Medcast meets Medical Republic

Medcast is joining forces with The Medical Republic to bring you the news and 'connected social learning'.Wow.

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In an exciting initiative launched this week, the E-healthspace Community (now under the banner of MedCast) has joined forces with The Medical Republic (TMR) to provide a news service.

When the first edition of TMR landed in my practice, I was really impressed by the breadth of experience in the team, including Dr Kerri Parnell as Editor-in-Chief. Their focus on the new, the controversial and intersection between medicine and technology with a view to helping doctors meet the needs of a rapidly changing landscape around technology and patient knowledge.

Online communities are harnessing the power of large groups of people more than any time in history. Traditional communication and power structures rely on a hierarchy of elected (or not!) representatives of ‘the people’. Doctors are starting to move into these communities and depart some of the older structures. Witness the rapid rise of GPs Down Under on the Facebook network, a phenomenon that had it’s origins in a group of female doctors frustrated with trying to rapidly communicate key clinical issues with colleagues through old structures such as the RACGP.

Online communities allow ‘the people’ to express opinions, share knowledge and develop ‘agreed approaches’ to clinical and political matters. Overseas, large online communities such as Doctors.net in the UK, Sermo and Doximity in the USA and many others, are important pieces of infrastructure for providing feedback from ‘coalface clinicians’ to policy makers.

Closer to home, we the usefulness of such communities in connecting doctors and making them much more effective in phenomena like the GP Down Under Facebook group.

This type of knowledge sharing was a great feature of E-Healthspace in the past and will be central feature of a new offering from Medcast to be launched in the near future. While the overall EHS community has been undergoing a rebuild, Medcast has been supporting smaller communities of learning for the Black Dog Institute, and for Coast City Country GP Training registrars. These rich clinical knowledge-sharing discussions provide real value for training, with registrars and supervisors sharing discussions.  Learning occurs when there is exposure to multiple viewpoints and ‘know how,’ rather than just ‘know what’ related to difficult clinical scenarios.

I hope you will enjoy the news, and our upcoming discussions and clinical scenarios in the coming months

Dr Stephen Barnett

Medcast Founder