Image via CrunchBaseappreciating the reliable services of Twitter in their time of need; they called it “an excellent system” which let them communicate with their needy patients and spread awareness, both quickly and easily, about where to can obtain their vital medication from. This appreciation note by the doctors was published in The Lancet, considered to be world’s largest medical journals. In the aftermath of the earthquake which hit Japan on 11th March, 2011, almost all the phone services were affected drastically and their services were unreliable, although at that time of need internet access throughout the country remained intact. Hence, gave the doctors the chance to make use of the services provided by Twitter.
Among the published notes in The Lancet, two doctors from the Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo, Dr Yuichi Tamura and Dr Keiichi Kukuda, specially mentioned the challenges their community faced during the catastrophe. They reported that their first priority after the disaster was to reach their regular patients and inform them to acquire their vital pulmonary hypertension drugs, which was crucially needed at the time. They said that “Forming a supply chain for such drugs in the earliest stages of the disaster was difficult; however we found that social networking services could have a useful role.” It was also precisely stated that the ‘Re-tweet’ function of the network allowed the important information to flow easily and vastly among the twitter community.
