We are nearing the 9th anniversary of the HCLDR Community and I think it’s about time we had another discussion about the future of the community itself.
Back in August 2012, HCLDR started as a 30min tweetchat. [Why 30min? Because we didn’t think we’d have enough to talk about for a full hour – boy were we wrong!] We focused on topics we thought were relevant to healthcare leaders which we defined as anyone who wanted to make an impact on healthcare vs people with “Director” or “VP” in their titles.
We chose Tuesdays evenings at 8:30pm ET because that was one of the few open evenings when there weren’t competing healthcare tweetchats. Back in 2012 there were tweetchats happening every day at different hours.
HCLDR was never about money or fame. In fact one of the founding principles was that we would never try to turn HCLDR into a money-making enterprise. Our goal was to simply be a place on Twitter where people who are passionate about healthcare could gather to exchange ideas.
As the months and years went by, HCLDR carved out a unique place on Twitter. Somewhere along the way, we became more than a tweetchat and more like a community. This was helped by my frequent attendance at healthcare conferences where we would hold HCLDR meetups and by the addition of a wonderful co-host: Joe Babaian who cares as deeply about the community as I do.
In the past, we have talked about potentially organizing an HCLDR conference – but honestly the amount of work to pull that off was simply too much. More importantly, many members of the HCLDR community are patients who can’t just pick up and go to a conference. We also played with Blab (a precursor to Clubhouse) and other mediums. For a while, we even posted summaries of our Tuesday chat via Storify.
I should probably state clearly that there are no plans to shutter HCLDR. We plan on continuing until there is just the co-hosts on the chats…THEN we might consider packing it in. However, after almost 9 years of running HCLDR tweetchats every Tuesday night at 8:30pm ET, it would be remiss of us not to think about how the community can evolve and change.
Pat Rich, a long-time friend who I met on #hcsmca and who also joins #hcldr chats, recently wrote this article about healthcare social media. In it he talks about #HealthxPh and how they have incorporated Twitter Spaces into their discussions. He also talks about how others have started using Clubhouse.
Is this something HCLDR should experiment with? What other ideas do people in the community have?
One change that is coming to HCLDR – most guest hosts. After years of HCLDR being predominantly hosted by Joe and I, we have decided that it’s time to open up and have more guest hosts who bring fresh perspectives and different topics to the Tuesday night tweetchats.
To make it easier, we’ve created this online form for anyone who would like to submit a topic and themselves as a guest host. Don’t worry – Joe and I will still be here to do all the logistics and will handle the blue box during the chats, but as the guest host you’ll want to be extra-engaging with the community.
Join us on Tuesday July 6th at 8:30pm ET (for your local time click here) as we discuss the future of HCLDR:
- T1 Is healthcare social media still relevant today? How is it useful to you (education, networking, finding a job)?
- T2 What keeps you engaged with HCLDR or any other online healthcare community that you are part of?
- T3 What could be added to HCLDR or changed to improve it? What have other communities done that we can learn from?
- T4 What topics would you like to explore on future HCLDR chats?
Image Credit
Photo by Chris J. Davis on Unsplash
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