What Kind of Impact is Social Media Having on Healthcare?

If you look what has happened even in the United States, social media and access to the internet's breaking down the barriers between patients and providers, and our patientsare much better informed often because they are part of this community of patients. So they come into our offices asking a lot more questions and different questions than they would have 20 years ago.

So that's certainly going to happen in Africa and I think that's a potentially powerful, if you empower our patients, if you empower the community with information they're going to be demanding better services and better health outcomes from their own governments from their own community programs and hospitals and clinicians.

So I think social media can empower patients and communities to demand better care. They can also empower the providers. So they can use social media to advocate for services that they need to deliver or for access to medications, but they want prescribe to their patients. They can use social media to advocate for and to connect with the community.

So the providers and patients can use social media here to advocate together for improved services, so also they can share learning with each other, one of the challenges we've talked about is that there are lots of learners, not enough educators, and so the community. Social media creates a community of learners and we see it in lots of various of life not just in health.

But I think it's tremendously powerful tool, you can cloud source good training and you can get people to share what works with each other.