• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

33 Charts

  • About
    • What is 33 Charts?
    • Bryan Vartabedian MD
  • Blog
  • 33mail
  • Foci
    • Social/Public Media
    • Physicians
    • Patients
    • Hospitals
    • Information
    • Process/Flow
    • Technology
    • Digital culture
    • Future Medicine
  • The Public Physician
Uncategorized

Blitter: Will Vertical Social Search Work?

August 13, 2011 By Bryan Vartabedian · Reading Time: < 1 minutes

Does the searching public care what doctors mention in their social encounters?  Blitter does.  Blitter is a hyper-vertical search engine that pulls clinical content based on its social mention by physicians.

“The idea behind Blitter is that it only includes content that an independent clinician has deemed interesting/newsworthy enough to comment about. Most clinical search tools grab all the content from a particular publisher – irrespective of the clinical usefulness of the output. So, we see Blitter as being a bottom up approach to content identification – possibly making it more useful.”

I’m skeptical at this point.

I wonder if there are enough doctors in public to really offer a selection of content.  If you search ‘reflux’, for example, and see what pediatricians are saying you get the very restricted view of only one doctor. A patient searching crohn’s disease finds 11 mentions. Clicking through the results I’m not sure that these references represent the best information to help a patient begin to navigate their disease.  Judge for yourself.

What doctors say in public spaces and why they say it is complicated business. My experience has been that personal and ‘soft professional’ dialog exceeds the sharing and curation of hard clinical information. And the mention of a disease with an associated link says nothing of its reliability as a source. In fact, some of us mention sources specifically in reference to their poor quality or unreliability. Perhaps the Blitter algorithm accounts for this.

As Twitter slowly slips into its long-tail phase and new platforms evolve, search engines such as Blitter will need to pursue the most active areas of clinical physician dialog in order to remain relevant.

The concept is nonetheless interesting.

H/T to  Howard Luks (via Google+, ironically)

Related Articles

  • Doctors and Social Media: Failure is Inevitable
  • Defining Social Standards for Doctors
  • Why Content Creation is Important for Doctors

Related Articles

  • Doctors and Social Media: Failure is Inevitable
  • Defining Social Standards for Doctors
  • Why Content Creation is Important for Doctors

Primary Sidebar

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
voices on technology & medicine.
Learn More

Popular Articles

  • The Fate of Fired Cleveland Clinic Resident Lara Kollab
  • Cures Act Final Rule – How It Will Change Medicine
  • 12 Things About Doximity You Probably Didn’t Know
  • Should Physicians Give Their Cell Phone Number to Patients?
  • Doximity Dialer Video – Telemedicine’s Latest Power Player

Sign up for 33mail newsletter

Featured Articles

The Case for New Physician Literacies in the Digital Age

Doctors and social media: Damned if you engage, damned if you don’t

Health Care and the Visibility-Value Continuum

Context Collapse and the Public Physician

Reactive and Creative Spaces

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Footer

What is 33 Charts?

With a mashup of curated and original content that crosses the spaces of digital health, media, communication, technology, patient experience, digital culture, and the humanities, 33 charts offers unique insight and analysis on the changing face of medicine.

Founded in 2009 as a center of community and thought leadership for the issues doctors face in a digital world, 33 charts was included in the National Library of Medicine permanent web archive in 2014.
Learn More

Foci

  • Digital culture
  • Digital Health
  • EHR/Health IT
  • Future Medicine
  • Hospitals
  • Information
  • Patients
  • Physicians
  • Process/Flow
  • Quality
  • Social/Public Media
  • Technology

Copyright © 2023 · 33 Charts · Privacy Policy