Health IT

MD Connect lists physicians on Twitter; Here are some more in health IT

If you are into health IT and digital health, you should follow these physicians on Twitter.

By Neil Versel on August 18, 2015

We love lists, for better or for worse. Last week, Jonathan Catley of online healthcare marketing firm MD Connect came up with list of “20 doctors you should be following on Twitter.”

It’s a pretty good one, with some familiar names — Dr. Kevin Pho of KevinMD.com fame, Dr. Val Jones of blog network Better Health — and some more obscure ones that we were unfamiliar with. Dr. Troy Fiesinger, a family physician in Sugar Land, Texas, is a prolific tweeter about healthcare policy. Dr. A. Patrick Jonas from Dayton, Ohio, wants to make primary care more patient-centric.

Catley also included Dr. Mehmet Oz. He does, as Catley said, have a “bazillion” followers, but is Dr. Oz really someone you have to follow? Perhaps it’s worth it in an effort to keep Oz honest?

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From a health IT perspective, it’s nice to see Dr. Leslie Saxon, director of the Center for Body Computing at the University of Southern California, on this list. Same goes for Dr. Joseph Kim, a self-professed “digital health geek.” And we love the wit of Dr. Zubin Damania, a.k.a. ZDoggMD.

Since I focus on health IT and digital health, here are five more physicians on Twitter worth a follow:

  1. Dr. Farzad Mostashari (@Farzad_MD).  The former national health IT coordinator is outspoken, but smart, and he is one of the leaders of the fledgling Get My Health Data movement. Mostashari has more than 24,000 Twitter followers.
  2. Dr. Doug Fridsma (@fridsma). The president and CEO of the American Medical Informatics Association is another Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology alumnus. Fridsma is all about standards-based interoperability, innovation and global health. Plus, his Twitter profile pic is a Simpsonized version of himself.
  3. Dr. Wen Dombrowski (@HealthcareWen). Dombrowski is a champion of social media (25,400 Twitter followers, nearly 36,000 tweets), an expert in user-experience design and an advocate for better eldercare. Oh, did we mention she’s speaking at MedCity CONVERGE in a couple of weeks?
  4. Dr. Bernadette Keefe (@nxtstop1). Keefe is another star of healthcare social media and a co-moderator of #HCLDR, a weekly tweet chats on healthcare leadership. The nonpracticing radiologist has consulted on social media strategy since 2010.
  5. Dr. Eric Topol (@erictopol). No list of physicians on Twitter is complete without Topol, perhaps the world’s preeminent digital doc. Topol, the editor-in-chief of Medscape, chief academic officer of Scripps Health in San Diego and director of the Scripps Translational Research Institute, has upwards of 66,000 followers. He has said on national TV that he prescribes more apps than drugs, which is a remarkable thing for a cardiologist. We get more story tips from his tweets than just about any other source on social media.