The Twitter conversation happening at medical meetings used to be called the backchannel. Chatter in those spaces was once a trivial thing. I don't hear the term so much at big meetings. It’s moving closer to the front. And for good reason. When you go to ASCO how can you argue that Twitter is anything less important that the hallway dialog? Our digital and IRL ... Continue Reading about Backchannel – The Vanishing Conversation at Meetings
Publishing Before the Idea is Done
One of the benefits of new media is the ability to share ideas before they’re fully baked. Nobody decides if my ideas are worthy of publication. It used to be that ideas weren’t released until they were done. Traditional publishing was about the finished product. Publication was a hard stop. And for generations, what was released into the world was limited by ... Continue Reading about Publishing Before the Idea is Done
Medical Knowledge at 2x Speed
I had coffee with a medical student this week. A former Rice University student and alumnus of the Medical Futures Lab, we caught up to recap his first year of medical school. Among other things we talked about learning. And like most medical students, his process had come to involve video at 2-3x speed. What was more interesting is how it had come to influence his ... Continue Reading about Medical Knowledge at 2x Speed
Pokemon Go and Medical Mindfulness
Hospital workers are caught up in the Pokemon Go craze and it's begun to raise concerns. Between rooming patients it seems there's just enough time to snag a Vaporeon. Some health care facilities have shut it down amidst concerns that selfies and snapshots risk the transmission of PHI. While Pokemon Go raises new challenges around privacy, the greater challenge ... Continue Reading about Pokemon Go and Medical Mindfulness
When Surgeons Learn from YouTube
A study in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery this month reports that 64% of plastic surgeons describe having used online videos to learn new procedures. What's remarkable isn’t the 64%, but the fact that the study drew so much attention. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. The Internet, after all, is typically seen as a sewer of misinformation. Good medical information ... Continue Reading about When Surgeons Learn from YouTube
When Data Meets Doctors
This week while serving on the GI consult service at Texas Children's Hospital I was asked to evaluate a child in the Pediatric Heart Failure ICU. When I walked into the patient's room, I found this: A massive wall-mounted touch screen at the foot of the bed with all of the patient's critical data beautifully displayed. As the cardiac intensivists round, all of the ... Continue Reading about When Data Meets Doctors