Somebody out there has got to be thinking of ways we can leverage our collective knowledge via Web 2.0 tools. A typical hospital has hundreds of thousands of hours of academic and practical education locked away in the brains of its clinicians.

Ok I know we’re already way behind the rest of the world in terms of technology integration. But I wonder what it would mean, and what shape a collaborative medical tool would manifest. What if all our nurses and doctors were communicating in real time their observations, processes, errors and successes?

Do we see blogs and social networks springing up to replace the static hospital intranets that currently act as little more than repositories for HR and policy documents? Are hospital wikis on the horizon? We already know that message forums in many cases have been resisted by management fearing loss of control to union mongering nurses. And, in rare cases where message forums for staff have been established the traffic has been underwhelming. There have been a few success stories out there, but not enough to encourage widespread adoption.

How about RSS? How many of your staff even know what that is?

I’m not sure if the form for Healthcare Enterprise 2.0 has revealed itself yet. And maybe that’s why the potential for collaboration remains untapped. Healthcare remains a business that is more about person to person contact (thankfully). Privacy issues cloud the probability that social networking tools will ever be of benefit. But I am hopeful. And I am not giving up.

Maybe the term “social networking” is itself a limiting factor and we need to think in terms of “clinical networking”  in a way that draws together and focuses the resources. Patient bookmarking you say?  Shift-change Podcasts. Virtual rounds and Patient self-charting. Death as downtime. Hospital corners on my style sheets. Anyone? Anyone?