Is There a Role for Social Technologies in Collaborative Healthcare?

The exponential growth, variety, and sophistication of the information communication technologies (ICTs) plus their growing accessibility are transforming how clinical practitioners, patients, and their families can work together. Social technologies are the ICTs tools that augment the ability of people to communicate and collaborate despite obstacles of geography and time. There is still little empirical research on the impact of social technologies in the case of collaborative health. Defining a set of social technologies with potential for developing, sustaining, and strengthening the collaborative health agenda should prove useful for practitioners and researchers. This paper is based on an extensive review of the literature focusing on emerging technologies and the experience of the author as a consultant to health care professionals learning about social technologies. A note of caution is required: the phenomenon is complex and hard to describe in writing (a medium very different from the technologies themselves). Hardware and software are in continuous development and the iterative adaptation of the emergent social technologies for new forms of virtual communication.