Klout’s top social media influencers in medicine

Last week, we brought you Klout’s Top 10 social media influencers in healthcare, and the Twitterverse responded.

One commenter wondered why we’d give Klout’s social media-influence score “credibility” with such an article because the Klout score is such a “blunt instrument.” Well, get ready for some more “credibility,” if you can call it that.

Below is Klout’s list of the Top 10 social media influencers in medicine. What’s the difference between that and healthcare? At first glance, the medicine list includes almost exclusively MDs, and it has a decidedly more international flavor. A member of Klout’s media relations team didn’t respond to an email requesting further clarification.

Suffice it to say, the two categories are similar, yet somehow different. The same person sits atop both lists: superstar blogger Kevin Pho, a New Hampshire physician who’s risen to prominence on the back of his KevinMD blog, which he markets as “social media’s leading physician voice.” But Pho is the only name to appear on both lists.

Here are Klout’s Top 10 social media influencers in medicine in the past 90 days:

1. Kevin Pho: All hail the healthcare/medicine social media king. Maybe in the future Klout will come up with another similar, yet somehow different social media influencer category that Pho can lead.

2. Elmar Breitbach: Breitbach maintains a blog in the German language and casts himself as an expert in assisted reproduction. He tweets about medicine and infertility.

3. Ves Dimov: Dr. Dimov is a University of Chicago assistant professor, as well as an internist and allergist, who maintains the CasesBlog, which focuses on health news. He has a healthy Twitter following at more than 7,700.

4. Hisham Rana: Yet another MD, Rana practices in the Los Angeles area and seems to have given up on his personal blog to focus on Twitter. He most frequently tweets links to health news stories.

5. Albert Einstein College of Medicine: Affiliated with Yeshiva University in the Bronx, New York, the Einstein College of Medicine tweets frequently and makes copious use of the #hcsm (healthcare social media) tag.

6. Ryan Madanick: A gastroenterologist from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Madanick also participates in the Sunday night #hcsm chats, the interactivity of which likely boosts Madanick’s Klout score. Clinically, he specializes in diseases of the esophagus.

7. Linda Pourmassina: Pourmassina is an internist from the Seattle area and maintains a blog that she says focuses on the “human” side of medicine.

8. Institute of Medicine: The IOM bills itself as an independent nonprofit that works outside of government to provide medical and healthcare advice to political decision makers as well as the public. The IOM has about 3,000 Twitter followers, yet follows only nine accounts itself, most of which are other government agencies.

9. Akira Hayasaka: A physician who practices in Japan, Hayasaka runs a clinic that specializes in treating liver disease. Some of his tweets appear in Japanese, while others are in English. He evidently takes pride in his Klout score, which seems curiously high, given that he has less than 700 Twitter followers. Maybe he’s more of a Facebook type of guy.

10. Johannes G. Mayer: With everything in Mayer’s social media accounts in the German language, your guess is as good as mine.