Hello Health Launch Party 7.31.08 - a set on Flickr

Thanks to Jen McCabe Gorman for sharing. The party looks like a lot of fun, and let us hope it helps patients and their families and communities become more involved and engaged in their health. Congrats to Jay & Myca.

We recently facilitated an exercise involving a patient, a clinical expert, and interested stakeholders at the California Healthcare Foundation, to look at the way a chronic condition (in this case, high blood pressure) is managed.

Over the next several days on this blog, I will step through our patient’s real story, along with clinical and public health commentary.

I created this cartoon from the exercise, suitable for downloading and discussion (
PDF version can be downloaded using this link or click on the image directly to see a larger version):

The cartoon is based on this output of our exercise which began with our patient’s story, clinical commentary, and the creative use of paper:

Feel free to answer the question in the title of the post at any point.

I will explain the meaning of the symbols and the meaning as we go along.

By the way, the exercise resulted in this future state, which I’ll go over on the last day:

Tomorrow: Step 1 - Initial Discovery

Content of Weblogs Written by Health Professionals. [J Gen Intern Med. 2008] - PubMed Result

This is a timely analysis of the content of blogs written by health professionals, by a fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars program. It is great to see that the RWJ Foundation (indirectly) would be studying the ways that tomorrow’s physicians will communicate. The article indicates that violations of patient privacy are rare, and suggests training of health professionals in this realm.

I agree with both, because health professionals should learn how to blog well, which really means they would learn to communicate well.

This would also mean, by the way, that I disagree with the creation of this headline about the study: Health Care Provider Blogs Do Not Maintain Anonymity, Study Says. My takeaway from this is that there is still a tendency to paint blogs in the negative within the health care press. That will change.

It is also not lost on me that the author has chosen a gmail address to be contacted, maybe blog and Twitter URL’s will follow in the world of PubMed….

The Health Blogosphere: What It Means for Policy Debates and Journalism - Kaisernetwork.org

I think the reason that Mike Leavitt is a good blogger (if people agree) is that he’s interested in communicating directly with his constituents, e.g. I don’t think blogging makes anyone a good communicator, it’s the other way around.