Naveen Pemmaraju, MD, from MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, discusses the use of social media for bringing together doctors and patients at the 2017 annual meeting of the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) in Marseille, France. He highlights the rise of social media in the general population, and points out that this has particularly taken off in the fields of cancer and blood cancer for doctors, patients and other healthcare stakeholders. Dr Pemmaraju outlines the session focused on social media at EBMT, which covered advantages for patients, clinicians, and for initiating research and collaborations. He also describes the most common concerns, centered on patient confidentiality, misinformation, and legal issues. Dr Pemmaraju also discusses different ways in which social media can be used, whether as a news source or a way to communicate or contribute information. He emphasizes the value of twitter in keeping discussion going between scientific conferences, and include patients as well as experts in these discussions. He also speaks about the power of twitter to bring together communities with rare diseases, as well as events such as twitter chats.
