This Scientific American post on communications and storytelling is worth a peek. More than ever, how we translate the technical developments in medicine and healthcare impacts the independent decisions made by patients. The 23andMe dialog has shown that individuals believe they can educate themselves about the subtleties of personal genomic analysis. But ... Continue Reading about Communications: A New Job for Physicians
Translation
One of most important words in medicine may be translation. Not language translation but the digital translation of knowledge. Translation is about taking what’s in our head and converting it to something that’s retrievable. As physicians we have amazing mindshare. Our knowledge and wisdom should be converted into media that can be consumed. This ability to ... Continue Reading about Translation
Medical Foo
Last year I was fortunate enough to be at Health Foo, an intimate powwow of some amazing folks (Foo stands for friends of O'Reilly). Structured as an unconference on the campus of the Microsoft Research Center in Cambridge, health foo brings together some of health care's most progressive thinkers for a weekend of collaborative thinking. The meeting was generously ... Continue Reading about Medical Foo
Cyberutopian Exhibitionism
Cardiac defibrillators the size of a grain of salt. Robotic, flying bedpans. The extinction of the doctor. Spend some time on Twitter and you may see the future. Because there's an arms race to 'break' the next seemingly implausible health innovation. And it all seems bigger since the social web draws the technologically savvy who are prone toward technological ... Continue Reading about Cyberutopian Exhibitionism
Individual Responsibility in Medicine
We're entering an age of individual responsibility in medicine. It used to be that our role as physician was well-defined. But medicine and the context of care are changing fast. As physicians... We need to teach ourselves. Technology and our defined roles are changing faster than med school curricula and CME can keep up. No one will do this for us. We need ... Continue Reading about Individual Responsibility in Medicine
Doctors on the Record
During a clinical encounter recently the mother I was visiting with reached down to the phone sitting on her chair and discreetly hit a red record button. Increasingly, parents are interested in recording their encounters with me. Sometimes one parent can’t be present for a visit. Perhaps the mother of an inconsolable 6-week-old wants to remember what her ... Continue Reading about Doctors on the Record