Lex Alexander from the news-record.com in Greensboro North Carolina is trying to build a network to aid health and medical reporting. Not an easy task. There are three health affiliate beat bloggers and issues range from:

• Doctors are already a busy type
• Patient-doctor privilege
• Tend not to be networked already ie: Doctors aren’t on Facebook

But Alexander pushes forward knowing full well that sometimes the best way to get started is face-to-face meetings to get a few core people in your network and grow it out from there.

Lex writes:

"I met with this morning with the executive director and a member of the executive committee of the local medical society and explained what we wanted to do. They seemed very enthusiastic (if unaware of what Twitter is, which is understandable). The executive committee is going to discuss it on May 1, and they’re running my solicitation for participants in their June newsletter. The ED also was going to contact directly some docs who she thought might have a particular interest in participating.

I’m also reaching out to the local voluntary organizations for such groups as office administrators.

So we’ll see what happens."

At this point I’m willing to venture that it hasn’t been a huge time sink for Lex, but it has obvious potential. Soon Alexander could have a network. At the very least, Alexander will have new sources.