Welcome
During its spring 2013 quarterly meeting in Phoenix, the
Arizona Telemedicine Council encouraged the Arizona
Telemedicine Program to expand the scope of its social
networking activities. After a six-month planning period,
we decided to go “all in” because it makes perfect sense
to leverage emerging telecommunications modalities to
communicate with our clients, the patients and health care
providers in Arizona. We ramped up by staffing our Social
Media Office with very experienced editors and content
writers and setting specific goals, which have been met.
We’re proud of our Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+
information streams, all of which are accessible from the
Arizona Telemedicine Program web page:
www.telemedicine.arizona.edu.
One social media channel is different—that’s blogs. In recent
years, blogs have become a favored media for journalism.
You can read tweets on the fly—and get the gist of the
stories. On the other hand, careful reading of blogs pays off.
More often than not, professional writers crafted them for us.
Just like any high quality newspaper article, a blog covers a
topic in rich detail, and the story is self-contained. Read backto-back, blogs coalesce into an e-magazine. Print out a series
of tweets, and the list resembles the yellow pages. Print out a
series of blogs, and you have a magazine.
This magazine contains 18 previously posted blogs, all still
available online, and all about telemedicine.
Read them, savor them, enjoy them: they are a window into
today’s marvelous telemedicine and telehealth world. Each
blog tells a personal story and each blog has a take-home
message you can take to the bank.
These blogs show how telemedicine is benefiting our great
state, and the state of healthcare in general. They provide
glimpses into the future of healthcare and telemedicine.
Enjoy!
Ronald S. Weinstein, M.D.
Founding Director
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