• 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
Physicians

How Relevant are Physician Meetings?

December 11, 2010 By Bryan Vartabedian · Reading Time: 2 minutes

This post from John Mandrola got me thinking about physician meetings. He tells about his experience at weekly rounds were he endured a presentation on health reform.  But John had heard it before.  It had been played out in the medical infosphere.

His story illustrates how physician-physician communication sits at the cusp of two generations.  There’s the last generation that elects to once a week sit on a couch among their hyperlocal posse and hear one select piece of information through a crackly PA system.  Then there’s the generation that wants to interact globally in real time with focused, self-selected information relevant to its needs.

What Mandrola describes will go the way of the hula hoop.  I suspect that people driving across town to sit in a room to receive information will evolve to include only those who refuse to adopt more efficient ways of interaction.  And no, IRL interaction is not going away and I’m not suggesting that there isn’t unique value to face-to-face engagement.  It’s just that these congregations will happen with real intent and real purpose.  Every time I’m forced to sit in a room like John describes there’s no ‘meeting’ anyway, just lemming-like people locked in a dark room forced to stare at a screen with no option to click away.

The term ‘medical meeting’ will evolve to have more historical meaning.  It suggests that the way doctors relate is episodic and isolated.  We come, then we go away.  I’m in, I’m out.  Now we’re engaging, now we’re not.  Until we ‘meet’ again.

But admittedly meeting is a cute term.

John Mandrola didn’t need to sit in the glare of a projector to learn about health reform.  He’s part of a self-built network having daily dialog that started long before his grand rounds and continues long after it convened.

The virtual spaces for doctors aren’t full built out at this point but the foundations are all around us.  As time passes and human networks evolve the current concept physician meetings will become obsolete.

Image via brsev

Related Articles

  • How Medical Societies Can Stay Relevant
  • Sermo's 100,000 Doctors
  • Repurposing Physician Knowledge

Tagged With: Communication, Medical meetings

Related Articles

  • How Medical Societies Can Stay Relevant
  • Sermo's 100,000 Doctors
  • Repurposing Physician Knowledge

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

Doctors and the Endemic Culture of Permission

100,000 Connected Lemmings

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

Health Care and the Visibility-Value Continuum

Will the Future Need Doctors?

  • 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