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

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)

After the medical social media conference of the year, it's a great pleasure to announce that "Basil Strategies and Webicina have created a joint partnership to develop a healthcare social media resource for fans of Doctors 2.0™ & You, THE annual international event in health care and social media." You can now directly access the Twitter and Blogfeeds from Doctors 2.0 & You speakers, as well as relevant social media hashtags, thanks to curation by Basil Strategies and technology by Webicina.

Let us know if you need something similar on your website!



The Date for Doctors 2.0™ & You, 2nd edition is May 23-24, 2012, Paris. See you there!

We launched PeRSSonalized Medicine to help patients and doctors keep themselves up-to-date easily. It’s the simplest, free, customizable medical information aggregator covering over 80 medical specialties and conditions in 18 languages!

The Austrian selection is the newest one in which the platform is in Austrian and the blogs, news sites, Twitter users and peer-reviewed journals are also the most relevant onesfrom Austria. Please let us know if you want to see PeRSSonalized Medicine in your language.



Many thanks to Dr. Michaela Endemann for the help in finding quality resources!

Some reasons why PeRSSonalized Medicine is unique:

• You can search in the database. It means you will find medical information only from a quality selected portion of the world wide web.

• You can personalize any of the sections.

• You can also receive the newest Pubmed articles focusing on your search term. Just insert your field of interest, a therapy, a condition, etc. and click Search. Then you can add the newly created box to your personalized medical “journal”.

• It is a community-based project. Please let us know which quality resources should be added to the database.

• Access over 80 medical topics in over 18 languages!

It's a great pleasure to announce the new partnership between Webicina.com and Streaming Well, the leading European health video production and distribution channel. Webicina, a free services curating medical resources in social media will feature videos created by professionals on Streaming Well. Here is one example for allergy. I did an interview with Francis Namouk, head of Streaming Well about this collaboration:

How was Streaming Well launched and what is the rationale behind that?

As our chief medical adviser, Paul Stillman puts it "There is a real mismatch between the ability for people to search for information and the quality of information they find". Based on this, my business partner and I identified a need for creating an engaging health information channel with professional produced content that patients (and their loved ones) can use to better manage their health. A channel where HCPs can learn about the patient experience and help get the best out of their consultation. We believe that video is the most engaging medium, and identified an opportunity to launch the first "Branded" health video channel across Europe.

How do you supervise the content of the videos? Are medical professionals involved?

Streaming Well prioritises collaboration with both commercial and advocacy groups to deliver professional and trustworthy information to patients, carers, and healthcare professionals. Our medical writers and panel of experts participate in creating video content that effectively communicates educational messages. All content is reviewed by our Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Paul Stillman.

What do you expect from this collaboration with Webicina.com?

We simply look to align our goals in providing quality health information to patients and HCPs. Webicina is a leading and trusted ressource for crowd sourced health information, and we are a leading European health video production and distribution channel.

We are happy to keep providing you with our video content, and hope to be included as a video partner for upcoming projects that might require our services.