The past several days I’ve seen a few interesting developments and discussions on the potential of social media for a more enlightened, and even productive, healthcare provider community.

One is The Bedside Trust, a sort of thinktank of healthcare executives and providers that has set up shop as a social network on the SocialCast platform. The idea behind it is to build a community of healthcare leaders who can work together collaboratively to create change in healthcare, participating in discussions and sharing ideas to “solve the healthcare crisis” as colleagues. The site is brand new and so far pretty sparsely populated — it’s also unrestricted and free for anyone to join, and it will be curious to see if that continues to be true — but so far the topics being floated by community members range from how healthcare organizations can better engage their physicians to how physicians and nurses can overcome historical tensions and work together more collaboratively.

While the idea of online communities for clinical leaders and healthcare executives is certainly not new, this seems to be a different approach: a true social networking platform where members establish profiles (rather than posting anonymously or hidden behind a handle), connect with others in the same geographic region or with the same professional title, and begin conversations within their established networks. It’s going to be interesting to watch how this community grows, and what kinds of offlines implications and influence it will start to have as it does.

In the meantime, Phil Bauman, an RN and author of a blog about “health 2.0,” writes about the 140 Health Care Uses for Twitter. His premise is that “micro-sharing” is the ideal platform for healthcare — presumably because it’s a brief, fast, easy-to-use way to communicate directly to a targeted group of people when moments count. His list of potential uses includes everything from emergency response team management and tissue donation recruitment to glucose tracking for diabetes patients and live-tweeting surgeries for educational purposes (something that’s already being done today).

Bauman raises the natural objections and obstacles to social media as a platform for the medical world: namely, the concerns about privacy and HIPAA compliance, violations of professional oaths and possible litigation. For these very reasons, the “letting it all hang out” nature of social media will cause the industry to move with extreme caution before adopting such channels as a standard way to communicate. Bauman acknowledges that while the concerns are very real, solving healthcare’s overwhelming problems may involve thinking creatively, and finding a way to steer around the roadblocks:

I want to focus on the possibilities because once we see the potential, we may have stonger motivations to deal intelligently with the constraints. So when reading this list, don’t get hung up on the details, the fears, the anxieties that may be provoked by the realities of health care as it is practiced today. It’s the 21st Century: let’s be imaginative, determined and innovative. Let’s be remarkable.