Archive for March, 2007
March 29, 2007 at 3:46 pm · Filed under Minds, Brains, & inbetween
New issue (episode, showing, sequestering, parade?) of Encephalon is out hosted this time on Peripersonal Space: Encephalon 19: Emotion and Reason Match Postponed Due to Flares on the Pitch, Hooliganism!
Didn’t have time to read all the articles, but I recommend A neural substrate for moral decisions.
Hopefully I’ll have time to get back to real reading and posting soon. Been too busy with work, school, side projects and a short but obnoxious bout with a norovirus.
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March 22, 2007 at 8:23 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood
Lots of things on my plate right now. So I figured I’d go on the hunt again for a good todo/productivity web app. I’d love to just use the awesome omnioutliner, but living on two laptops one mac the other pc makes this rather impossible.
There are a lot of solutions, most using some form of the GTD approach. Many of them are overcomplicated or nonintuitive (like most of the tiddlywiki based solutions). Call me silly, but I think entering items into your to do list should take less effort than the task itself. I’m not going to review all the ones I tried out cause it’s a waste of time. If you want you can do your own research by reviewing all my productivity tagged del.icio.us links or you can review Lifehacker’s excellent list.
The one I finally settled on is Todoist because it’s clean and simple with nested todo hierarchy functionality, and it makes good use of keyboard shortcuts. I’d say more about it but that would be hypocritical since I’m talking about efficient use of time.
Speaking of clean and simple but in a dumb way, today I joined up on Twitter as Catcubed. It’s like nano-bloging/IMing about nothing but you’re saying it to no one and everyone at the same time. If you combine it with IMified your setup to easily shout out your boring life to the world in two seconds flat. And for you wordpress geeks there are a couple good plugins (twitter tools, twitter updater).
As a voyour, Twitter is the shortest way to waste the most amount of time in the world—especially if you stare dumbly at the twitter/googlemaps mashup twittervision. Check it out! You to can read that pdimeglio“Skipeed class today, feeling better. Now watching daily show” or that fast640kdsl is “Going to bed.” Worldwide blipverts from peoples boring lives in realtime!
p.s. Twitter’s servers are getting smacked hard at the moment due to it’s popularity, so their page loads may be a bit slow.
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March 21, 2007 at 2:47 pm · Filed under Online Health Care + Fetal & Pediatric Medicine + Blogging about blogging
Patient blogs are a way for patients to communicate to their friends and family and journaling can help them get through what may be a difficult experience. It can also benefit the hospital by offering self-generating patient stories that potential new patients can be directed towards.
From the Fetal Treatment Center’s website statistics, I know that we already have fetal treatment patients that blog about their experiences using various free blogging resources like blogger (I know because we get links from their blogs).
Caring Bridge - pros and cons
At the NACHRI conference, I talked with some people from Caring Bridge, which is a non-profit that offers blogging services for patients. Caring Bridge is a good service, but they have one fatal flaw: all the patient’s pages are automatically locked private. They can choose to give friends and family a password to see their posts, but they can’t choose to make any of their posts public.
Personally, I’d rather see the service offer the possibility for patients to choose make some of their story public. Without this feature, there is nothing for potential patients to read. Caring Bridge has a sponsorship package so that hospitals can pay to put their logo on their patient sites, but this is useless from a marketing perspective if the pages are all locked private. Supposedly, public post functionality is on the table, but it won’t be ready this year. Frankly, the ability to set a post to private or public is a common feature to most blogging services, so it really makes no sense for me to encourage patients to use Caring Bridge—as much as I’d like to support a non-profit like them.
The problems with hosting our own
I’d like to have a nice single solution to direct patients towards. We could host our own but that would require time and effort. Also, having it hosted here creates a rather strange legal situation. As the patient tells their story, they are also potentially letting out patient data. On any other blogging site this is fine, but if it is under our banner it creates a weird legal gray area in regards to HIPAA Compliance.
I will have to do some additional research to see if what the best solution is: a single interconnected solution that is easy for patients would be ideal. If anyone out there has any ideas let me know.
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March 21, 2007 at 2:11 pm · Filed under Online Health Care + Fetal & Pediatric Medicine + Blogging about blogging
After hearing the session on blogging at the NACHRI conference, I did some research into pediatric blogging. I found that there aren’t nearly the number of pediatric bloggers as there are neuroscience bloggers, but there are still some interesting sites out there:
Blogs targeted at patients
Blogs targeted at pediatricians or anyone who will listen
- Pediatric Grand Rounds - the archive of past editions of the Pediatric Grand Rounds, a bi-weekly collection of the best posts pertaining to the health of children.
- Blog, MD - a blog written by a third year fellow in a combined pediatric hematology/oncology and pediatric neuro-oncology program in the Northeast.
- Consider the Evidence: Med/Peds Journal Roundup - a blog written by a 5th year medical student (aka intern) about recent interesting medical journal articles
It’s a fascinating assortment of blogs, and there are more out there. PediaCast/PediaScribe seems like it is definitely a great resource for parents. I like Dr Raley’s personal touch and how he uses it to reach out directly to the patients he serves. For doctors, the Pediatric Grand Rounds seems like the best resource for recent news and research related to pediatric care.
It would be an interesting endeavor to have a blog written by a member of our staff at the Fetal Treatment Center or the Bay Area Pediatric Surgeons. However, that requires a measure of focus and time in their already busy schedules, so I don’t know how realistic that is. As a result, my main interest here at UCSF is working to facilitate patient blogging. I have a lot of thoughts surrounding that topic, which I will leave for my next post.
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March 21, 2007 at 2:04 pm · Filed under Online Health Care + Fetal & Pediatric Medicine + Blogging about blogging
As a medium, blogging lays somewhere between a newspaper article and Hamlet’s egocentric soliloquy. Over the past year or two, the wild interwebtube has become overrun blogs like some sort of bunny warren with burrows reaching to infinity. The variety of topics range from politics to cute puppys & kittens to science to “oh my gawd, you wouldn’t believe who I saw sally holding hands with!”
With the popular explosion of blogging, it’s not surprising that corporations and institutions have began to take interest in the phenomenon. Everyone wants to get on the bandwagon, but few know how to use this new medium, which is why most corporate blogs are just thinly disguised press releases.
Akron Children’s Foray Into Blogging
The medical industry has only just begun to experiment with blogging. At the NACHRI Conference, the Akron Children’s Hospital presented their two blogging experiments. Their first foray into blogging followed Ellen Kempf, M.D., director of the Oak Adoptive Health Center, on her educational journey to a Chinese orphanage. Their second blogging project followed 11 year old Meghan Frantz as she traveled to Washington, D.C. to talk with members of Congress about the challenges imposed on her younger brother Zack because he has cerebral palsy.
These projects were crafted to gain media attention for Akron Children’s and support political health advocacy efforts. Meghan’s blog was the most interesting, as it was a younger blogger and it was so targeted. It wasn’t an easy project: while Meghan wrote all the content she needed a lot of hand-holding for uploading the content and photos; also, the family required a lot of help traveling with Zack.
Blogging doesn’t always have to require so much extra support. In fact, the medium usually prides itself for being something anyone can do with a minimum of fuss. I still think their approach was good, but I was curious as to what else was out there. I did some research into other examples of pediatric blogging which I will detail in my next post.
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March 21, 2007 at 12:24 pm · Filed under Online Health Care
For those of you who are interested, I’ve posted all of our presentation materials for “Servicing Patients Online: Educational Multimedia and Online Patient Evaluations” to a NACHRI page our website.
If you have any questions please feel free to contact me.
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