I’ve been far too busy the last six months or so and haven’t hauled out the 40D much. I did take it on the Guadalupe Peak climb but I wasn’t really focusing on photography during all that. The holiday break has given me some time to fix some minor hardwear problems and get some shooting in.
I’m shifting up my style a bit on the post-processing side of things. You’ll probably see even more variation in style over the next few days as I try some new techniques. You can monitor the results here.
The change-resistant keep repeating that phrase to themselves like a mantra but docs seem to be holding their own with the “social media guru” types in the increasingly post-geekdominant twitterverse.
I observed one of the more interesting examples of this adoption a couple of weeks ago. My friend and co-worker Jennifer Texada wrote about it on her blog. I’m the unnamed colleague mentioned in her post:
A colleague here at the hospital told me about this one. What is happening here is a Doctor in South Africa is at bedside asking a Doctor in India for real time assistance with a diagnosis. From other correspondence he has with this doctor in India, it is clear that he knows him personally and/or professionally, so he is a trusted source from the requestor’s position.
From the message it sounds like he was probably bedside, maybe in a rural area. If you follow the stream it ends there. I expect that if the doctor replied it was probably in the form of a direct message. Which is a private message between 2 twitter users.
My college said that “if this was not a first, it was among the first time that he has seen this happen.” Especially in places where you might not have access to experts. The personal relationships you develop could extend all the way to the bedside, no matter where the bedside is.
Even more interesting, in some respects, is the Twitter exchange between Baltimore doctor Gary Kerkvliet, Comcast, and Verizon documented by Julio Ojeda-Zapata:
Stories of one company or another coming to the aid of its customers via Twitter are now legion. Consumer-facing firms like Comcast have made it a priority to scan the twitterverse for unhappy customers and to make them happy.
What you will find less often on Twitter are stories of one customer being simultaneously wooed by multiple companies eager for that person’s brand loyalty.
That’s just what happened to Baltimore doctor Gary Kerkvliet, who found himself being courted by Comcast and Verizon — via tweets and direct messages — for his home-Internet business.
Kerkvliet would ultimately become a champion of both companies — despite having initially horrific problems with one and ending up with the other.
Dr. Kevin Pho at KevinMD also points to the increasing use of Twitter at medical conferences:
More physicians are using the microblog service Twitter. This past weekend, two medical conferences were updated by the minute from plugged in doctors.
Clinical Cases and Images’ Ves Dimov and emergency resident Graham Walker brought us the NEJM’s Horizons Conference, where they provided their input and expertise to influence the NEJM in their Web 2.0 initiatives.
Rural hospitalist Theresa Chan was also prolific in updating the Management of the Hospitalized Patient conference in San Francisco, sharing valuable tips from the lectures.
Someone obviously forgot to tell Dr. Kevin Pho that physicians will never blog either.
Update:
How could I forget the 28,000+ Twitter updates from my friend Dr. Cameron Kaiser?
I’m currently working my way through a several month stint in our Clinical Safety & Effectiveness program and it’s managing to fill up the unfortunately few time slots that I can devote to extended reading. At the start of the course in November our process improvement team was nice enough to send me a well-needed backpack along with the following:
Good enough? Standards and Measurement in Continuous Quality Improvement
Brent C. James, M.D., M.Stat.
The Quality Toolbox
Nancy R. Tague
Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results
Michael E. Porter and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg
Leading Change
John P. Kotter
Measuring Quality Improvement in Healthcare: A Guide to Statistical Process Control Application
Raymond G. Carey, Ph.D. and Robert C. Lloyd, Ph.D.
Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century
Institute of Medicine
Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos
Donald J. Wheeler
There’s more too. Quite a bit more than I care to list actually. I’ll have more to say about these books as I make my way through them.
I was quite surprised that the #healthcare Twitter group had not been promoted yet (perhaps I shouldn’t have been) but I took care of that a few days ago and started Tweeting away with the @PhysRelations account that I manage. The interest was certainly there however, and the group is blowing up.
Many Twitter groups and hashtags fail to gain momentum but when they do the rush of activity, the hyper-networking, can be really productive. We’re just getting started with #healthcare but I think it has significant growth and opportunity ahead of it. Join the group, and the conversation, here.
Update:
I created #EMR (Electronic Medical Records) and #HIT (Health Information Technology) groups as well. Contact me at @johnwlittle or @physrelations if you create a new healthcare related group.
