Presentation given at the European Society of Coloproctology Annual Meeting, Milan, 2016.

1. The Other Side of the Firewall -
Social Media Developments
in Other Specialities
ESCP Milan, 28-30 September, 2016
Marie Ennis-O’Connor
@JBBC

2. Firewall
A system designed to prevent
unauthorized access to or
from a private network.

7. Encouraged medical
professionals to treat
patients as equal partners
in achieving better health
outcomes.
Enabled
Empowered
Engaged

10. “I’m convinced that
our next exponential
leap in medical
progress depends on
us learning from
networks of
microexperts”
Roni Zeiger MD
Smart Patients

11. “I don't think the
doctor needs the
patient to become the
doctor...we need each
other, to combine our
expertise”
Ted Eytan MD

12. “Living day in and day out with these illnesses
gives us an awareness of them and a
perspective doctors cannot fully understand”
Catherine Richardson, Gastroparesis Patient

13. “It is the kind of wisdom you
get only from living and
breathing with this illness
every single day of your life
outside of the confines of the
hospital walls
I experienced it first-hand
when I discovered the online
Cystic Fibrosis community and
it has completely transformed
my healthcare and my life”

15. Susannah Fox
Chief Technology Officer of the US
Department of Health and Human Services
“Technology allows us
to widen the network
of people we can talk
with, increase the
velocity of those
conversations, inject
them with more
source material, then
archive and make
them searchable”

16. “The opportunity to
collect and organize the
incredibly valuable
knowledge that patients
and caregivers are sharing
with one another has the
potential to change the
game for many living
with chronic conditions
and beyond”

18. • Live Twitter event
• Dedicated hashtag #
• A chat “host”
moderates the
conversation
• Transcript of tweets
available after the
chat

19. • The impact of the technology-driven, big data,
uber-information era we now live in is certainly
not unique to healthcare, but its effect on
treatment, operations and patient-doctor
interaction within the industry are outstanding.
• The effects on how a patient approaches their
health and treatment programs are particularly
transformational. We’ve entered an era of self-
empowerment, self-efficacy, and self-advocacy
amongst patients.

20. Alicia Staley
Jody Schoger
Dr Deanna Attai

21. And I stumbled upon conversations among women
trying to find answers to very basic questions that I
felt should have been answered by their physicians.
Some women were truly uninformed, but many were
simply overwhelmed.”
“What I found was a very large breast cancer
community, from newly diagnosed women to those
with metastatic breast cancer, all supporting one
another online.
Deanna Attai MD

23. The healthcare conversation is no
longer a one-way narrative but is
evolving into a global, participatory
online discussion

24. “An army of patients
connected through and
fostered by the
internet can find
things that doctors
haven’t seen”
Dave deBronkart
aka “ePatient Dave”

25. “In 2003, my
cardiologist told me I
would never meet
another SCAD patient
It was just too rare
Today, I “know” more
than 1,000 fellow
survivors – all because
of social media”

30. “This isn’t an addition to
your job. This is part of
your job. This is where
our patients are these
days and this is where we
need to reach them.”