At the beginning of September, we lauched an expansion of our Social Media Club Editorial Team, by hosting guest bloggers to highlight a different vertical within social media.  The first week of each month we host themed content featuring true social media professionals who are in the trenches within their niche, with October featuring Healthcare related content. 

Guest bloggers include Lauren Vargas, Alex De Carvalho Shwen Gwee and Brian Ahier, who will be sharing insights into industry trends, challenges, case studies and more, October 3rd-7th. 

Meet our guest bloggers: 

Brian Ahier works as Health IT Evangelist at Mid-Columbia Medical Center. He is a City Councilor in The Dalles, Oregon and also serves on the Board of Mid-Columbia Council of Government, and Q-Life, an intergovernmental agency providing broadband capacity to the area. Brian helped form the plans for HIE in Oregon and sits on the HIO Executive Panel. He has worked extensively on the Direct Project and serves as President of Gorge Health Connect, Inc. (GHC) a health information exchange organization in the Columbia Gorge where they are implementing a Direct Project pilot. He blogs at O'Reilly Radar, Government Health IT, Healthcare IT News and on his own blog at http://ahier.blogspot.com.

Alex develops social media initiatives and networks from business planning to launch. He co-founded and runs a worldwide community for physicians, VoxMed. He is the co-author of "Securing The Clicks: Network Security in the Age of Social Media." A Professor at the University of Miami, School of Communications, Alex teaches a course on social media. Based in Miami, Florida, he organizes The Startup Forum, Social Media Club South Florida, BarCamp and Mobile Monday meetups and conferences for South Florida new media professionals. 

Lauren Vargas is Community Management Strategist at Aetna and based in Boston, Massachusetts. Lauren is a multi-faceted communications professional with ten eyars of experience in community relations, internatl and external corporate communications, and government affairs. She assists organizations with building sound objectives and strategies for listening and measurement, and helps them engage with the communities they serve by fostering authentic relationships built on trust through conversation and participatory media. 

Shwen is currently VP of Digital Health within the Health Practice at Edelman's NYC office.  Prior to Edelman, Shwen led Digital Strategy and Social Media within the Marketing department at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, where he focused on New and Social Media, Web 2.0, and Health 2.0. He led development of a comprehensive digital strategy for launch/commercialization - including (internal and external) new/social media strategies - and establishes/maintains key relationships with the new media and health 2.0 communities. 

Stay tuned to Social Media Clubhouse blog next week, to meet our guest bloggers and learn how social media is influencing the healthcare industry.