Mom Writes Moving Essay About Her Son To Win Prestigious Mayo Clinic Social Media Scholarship

Sept. 17, 2012 - PRLog -- SPRING HILL, Tennessee, September 17, 2012 -- As teens are starting college all around us, a local mom is quite excited about winning a scholarship this year, but it's not one for college. It's a scholarship worth almost $5,000 to attend the Social Media Week events held by the prestigious Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

In order to win a scholarship, participants had to write an essay about their use of social media tools to enhance health care and health care delivery. The essays were voted on via social media such as Facebook "likes" and Twitter "tweets" and the top 15 essays became finalists. The finalists were selected by a panel drawn from the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media Advisory Board. The three winners, including local mom, Melissa Hogan, get all their expenses covered to attend an intensive week of learning and networking on social media strategy in health care sponsored by The Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media.

Ms. Hogan wrote her essay about her journey in social media since her son was diagnosed with the ultra rare disease, Hunter Syndrome or Mucopolysaccharidosis II, in 2009. She uses social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, as well as two different blogs, to raise awareness about the condition, support families, and bring the disease down to a personal level. As her essay writes, her goal is "to put a beautiful face on a terrible disease." You can read her essay at http://socialmedia.mayoclinic.org/2012/07/16/melissa-h-sc....

To do that, Ms. Hogan writes a blog (http://www.savingcase.com) that started small in early 2009, but has emerged to be read in over 100 countries around the world. She writes about the groundbreaking clinical trial that her son is involved in, special education, health care, rare disease research, and other issues faced by families of children with special needs.

Ms. Hogan has also written an e-book entitled Calmer: Medical Events with Cognitively Impaired Children in an effort to help other families with children who face constant medical interventions but who may not even understand what is going on and why.

Melissa Hogan is sought as a speaker about rare disease issues as well as social media as it relates to rare disease. She was recently the opening speaker at the World Orphan Drug Congress in Washington, D.C. She describes herself as a lawyer by training, writer by passion, and advocate by necessity.