Hospice and Palliative Medicine Tweetchat reaches 200th chat

When I first began exploring the health care Twittersphere in late 2008, there were not a lot of people there, and explaining it to others and expand the network was pretty challenging. Six years later, the understanding of Twitter as a space to advocate and influence is well understood in the realms of sports, entertainment, politics and news. Well, we too in hospice and palliative care have made a significant impact on Twitter even if it is in the smaller niche of Health Care.

One of the tent poles for people to gather and find each other has been the weekly Hospice and Palliative Medicine Tweetchat. Having seen the success of the Healthcare Social Media (#HCSM) chat hosted by Dana Lewis (@DanaMLewis), I thought we could do something similar with the HPM community. With the assistance of co-founder Renee Berry (@rfberry), we started the chat on July 14th, 2010. Since then, on every Wednesday (barring significant holidays) there has been a chat on Twitter highlighting hospice and palliative medicine issues for four years and tonight we will have our 200th chat. In a social media world where everything seems ephemeral, this is something you can depend on.

Signing up for Twitter and seeing how this goes.
— Christian Sinclair (@ctsinclair) November 6, 2008

The #hpm hashtag (remember when you didn’t understand what that was?) is quite active through the whole week. For stats on the participation in #hpm, you can check out Symplur’s wonderful Healthcare Hashtag site.

Many of the people who participate have mentioned that the weekly chat serves as self-care because of the camaraderie and support. I know many of the people I have met through these chats have become good friends, regardless if I have met them in person yet, although I always look for the opportunity. Thank you to all of the people who have participated and moderated over the past four years. It truly is a community effort.

We invite everyone to come tonight to join in with the celebration of volunteerism, advocacy, communication, shared goals, and communication. If you used to join often but life’s circumstances changed, please come back tonight and say hello. If you are still a little wary, and not sure about it, use nurph.com to watch the conversation (and maybe join in). If you cannot make it tonight, set a reminder in your calendar until it becomes a good habit! For those of you who will always be Twitter-averse (which is okay!), we will be brainstorming tonight on how to re-purpose the discussions from each weekly chat to reach new audiences.

Looking back at the first post about #HPM Tweetchat, the reasons to participate still resonate:

So why is something like this important?

• A Tweetchat creates content that might spread
• A Tweetchat lures other people into the conversation
• A Tweetchat places you on the map
• A Tweetchat connects people
• A Tweetchat increases your sphere of influence
• A Tweetchat exposes you to new ideas and resources
• A Tweetchat is a place to get questions answered

(And if you were wondering why we chose #hpm and not the more inclusive #hpc, well Twitter was dominated by tech early adopters and #hpc was primarily used to discuss HP computers. #eol or #eolc were also too restrictive and reinforcing of the common bias that we help only at EOL. #hospice and #palliative are in more common use now as is #hpmglobal.)