• Health Check: How Trusted Is Your Corporate Blog? – Nice discussion of what makes an organizational blog great. Being genuine and transparent is very helpful.

• Blog growth slows; more bloggers are bringing home the bacon – Latest on the growth of the blogosphere, it's slowing. That’s just blogs though, social media penetration is picking up.

• Technorati: State of the Blogosphere 2008 – Annual State of the Blogosphere Report From Technorati. It looks like they are changing the measurement of blog growth (or stopping to measure it), but there are less daily postings now than there were in 2007.

• We Love DC » Blog Archive » Metro Says No to Bloggers – "It only looks worse when you turn people away." A lesson from one of our nation's best public transit systems about the impact of making distinctions that don't make sense to the public about what you will share. Lots of analogies in health care (of course)

Health Affairs Blog: Health IT Initiatives: Not Magical, Just Practical

Thoughtful quasi-blogpost* from Mark Leavitt, MD, who is also the Chair of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT). In the post, Mark very nicely acknolwedges the number of dedicated volunteers in the CCHIT process – I know from experience that this group is working hard and is very talented (way more than I am).

*the quasi part is that I notice that the Health Affairs blog appears (to me anyway) as more of a Web 1.0 publication with comments, than a blog in the spirit of blogs. It might be nice to tweak the HTML title tags a bit for easier embedding into other blogs, and maybe shorter, more personal posts, in the spirit of blogging. I think Health Affairs has been on the leading edge to adopt the blog format in the first place to be sure, now perhaps they could go a little farther to support interaction with the people in health policy in a more behind the curtain way…

• Contrasting Personal vs. Professional Uses of Social Media: The Case of Healthcare Blogging | Trusted.MD Network – Assertion that physician bloggers didn't like the JGIM study "one bit." I liked it – it's informative of a new medium that will ultimately help patients be involved and a health system to be accountable. That's the goal.

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….

May 10th through May 13th:

• Be Well Mobile, Patient Engagement Software that works – cell phone platform for disease management
• Medical Advances—Through Your iPhone? – Portable applications in health care that the iPhone could enable.
• Scientific Misconduct Blog: LSD and the corruption of medicine (Part III): Naming names – A chilling account of experimentation on US citizens without consent
• Texting may help teens remember meds – CNN.com – Cell phones as a tool in medication adherence.
• The Open Secret of Success: Financial Page: The New Yorker – One of the best summaries of what Toyota does well that I've seen.
• ITIF: Explaining International Broadband Leadership – Summary of broadband access in the US and other countries
• Ruthsarian Layouts – Some helpful CSS layouts for blog design

I am in Oakland, California, today, participating in an discussion sponsored by Kaiser Permanente about Web 2.0 applications in health care. As part of the discussion I presented my story as a physician who wrote a blog internally for our medical group, and since October, 2007, on the public Internet (here).

From 2005-2007 I managed an internal blog that ended up having 748 posts total, so for 2 years, I posted something almost every business day, along with other physician informaticists on my team with me. That’s quite a commitment. This blog has 298 posts on it since October, 2007. I actually never thought I’d keep a blog, but I’m (a) glad I’m doing it and (b) glad I have a story to share about it as a Health Information Technology leader. I want people to know how I am serving them.

I also got to moderate/interact with two industry experts in the field, Tim Collins, SVP of Experiential Marketing for Wells Fargo Bank, and Lee Aase, Manager for Syndication and Social Media for the Mayo Clinic. It’s an honor to meet other industry leaders who are embracing this technology, and they are embracing it. I know this is the future (or the present…)

Given my experience, the idea of patients bringing their user generated content into the physician patient relationship really interests me. Could an electronic health record of the future subscribe to specially tagged RSS feeds from our patients? I don’t think physicians can or would be following 2,000 lives worth of lifestreams. However, if there’s something in a patient’s life that they want us to know about and can get it to us without double entry, I think that information would change the content of our relationship a lot. And in a good way.

• Safari 3.1 includes hidden one-window preference – This is the holy grail of Safari as the browser of choice. That plus compatibility with blog authoring tools.
• Mac BU promises bibliography improvements to Office 2008 – Interesting discussion somewhat unrelated to the article’s title about the state of bibliographic software. I would look forward to further refinements of Zotero, and maybe a server version.
• QLPlugins – Quick Look Plugins – Great efficiency improver of one of my favorite Leopard features.
• Aetna Smartsource Demo – Aetna’s latest information tailoring system for patients. Getting closer to supporting the patient-provider relationship?
• Apple – Support – Discussions – Unresponsive Keyboard and Trackpad … – This is a real issue for MacBookPro owners – prepare yourself just in case this happens to you.
• A new snapshot of health consumerism from EBRI and The Commonwealth Fund – Nice overview from Jane Sarsohn-Kahn
• Roblog » Batch Categories – Another category management plugin, for Wordpress 2.3 and 2.5
• uwMike » WP-Cats – More preparation to migration to WP 2.5
• Disk Inventory X – Map your hard drive to avoid wasting space
• How to Fly Without ID and Skip Lines | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss – Just in case this happens to you, here is how you can fly and recover.