May 5th, 2011 by Dr. Val Jones in Announcements
Tags: Alain Ochoa Torres, Cinco De Mayo, Collaboration, Content Partner, Diario Medico, International, Medical Blogger, Spain, Twitterview
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I am so pleased to announce a new content partnership between Better Health and Diario Médico (DM), Spain’s leading news outlet for physicians. We will now be featuring regular content from the DM bloggers, translated for our readers from Spanish to English. The medical blogging community is a global family, and we proudly embrace our Spanish innovators overseas.
I first met the DM team two years ago on Twitter. Their lead social media guru, Alain Ochoa-Torres (@alainochoa), was the first to reach out to me – eager to learn about social media trends in the United States. We arranged to do a live “Twitterview” to talk about how U.S. physicians are engaging in social media, especially blogging. That Twitterview (screen shot shown to the left) was translated into Spanish and became the beginning of an exciting international collaboration.
In the future, Better Health hopes to find ways to make Spanish health content available to our readers… and with DM’s help I’m sure that we will expand our understanding of global health, while making friends with our new Spanish blogging colleagues!
Please join me in welcoming our new blog contributors:
Sergio Minué, MD.
General Practitioner (GP). Management professor at Andalusian School of Public Health (Escuela Andaluza de Salud Pública, EASP) since July, 2000.
In the last eleven years Dr. Minué has been involved in several projects related to education, investigation and consulting both at national and international level. He has worked in projects for Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Morocco and El Salvador, and collaborated with Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in other actions.
At the present he is Director of the Expertise in Healthcare Management program at University of Granada and coordinates healthcare management module in European Master ‘Erasmus Mundus’ Europubhealth.
Served as Director of Medical Care Management Department at EASP from February 2009 to May 2010.
Worked as Teaching and Investigation Director at EASP from 2003 to 2007.
From 1993 to 2000 held different management positions at Insalud (now-defunct Spanish national healthcare authority): Medical Director of Primary Care Team at Barajas (1991-1993), Assistant Medical Director of Primary Care of Madrid’s Area 4 (1993-1994), Medical Director of the same regional area (1994-1996) and finally Medical Director of Primary Care for Madrid’s Area 2 (1996-2000).
Quality Pilot in European Master ‘Erasmus Mundus’ Europubhealth (2006-2010). During that time he coordinated Quality Committee of Virtual Campus of Public Health in Latin America organized by PAHO.
Member of Patient Safety groups at Cochrane and Spanish Primary Care Association (Semfyc). At Semfyc he is also member of the Knowledge Management group and coordinates Project ARA, focused on MD re-certification.
Member of Internet and Healthcare investigation group at EASP, he is currently working in several investigation projects on how doctors can use new technologies, social media and Web 2.0. He is also involved in projects related to best practices in teaching, safety, clinical decision-making and Primary Care. He is the leading author of an ongoing investigation on decision-making and mistakes in diagnosis. Reviewer for ‘Gaceta Sanitaria’ magazine. Participates in expert groups in Spain, Europe and the Americas.
He authored articles published in scientific journals both in Spain and abroad, and is a frequent lecturer and speaker in scientific congresses all over the world and is still actively writing and publishing in his field of expertise. He writes in two personal blogs (‘El Gerente de Mediado’ and ‘La Cara Ve’) and is a regular contributor to other healthcare blogs and Diario Médico.
Miguel Ángel Máñez, Economist.
Miguel Ángel Máñez is an economist and currently holds the position of Finance and Human Resources Assistant Manager of the Health Department of Alicante-Sant Joan d’Alacant in Alicante, Spain. He is also the Coordinator of the ’2.0 Office’ for Valencia’s regional health authority, responsible for the implementation of Web 2.0 tools aimed at patients and healthcare professionals. He is the author of a well-known blog in Spain about healthcare management called ‘Salud con Cosas’. He has taken an active part in courses and seminars about Internet and healthcare, marketing, and strategies of healthcare management. He is the author of several articles on healthcare and Web 2.0.
Vicente Baos, MD.
General Practitioner (GP) in Collado Villalba Pueblo (near Madrid), writes ‘El supositorio’ (‘The Suppository’) since 2007, one of Spain’s most influential healthcare blogs.
Graduated in 1982 at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, completed his training at Puerta de Hierro Hospital (Madrid) in 1987. Member of Editorial Board at ‘Therapeutiction in Spanish Healthcare System’ (‘Información Terapéutica del Sistema Nacional de Salud’), a journal published by Spain’s Ministry of Health since 1994.
Dr. Baos also coordinates Prescription Drug Use group at Spanish Primary Care Association (Semfyc) since its creation in 2003. He is a consultant at Spain’s Drug Agency (‘Agencia Española de Medicamentos y Productos Sanitarios’). Author of several books on prescription drug use (some of them for MD’s and others targeted at general public) and a long list of scientific articles.
His main areas of interest are Primary Care and the analysis and evaluation of pharmacological therapies.
Frederic Llordachs, MD.
MD with MBA, specialized in Healthcare Management and Marketing. Direct experience with healthcare insurance, and healthcare management, and interested in venture capital. Also involved in early-stage start-ups, like Doctoralia (http://www.doctoralia.com), the global platform for healthcare search, and also other pre-seed projects like Lexpertia (http://www.lexpertia.com), the search engine for lawyers in Spain.
Julio Mayol, MD, PhD.
Julio M. Mayol MD, PhD, graduated with honor from Universidad Complutense de Madrid Medical School in 1988. He received his training in General Surgery at Hospital Clinico San Carlos and Beth Israel Hospital, taking further postgraduate training as research fellow in Surgery at Harvard Medical School. Currently, he he has an appointment as Professor of Surgery at Universidad Complutense de Madrid Medical School. He serves as Chief Innovation Officer and Chief of the Division of Colorectal Surgery at Hospital Clinico San Carlos. He is a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Medicine and European Expert on Cell Therapy at European Medicines Agency.
About Diario Medico:
Since 1992, Diario Médico has been Spain’s leading news outlet for physicians. Part of one of Spain’s most important publishing groups (Unidad Editorial, publisher of El Mundo ), Diario Médico is both a website and a free newspaper distributed Monday to Friday in all hospitals and general practitioner offices across Spain.
The publication covers a wide range of subjects, from breaking scientific news to health policy, in-depth interviews, scientific meetings, clinical practice, legal issues, management, and health IT.
Diario Médico reaches 2.4 million paper readers and 450 thousand website visitors (more than 500 thousand pageviews/month).
The brand strives to be a cutting-edge reference tool for all healthcare professionals in Spain, and its website is constantly innovating. Diario Médico provides online courses as well as speciality-specific newsletters, video reports and Web 2.0 content such as Twitterrviews and a medical blogging platform (Médica Blogs).
April 15th, 2011 by Dr. Val Jones in Announcements, Quackery Exposed
Tags: Facebook, Health Content, HealthyRT, Medical Reviewers, Peer Review, Peer-Reviewed Tweets, Reviewers, Twitter
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A few days ago I published a blog post about Dr. Mehmet Oz NOT being a trustworthy source of health information. It set off a firestorm of blog comments, tweets, and Facebook sharing – all because people (like me) had developed sincere concerns about the safety of viewers who might take his advice to heart. The outpouring of commentary, and the rapidity of the response made me wonder: can we harness this power for future good? Could we counter Dr. Oz’s (and others like him) misinformation with peer-reviewed content that’s easily accessible by Twitter and Facebook?
I chatted with some colleagues and concerned patient advocates on Twitter (including @academicobgyn @scanman @hrana @AmberMBaylor @DamonRamseyMD @RyanMadanickMD @jalbietz @DrElizabethLee @FaceliftMD @goodwillstacy @PWestcott ), and we all agreed that it would be a great service to have vetted health tweets available for people to read and retweet. If enough of us were regularly engaged in retweeting sound health stories and information, we could potentially drown out the “miracle cures” and snake oil that drives us all nuts.
So how would this work?
I’d like to get a small group of volunteer experts together – healthcare professionals committed to science and common sense – and have them read and approve links before they are promoted on Twitter. I have created a new Twitter account called “HealthyRT” – the volunteer experts will have access to this account and can promote content that is medically sound. I hope that the word will be spread about this account, and people will subscribe to the feed and RT links that they find helpful. In this way, everyone on Twitter has the power to RT good health content, and it takes very little effort for retweeters to be engaged.
Now, there is no guarantee that the feed will be perfect (no peer-review process is) but every effort will be made to ensure that it is not used for self-promotion or that the standards lapse over time. If there are any concerns, people can direct message the HealthyRT team and we’ll keep us on the straight and narrow with the help of the crowd (as it were).
This experiment could fail or peter out… or it may become the greatest anti-snake oil strategy in Internet history. It all depends on the commitment of the reviewers and the extent of our subscriber base. But I’m willing to give it a try… and I hope you are too!
Anyone interested in becoming a HealthyRT reviewer, please email me directly: val-dot-jones at getbetterhealth.com.
Everyone who’d like to help to promote good health content – and drown out the bad – please subscribe to HealthyRT and retweet it as much as possible.
Please use the comments section here if you have ideas about how to improve this strategy. Let’s do it!
*You can follow us now at: http://twitter.com/#!/HealthyRT *
March 15th, 2011 by Maria Gifford in Announcements, Medblogger Shout Outs
Tags: Best Of The Medical Blogosphere, Better Health, Call For Submissions, Clinical Medicine Blogs, Grand Rounds, Health Blogs, Healthcare Blogs, Maria Gifford, Medblogger Shout Out, Medbloggers, Medical Blog Carnival, Medical Blogs, Physician Bloggers, Science Blogs
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Grand Rounds will be hosted right here at “home” at Better Health on Tuesday, March 22th, 2011.
Please send your blog-post submissions via e-mail by 12:00AM midnight CT on Saturday, March 19th, to: maria.gifford@getbetterhealth.com.
Please include:
- ”Submission for Grand Rounds” in the subject line of your e-mail.
- Your name (blog author), the name of your blog, and the URL of your specific blog-post submission.
- A short summary (1 to 3 sentences) of your blog post.
There’s no specific theme for this edition of Grand Rounds — just send us something really smart or deep or profound that will move us and make us all think harder about health and medicine.
For more information, please see the Grand Rounds Submissions Guidelines. We look forward to receiving your submissions and featuring them here next week. Thank you!
- Maria Gifford, Director of Content, Better Health
November 11th, 2010 by Dr. Val Jones in Announcements
Tags: Better Health, Blog, Content Partner, Harvard, Harvard Health Publications, HHP, Partnership, Science Based Medicine
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I’m very pleased to announce that Harvard Health Publications (HHP) is Better Health’s newest content resource. Soon readers of the Better Health blog will enjoy contributions from the HHP team. We believe that their insight and perspectives will be a great addition to our unique collection of healthcare voices online.
The Better Health blog is a continuation of “Dr. Val And The Voice Of Reason,” first launched in 2006. At the time, I was inspired to start a blog because of the baffling amount of misinformation that my patients were finding on the Internet. It was a David-versus-Goliath enterprise, but I felt duty-bound to do what I could to provide a counterpoint to media hype, fear mongering, and snake oil salesmen.
Over the past four years I’ve been humbled by the number of others who have chosen to join me on my quest. I’m no longer a single voice, but rather a facilitator of a movement designed to empower patients with trustworthy health commentary. Currently the Better Health blog offers content from over 100 contributing authors, most of whom also manage their own blog sites. In addition, I am a proud contributor to Science-Based Medicine, a blog devoted to an in-depth review of controversial therapies and practices.
HHP shares my desire to promote evidence-based information in an accessible format. Their goal is:
” …to bring people around the world the most current health information that is authoritative, trustworthy, and accessible, drawing on the expertise of the 9,000 faculty physicians at Harvard Medical School.”
I applaud this commitment to journalistic excellence and medical integrity and I’m proud to promote their efforts to empower patients on a national and global scale.
A warm welcome to the HHP team, and a big “thank you” to the readers who have inspired me to keep writing all these years.
- Val Jones, M.D. (aka “Dr. Val”)
October 7th, 2010 by Maria Gifford in Announcements, Better Health Network, Medblogger Shout Outs, News
Tags: Best Doctor's Blogs, Best Of The Medical Blogosphere, Better Health Bloggers, Clinical Medicine Blogs, Doctors and Social Media, Doctors on the Internet, Doctors Online, Doctors Who Blog, Dr. Lucy Hornstein, Dr. Wes Fisher, Healthcare Blogs, Healthcare Social Media, Humanistic Side of Medicine, Humanizing Medicine, Medblogs, Medical Bloggers, Medical Blogs, Medical Scribes, Medicine and Humanism, Musings of a Dinosaur, O Magazine, Oprah, Physician Bloggers, Social Media In Medicine
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Check out this preview article (dated October 20, 2010) by Madonna Behen on Oprah’s “O” Magazine website entitled “4 Doctor’s Blogs to Read Now,” where two of the four doctors’ blogs listed are regular Better Health content contributors. They are family physician Lucy Hornstein, M.D., author of “Musings of a Dinosaur,” and internist, cardiologist, and cardiac electrophysiologist Wesby Fisher, M.D., author of “Dr. Wes.”
An excerpt:
You thought physicians were robotic and cold? A new epidemic of personal blogs written by docs might change your mind. These medical scribes are boldly posting their real feelings (and worst fears) on the web, for all the world to see. Their journals provide us patients with an informative and humanizing look behind the professional mask.
Congratulations to these great physician bloggers of ours for making up half of the list!
