The Advisory Board for the Mayo Clinic Center for Health Care Social Media includes representatives from various health care roles, including patients, who have been actively using social media, as well as representatives from other industries whose insights will help support the center’s mission.

Members will provide advice and feedback to leadership of the center and will contribute to advancement of practical social media application in health care.

Additional members of this 25-member group will be named following a crowdsourcing process as described here. We want to reflect diversity in all its forms in our 25-member board, so your nominations for the remaining 12 positions will help us accomplish that goal.

The first 13 members of the board are:

Phil Baumann is a registered nurse who believes that health is inherently social. He consults with organizations to bring innovative ideas in social process design and emerging technologies to life. As President of CareVocate, he speaks, writes and conducts workshops on online communications with a concentration on health care and life science. He has built and led communities connecting diverse health care professionals, including the popular #RNchat, the first Twitter chat for registered nurses. His web-based project “Health Is Social” produces public and proprietary content for integrating social media with health care. Phil leads discussions on the roles and ramifications of Web technologies, from society at large to individual health to the business enterprise. He is a member of the Better Health Network of medical bloggers and blogs regularly at PhilBaumann.com, HealthIsSocial.com and RNchat.org. You can follow him on Twitter: @PhilBaumann, @HealthIsSocial and @RNchat, or email him.

Ed Bennett is the Director of Web Strategy for the University of Maryland Medical Center, and is responsible for the public Web sites, intranets and social media activities of the hospital. Ed also blogs at Found In Cache, where he maintains an industry reference – the Hospital Social Network List, which tracks the social media activities of over 800 U.S. Hospitals. Over the past two years, he has spoken at numerous conferences on social media and healthcare. Ed is an actively engaged member of the Health Care Social Media Community on Twitter.

As Senior Manager for Digital Communications at Inova Health System, Chris Boyer develops and implements strategic marketing and business development initiatives that utilize the power of social media and transactional Web to engage Inova’s target market, a diverse population. Since starting with Inova in April 2010, Chris has spearheaded the use of measurable, integrated approaches to promoting health services through the effective use of traditional online search marketing, search engine optimization and social-media optimization. Chris recently led the successful development and rollout of an Emergency Room Wait Times app for iPhone, as well as an online interactive fitness program called “Fit for 50″ with former Washington Redskins star Darrell Green.

Nick Dawson is the Administrative Director of Physician and Community Engagement for Bon Secours Health System’s largest market. In his role, Nick leads health 2.0 efforts, including regional EMR roll out.  Nick pioneered the role of Director Community Engagement at Bon Secours Richmond Health System. In addition to those duties, he served as Director on the Revenue Cycle team for the 14-hospital system. In the past, he has worked for other multi-hospital systems and been a consultant on staff a major health IT and strategy vendor. Nick is a member of the Healthcare Financial Management Association, speaks nationally, and is often published on the topic of community engagement and patient experience.

“e-Patient Dave” deBronkart was diagnosed in 2007 with Stage IV, Grade 4 renal cell carcinoma (kidney cancer). His median survival time at diagnosis was 24 weeks. However, after great treatment and a clinical trial, he had beaten the disease in nine months. Today Dave is actively engaged in opening health care information directly to patients on an unprecedented level, thus creating a new dynamic in how information is delivered, accessed and used by the patient. A year after the diagnosis, Dave was invited to the annual retreat of the e-Patient Scholars Working Group, which consists of medical and lay pioneers who have been demonstrating that a new world of Participatory Medicine is evolving. Dave became an active blogger on e-patients.net and has now devoted himself full-time to healthcare.

Lucien Engelen works as the Head of the Regional Acute Healthcare Network at the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands. He advises their board on how changes in healthcare can enhance the participation of the patients. In their Reshape Program, Lucien researches the innovations and changes that are necessary for Participatory Health Care. Combining his previous business experience, he looks at health from both a patient and business perspective. Lucien sees Health2.0 as the most challenging aspect of future healthcare reform. He initiated AYA4, a community for young cancer patients and families to meet and share experiences, as well as AED4, which collects the geo-position data of AEDs for iPhone, iPad and Android apps. He is also an author of three books, and the Initiator & Curator of TEDxMaastricht, which will address health care change. Learn more on his LinkedIn profile, send him a tweet (@zorg20) or visit his blog.

Meredith Gould (@meredithgould) is a sociologist by training and activist by temperament with a wide range of editorial and marketing experience. Since 1990, she has focused on health and wellness issues, especially how health is socially-constructed.  A passionate advocate for using technology to build communities, Meredith participates in healthcare social media (#hcsm), healthcare marketing (#hcmktg) and hospice/palliative medicine (#hpm) conversations on Twitter.  She is the author of seven books, blogs about daily errata at More Meredith Gould and serves in an elected leadership position for the Virtual Abbey, a community (@Virtual_Abbey) of modern monastics committed to the Benedictine tradition. Learn more at http://www.meredithgould.com or send her an email.

David Harlow (@healthblawg) is Principal of The Harlow Group LLC, a health care law and consulting firm based near Boston, Mass. His twenty years’ experience in the public and private sectors gives him perspective on legal, policy and business issues facing the health care community. David assists clients in developing new paradigms for their business organizations, relationships and processes, helping them reach organizational goals in a highly regulated environment, in realms ranging from facilities development to social media strategies to the avoidance of fraud and abuse. His blog, HealthBlawg, is highly regarded in both the legal and health policy blogging worlds.  He also speaks regularly before health care and legal industry groups on the uses of social media.

As Principal of Holtz Communication + Technology, Shel Holtz consults with organizations on the application of online technology to their communication efforts. Hospitals and health care are focus points of his practice. Shel has been an author of six communication-related books. He is a regular conference speaker, mostly on social media-related topics. He is a blogger and co-host of the first communications-related podcast, “For Immediate Release.” Shel is accredited by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and was named an IABC Fellow in 2005. He is a Founding Research Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR).

Dana Lewis is the Interactive Marketing Specialist at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, Wash. She is also the creator and moderator of #hcsm, a weekly Twitter chat on healthcare communications and social media. She co-organizes Social Health, the successful international health ‘unconference’ and serves on the advisory board for South by Southwest’s health track. She is also actively involved on local and national levels with the American Diabetes Association. Dana, a 2010 graduate of the University of Alabama, was named to USA Today’s All-USA College Academic Team in June 2010. She received the Best Non-profit Microblogging Award from the Society for New Communications Research Excellence.

Reed Smith is a consulting strategist and thought leader focused on the integration of social computing into hospitals. Much of his work focuses on incorporating interactive elements into current online strategies within hospitals and healthcare organizations. Reed’s hospital experience includes time as a hospital marketing director and overseeing product development for the Texas Hospital Association, where he assembled best practices and case studies from organizations across the country to create a social media guide for hospitals. Prior to healthcare, Reed spent time working in both telecommunications and professional sports. He has also presented at various healthcare and social media conferences around the nation. You can learn more about Reed by visiting i am reedsmith and his LinkedIn profile, or by connecting with him on Twitter.

Tom Stitt (@tstitt) serves on the Health Track and Accelerator Health Advisory Boards of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival where he is an advocate of making health part of their social media and new technology agenda. Tom has been active in supporting various online health communities, including the weekly Twitter chat known as #hcsm. He is a co-founder of a stealthy early stage medication adherence startup that is focused on building social communities to drive better medication adherence. As a consulting firm principal, Tom has served as a project manager and planner for deploying large-scale, patient-centric interactive television systems at a number of leading health care providers.

Tom Vanderwell graduated with a BA in English and started a career in real estate and lending. He has spent the last 22 years helping people with their residential real estate investments, first on the sales side and then as  a mortgage lender.  Tom and his wife have five kids, two of which they adopted in 2004 from Haiti. Tom is on a Haitian orphanage board and is working on other efforts to help in Haiti via http://alongsidehaiti.org. You can watch an interview with Tom about his patient experiences at Mayo on the Mayo Clinic YouTube channel. Tom thoroughly enjoys how social media makes the world a much “smaller” place and is excited about the opportunity to assist Mayo in using social media to further health care. You can connect with Tom on Facebook and Twitter (@tvanderwell).

Views expressed by members of the Advisory Board are those of the individuals and do not represent the positions of Mayo Clinic or the Center for Health Care Social Media.