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33 charts Greatest Hits of 2018

December 20, 2018 By Bryan Vartabedian · Reading Time: 4 minutes

greatest hits 2018Before we get started with the 33 charts Greatest Hits of 2018, a few quickie things that you may or may not have noticed.

The evolution of 33 charts

It’s been a great year on the site. More people are reading. Those finding us on Google more than doubled in 2018. The newsletter continues to grow as I find my voice there.

New site design. This was the first full year with my new site design which I love. People love the clean look and the mobile responsiveness (over half of my readers are on a phone or tablet). While I’ve restricted writing on the site to my blog, I have plans to create more ‘fixed,’ non-blog content pages this year. So stay tuned.

Tags. I have spent hours consolidating and reshaping my tag structure on the site. So hopefully if you find a post that you like, the tags at the bottom will bring you to related material. All of the tags are hand-curated and exist only to help you navigate. I hope you use them. As a reminder, the site ‘Foci’ that you see up on the right menu bar are very broad categories that will help narrow down 33 posts within big picture categories. The tags are much more granular. This is still a work-in-progress.

Hosting. In November I moved 33c to a cloud-based server which has lead to crazy fast page load times. Refresh a page with solid internet connection and you almost can’t perceive how quickly the page comes up. I hope this is helpful to you as a reader.

Podcast. Check out my podcast The Exam Room. While I’m still refining my audience and angle, I discovered that I love having conversations with folks. You can wish me Merry Christmas by hitting subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. I have some great guests lined up for 2019.

Greatest hits

Here are some of posts that had traction this year. I’ve added a little commentary about why they carried or how they changed my thinking. In the interest of space and bandwidth, I’ve limited this to 10 posts.

Let’s roll the clip…

Should Physicians Give Their Cell Number to Patients?

This was one of the most trafficked posts of the year. I think it works because it’s painfully practical and confronts the why 24/7 access to a doctor is not good patient care despite how it may appear.

Doctors and the Rise of Authority Creep

This post touched on the emerging tension between non-institutional physicians and rising numbers of academics on Twitter. 2018 clearly saw the early rumblings of a divide between the learned men/women and the common Twitter doctor. The Twitter filibuster was a clear indicator of this tension. This kind of divide indicates that we’ve hit critical social mass and more doctors are out there talking. Was my call for Twitter’s demise premature? I don’t think so, but we’ll see.

Tell me what you understand: My First Question for Hospitalized Patients

A post about one question that I ask new inpatient consults. Beyond getting a lot of eyeballs, it began some serious thinking about the granular aspects of what I do as a physician. I noticed that I had written posts in the past that capture the art of what I do. More importantly, I started noticing that some of the things that I’ve learned over 20 years with patients may have value if captured and written. There are others under the tag Doctoring 101 if you are interested. I’m going to try to add to this tag collection in 2019.

The Twitter Education of Dr Milton Packer

More evidence that the conversation is moving online: Key opinion leaders get angry about it. Heart failure kingpin took to the mainstream media to criticize Twitter. So I gently helped him understand the role that Twitter may play in medicine. What I love about this post is that for the foreseeable future it will haunt Dr. Packer. Google his name and you’ll find the 33c post way at the top!

Within Normal Limits

A phrase normally used in the paper chart, it’s now gone the way of the horse and buggy. What it meant and what we’ve lost with its passing. I just love making these kinds of connections – its this odd sensemaking that makes me go to my iPad to write.

Voalte Phones and the Fantasy of Real-Time Physician Communication

More applications are beginning to promise immediate access to doctors. This post (which uses the Voalte phone system as an example) illustrates why immediate access may not always work. Real-time has its limitations when you are dealing with humans.

Why Doctors Would Hate the Best EHR in the World

Smashing the going narrative that the EHR is destroying medicine as we know it, this post was not well-liked by physicians. I think it’s important because it shows how even end users we can’t always understand our own problems.

Doctors and the Media: Why Can’t Physicians See Their Role?

This one is still trending on the site. It confronts the truth that doctors don’t see any role in public visibility. While I could write all day on this, this brief post tweaked a nerve among those like-minded folks who think a public role of MDs is key. Makes me think that I need to write more for the MSM on this one.

The Human Nature of Clinic Schedules

One explanation for the commonly misunderstood phenomenon of clinic scheduling. Read this and you’ll understand how even the best AI would have a hard time understanding the messy scheduling of humans.

Keep Mama Happy

Here I took on the common practice of practicing poor medicine in order to just make people happy. I began referring colleagues to this post as a means of helping them understand my thinking. I don’t think I do that enough. As it turns out it’s really valuable and I plan to do more of that practical sharing in 2019.

If you’re snowed in somewhere and are looking for more, you can check out the Greatest Hits from 2017.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. The site only works when ideas are seen and shared. I look forward to shaping more ideas for you in 2019!


Photo by Fancycrave on Unsplash

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Bryan Vartabedian, MD

Bryan Vartabedian, MD
Bryan Vartabedian is the Chief Pediatrics Officer at Texas Children’s Hospital North Austin and one of health care’s influential
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