Between the Olympics and the elections, 2012 brought us plenty of distracting media to consume. Fortunately for patients everywhere, many research labs and companies remained hard at work with the aim of solving problems facing emergency medicine. Here we summarize 12 of the most impressive – or at least provocative – innovations of the year.

In April, we wrote about the use of social networks for physician-physician communication and concluded that while there is much potential, the ultimate online physician network probably does not exist yet. In this article we turn our focus to social networks that enable physicians to communicate with patients.