we participated.

How can you find those chats?

Simply search for the hashtag #rnchat on Twitter’s website. You don’t need an account to do so. So, the next time someone complains to you that Twitter is nothing more than silly status updates, show them discussions like this one.

Do you have any other health IT Twitter chats you’d like to share with us?