Hope you can join us this week for Doctor Anonymous Show 201 when our guests will be the authors of the blog called "Future of Family Medicine." This unique blog is written by medical students and the topics vary from health policy, to concepts like the Patient Centered Medical Home, and today's post called "The New Deal for Primary Care in Community Health Centers." Join us on Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 9pm Eastern Time on BlogTalkRadio. Also, check out the video promo above. See you for the show!
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Medical Social Media Awards
With last weekend's golden globe awards and miss american pagent, not only is it award season for actors and beauty queens, it's also award season for medicine and social media. Last week, I put out this tweet reminiscing about how I miss that the medblog awards were no longer going on - or, at least that what I thought. Just a few minutes later on twitter, I got a message back stating that the awards were just going to be announced.
Yesterday, Medgadget announced on their website the 2010 Medblog Awards sponsored by epocrates and lenovo (pretty impressive sponsors). There will be seven categories that will be recognized. The nomination process seems like a quicker timeline, in that nominations close in a few days this coming weekend. I was lucky enough to be nominated way back in 2006 in the new medblog category. The very popular (and infamous) Dr. Flea blog won that year.
The other award that I wanted to share with you is the shorty twitter awards. It's kind of funny because I really pushed to win my category a few years ago during the first year of the award. Another competitor in the same category really came after me and eventually won the category. Also, if you look at this year's site, the category of health is not even what they call a "major" category. Oh well.
For most other people writing this type of post, this is where they ask you to nominate them. Me? Well, I'm asking you NOT to nominate me for these awards. Am I still bitter about what happened before? Maybe. But, I know that there are a lot of other better bloggers and "twitterers" out there. I used to really get caught up in this stuff. Not anymore.
It's just more interesting for me to monitor twitter and facebook as people post things like "If you nominate mine, I'll nominate yours." Or, "If you vote for mine, I'll vote for yours." The politicking and the gamesmanship that will occur over the next few weeks - that's is what I look forward to every year....
Physicians in Social Media
I've been pleasantly surprised by the attention that I have received from my Medical Economics cover last month. It's amazing how many opportunities that have occurred since the magazine came out. I'll be talking about some of them in the coming weeks. Last week, local TV news interviewed me about the article.
Thanks so much to WKBN/WYTV for interviewing me last week about the magazine. In the video above, I have put together a series of stories for the 24 hour news cycle of local news - which I find really interesting. I make some appearances on the morning show, and the anchor there said some nice things at the end of the first story. All this from me spending too much time on facebook and twitter - HA!
Dr. A Talking Social Media with HMCNews
Jessica Levco from the HealthCare Marketing & Communications Newsletter interviewed me a few months ago at the Swedish Medical Center Health Care Symposium in Seattle, Washington. Of course, we talked about medicine and social media.
In the video above, we chatted about why I think physicians need to be online, and at least be familiar with health information resources. I also encourage you to check out today's edition of HMCNews where I profile a couple of interesting stories.
Addendum: Apologies if this is not working. I got some feedback on that. Maybe better access the video through their direct link here.
Dr. A Show 200 Wrap-Up: EndoGoddess
Thanks so much to Dr. Jennifer Dyer for being on Doctor Anonymous Show 200 last night. She is a pediatric endocrinologist at Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. She is the first physician in her family and actually started out wanting to be a journalist. But, she became inspired to not only go to medical school, but also pursue a career in pediatrics.
Pediatric endocrinology has to do with hormones in the body, which means diseases like diabetes in children. Dr. Dyer is known as @EndoGoddess on twitter, and she is right in the middle of the fight against childhood obesity. She has been making the rounds on the medical lecture circuit talking about how she utilized text messaging to take care of patients. She talks about it more in the video above which is a presentation at a TEDx conference in Columbus, Ohio.
We covered a number of other topics in our interview including her philosophy on "meeting patients where they are" as far as coming up with a treatment plan, her pursuit of a year long White House Fellowship to address childhood obesity, her own weight loss success story, and what she does every year while watching the golden globe awards.. Hmmmm....
You can listen to the entire show in the sidebar of this blog. Or, if you like you can go to the show's iTunes page, download the show, and listen anytime. I also encourage you to check out the show's Facebook page and to press the huge "Like" button at the top. I have also done local TV interviews on health topics. Check out my YouTube page to check those out. Have a great weekend everybody!
Dr. A Show 200 Tonight!
Thursday, January 13th, 2011 at 9pmET
I invite you to join me for Doctor Anonymous Show 200 tonight! Can you believe it's been 200 shows already? My guest will be Dr. Jennifer Dyer from Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. She is a pediatric endocrinologist and is in the midst of writing up a research paper on how she utilized text messaging to communicate with patients. We'll also talk about her thoughts about medicine and social media in general.
If you are new to the show, I encourage you to catch us live. There is a great chat room that also goes on. You can even see my shining face on the webcam. Can't catch us live? That's ok. You can listen anytime after the show as it is saved as a podcast so you can listen anytime!
For first time Blog Talk Radio listeners:
*Although it is not required to listen to the show, I encourage you to register on the BlogTalkRadio site prior to the show. I think it will make the process easier.
*To get to my show site, click here. As show time gets closer, keep hitting "refresh" on your browser until you see the "Play/Chat" button. Then, of course, press the "Play/Chat" button.
AAFP Connection
There have been a few stated excuses why physicians are hesitant to utilize social media services for things like peer to peer communication and for discussion of clinical cases. The statements that are made are they physicians are concerned about issues of security and privacy. Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with these statements.
It's just that organizations, especially physician membership organizations, have been trying to come up with the answer of how to build a site by which physicians can feel "safe" to discuss these type of issues.
My professional organization, the American Academy of Family Physicians, announced on their Facebook page yesterday that they are introducing a platform on their website that is "safe" and "secure" to encourage family physician members increased communication.
The name of this service is "AAFP Connection," and I give a brief review of this service in the video above. Visually, the interface is nice. There is no doubt that one of the things that they wanted to do is to make the user interface fairly easy to navigate.
AAFP Connection has the equivalent of twitter/facebook updates and the ability to store photos. Something interesting is the ability to upload documents and share these as well. I wonder how much this feature will be utilized by users.
Of course, the big question is this: Will AAFP members use this platform? My initial gut feeling is no. I have been a member of the AAFP for a number of years now, and the in the "communication generation" before this one, there was promotion of the use of e-mail listservs. What happened there was it was popular for a number of months, and then people didn't utilize as much. For me, there wasn't too much real dialogue, and a lot of people used it for their own self-promotion - thereby giving it a "spam" like feel.
The failure of AAFP Connection is not going to be because of the AAFP. It's just that for those who use twitter and facebook, how can a busy physician check another social network? For those who are not even on social media, trying to explain the concept of a social network will be difficult. The good part is that their huge AAFP Committee Cluster meetings will take place at the end of this month. Maybe some good brainstorming can take place to see how to effectively roll this product out....
EMR Not In Health Care Repeal
In his first day on the job, newly sworn in Ohio Attorney General (and former US Senator from Ohio) Mike Dewine stated his intent to join the lawsuit filed by other states with regard to last year's health care overhaul legislation. He is fulfilling a campaign promise that is outlined in the video above. The core of the lawsuit states that the federal government does not have the authority to require Americans to purchase health insurance.
Last year's health care debate was so confusing, I don't know if anyone really knows what is all in there. But in some discussions recently with physicians, they are encouraging the health care repeal legislation to go through "so we can get rid of all this nonsense electronic medical records." Now, I don't entirely disagree with this statement.
However, from what I understand, the electronic medical records legislation passed the House days following the president's inauguration in January 2009 and was signed into law a month later. This was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 and it's HiTech Act.
So, correct me if I'm wrong. But, the path toward an electronic health record is still there and not going to be a part of this health care repeal legislation. Now, I don't disagree with EMR implementation. But, in taking steps to try to integrate them into practice, it has been difficult, and I think the time lines that have been set out by ARRA are too aggressive and will lead to mistakes that will be blamed on the health care system (meaning I'll be blamed for it), and not blamed on this bad piece of legislation.
Physician Author: Terrorism Short Story
One of the things that I have always wanted to do is to highlight docs doing interesting stuff away from the job. Recently, I was in our local emergency room (the people "in the biz" and the cool kids call it the emergency department), talking to one of the docs. He is a veteran of the war in Iraq and wrote a short story with an interesting premise.
It's pretty obvious that the United States is pretty dependent on energy like electricity. What would happen if terrorists attacked the energy grid of this country? What would be the impact of such an action? How easy would it be to do? Well, this doc has written a fictional story about how possibly this could be done.
The story is entitled "1111" which means the date of January 1, 2011. The story begins on the day before. It's definitely an interesting read (read below or click here). In the video above, there is an interview with the doc on our local terrestrial radio station. It's really interesting listening him tell the "story behind the story." This story will make you think. Enjoy!
From Columbine to Virginia Tech to Tucson
The tragic events in Tucson, Arizona over the weekend has sparked another debate involving gun control, mental illness, and "how can this be allowed to happen again?" The latest information from over the weekend states that they believe that it is a lone gunman who killed 6 people and wounded 14 others during a meet-and-greet session with the local US congresswoman.
The name of the suspect in custody is Jared Lee Loughner. A Cnn.com article called "Massacre suspect 'mentally disturbed,' former teacher says" gives a profile of this person:
In a statement issued Saturday night, Pima Community College said Loughner was suspended after a series of run-ins with campus police between February and September, capped by the discovery of a YouTube video in which he accused the college of operating unconstitutionally. Loughner quit school after the suspension, the college said -- and it warned him that to return, he had to present a doctor's note stating that his presence would not be "a danger to himself or others."Man, this sounds really familiar, doesn't it? All too familiar. In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings back in 2007 (has it already been almost four years since that happened?), I wrote a series of posts outlining my opinion about mental illness, gun control, and the lack of society's responsibility to finally fix the problem.
I encourage you to read them, including "Mental Health Care Delivery in US," "Depression = Murderer?" and "Privacy Laws Need Scrutinized." I'll end this post with some chilling statements from 2007 from a blog post entitled, "Can The Cycle Be Broken." These same words can be applied to the Tucson tragedy over the weekend. They are as true now as they were then...
Of course, people are outraged by this situation. I'm outraged by what happened. But, I've seen this too many times. We are shocked by what happened, we mourn the victims, we blame whomever we need to blame for what happened, then we go back to our apathy until the next tragedy happens. Well, I'm sick and tired of this useless cycle. Instead of outrage turning into apathy, let's turn outrage into action. And, I'm not talking about knee-jerk reactions...Um, uh, wait a minute. As I think about things now, I'm thinking about what realistically can happen? Would it mean a radical change in American culture? A culture that celebrates violence? A culture that makes celebrities out of people like Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, and Cho Seung-Hui. Unfortunately, this is a culture that shirks at the idea of accountability. A culture that believes that it's someone else's job to fix the problem. A country and culture that feels no personal investment to fix its own problems. Am I wrong here? Please tell me I'm wrong...