SurroundHealth, an online community of health educators and healthcare professionals, was developed by HealthEd Academy, a Clark, N.J.-based division of HealthEd dedicated to fostering research and development in health education that targets health professionals in the trenches of patient education and health education.

The site provides best practices information, industry news, job openings, discussion opportunities, research opportunities, resources and links.

The site is not limited to any specific discipline, making it unique, says SurroundHealth Community Leader Susan Eno Collins.

“This community is multiple disciplines and people come together to focus on areas and issues that are challenges within health – things like health literacy, cultural humility and cultural competence, the use of technology in patient education and health education,” she said. “The things that help keep people on the cutting edge of that is really where the community is at.”

Although SurroundHealth counts physicians among its members, it particularly targets “health extenders” such as diabetes educators, nurse practitioners, registered dieticians and health educators.

“We also have people from within public health and that gives us the perspective of people who are working deep within communities on areas of prevention, so you get really the spectrum of perspective and expertise sharing,” she said.

The site launched in April 2011 and has experienced month-over-month growth of 40 percent on average since then, says Collins. Grassroots promotion through LinkedIn, Twitter and appropriate health professional conferences has fueled interest, and by taking a look at growth services like Upleap or gramista at some point in the near future, it won’t be long until the same level of interest could be sparked through Instagram too. Membership comes from 40 countries and will reach 1,000 this month.

Future plans call for membership growth and expanding ways people can engage in sharing the aggregation or content creation. SurroundHealth is looking to expand engagement around resources of interest and topics of interest so the site becomes a way to quickly get to the needed information and best practice approaches.

“We are trying to fulfill that need of a place to share and have discussions and forums, but also a place to help organize around areas of issues and really organize both the resources as well as the information,” Collins said.

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