Grand Rounds, health blog hot list

What is Grand Rounds?

Grand Rounds is a weekly summary of the best medical blog posts on the Internet. Each week a different blogger takes a turn hosting Grand Rounds and summarizing the best medical and health care discussions of the week.
As the new co-leader of Grand Rounds, Dr. Val Jones will host the official calendar on her blog. Along with medical student, Colin Son, they will manage the schedule and identify hosts for each week’s edition.
Grand Rounds was originally established in 2004, and is the most popular medical blog “carnival” on the Internet.

 

How to participate

Submitting your blog post to Grand Rounds is as easy as 1-2-3.

1. Go to the Grand Rounds calendar and locate the host blog for the upcoming edition.

2. Click on the host’s link and read their instructions for submitting your post. Their instructions are usually listed in a recent blog post.

3. Email the host prior to their deadline (usually Sunday night before the Tuesday Grand Rounds). Include the URL of your blog post, your blog name, and your blog’s URL in your email. Put “Grand Rounds Submission” in the title of your email.

What kind of blog posts are appropriate for submission to Grand Rounds?

Anything with a health or healthcare theme. Suggestions include:

• Patient encounters

– something that made you laugh, cry, or gaze into the abyss

• A profile of someone in medicine

• Medical education

– experiences, insight, generalizations

• Implications of a new basic science discovery

• Commentary on a new study

– what it means for patients and practitioners

– why this new test / device / pill will save us / bankrupt us / kill us in our sleep

• Commentary on health care delivery

– an experience you’ve had with a limitation or success of the system
– your theories about what would improve access, outcomes
– something new and interesting about insurance, malpractice, regulations
– drug companies, and why they’re so evil and / or saving lives
– why recent data about health care is all wrong / fine as is / not discouraging enough

Rules:

• One entry per blogger
• Recent posts between 400 and 1000 words are preferred
• Posts are to be written for a general audience (more on this below)

Advice from the founder of Grand Rounds, Dr. Nick Genes:

Remember, the target audience here is NOT other medical bloggers, or people in the health care industry. It’s the educated but non-medical readers coming from general-interest blogs. So write for that audience, if only for this one post (even if your blog is about echocardiography). The idea is to introduce the wider world to the growing medical blogosphere — the doctors, nurses, students, administrators, EMTs, techs, and patients who blog.

It’s the host’s discretion as to what gets included. In addition to linking to your posts, hosts may provide groan-inducing puns, and snarky comments, that readers have come to expect and enjoy. It’s nothing personal.

If you’re looking for more guidance, check out other linkfests such as Carnival of the Vanities. Grand Rounds was conceived as along those lines, like a Carnival of the Caregivers.

Frequently asked questions:

1. Is Grand Rounds just limited to bloggers in the health care field? No – Hosts may consider any medical-related post. The point of Grand Rounds is to promote the nascent medical blogosphere, and submissions from health-related blogs will take priority.

2. I’m a doctor / nurse / researcher / student / EMT / health care economist / patient who writes mostly about gardening / dating / reality television. Will you link to my post? Maybe, if it’s medically related. And very few blogs are 100% medicine. Submissions from mostly health-focused blogs will take priority.

3. How do I become a host of Grand Rounds? Send an email to val.jones@getbetterhealth.com or colinson@gmail.com and request to be considered as a future host. Send them a link to your blog. Host bloggers must have been blogging regularly for at least 6 months, have a health theme, demonstrate good writing skills, professionalism, and respect for scientific medicine. If your blog meets those requirements (and is approved by Val or Colin) they’ll contact you via email to schedule your host date.

4. Can I have a Grand Rounds button for my blog? If you’ve ever hosted Grand Rounds in the past, you may certainly display the Grand Rounds button on your blog. The button links to the Grand Rounds calendar and archives. Please send a button request to john.crotty@anerian.com.

Meet your hosts

Val Jones, MD

Val Jones, M.D., is the President and CEO of Better Health, PLLC. Most recently she was the Senior Medical Director of Re volution Health, a consumer health portal with over 120 million page views per month in its network. Prior to her work with Revolution Health, Dr. Jones served as the founding editor of Clinical Nutrition & Obesity, a peer-reviewed e-section of the online Medscape medical journal.

Colin Son

I am a fourth-year student at the University of Texas Medical School at San Antonio, which also happens to be my hometown. For undergrad, I attended film school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, graduating with a BFA in Writing for Screen & Television. Halfway through film school I realized that I loved screenwriting but probably not enough for a career of waiting tables and taking meetings with B-list producers. While considering my options for the future, I had the privilege of shadowing a pediatric cardiac surgeon and became hooked on medicine. Away from the hospital I’m very interested in health policy and am involved in organized medicine, I’m a political junkie, I have trouble putting down a good history book, I still try to make time to work on my screenplays, I love to travel, and I’m an avid college football fan. Besides writing for The Differential, I also opine on issues of interest to me at my personal site,From Medskool.

 

Meet the founder

Nick Genes

Nicholas Genes, MD, PhD, is a resident in the Emergency Medicine program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. He received a bachelor’s degree in science from Brown University, where he first developed his interests in medicine, research, and writing. After college, he enrolled in the MD/PhD program at the University of Massachusetts, pursuing a medical degree while studying chondrocyte mechanotransduction in Dr. Charles Vacanti’s laboratory for tissue engineering. In the course of writing a freelance article, he discovered the world of medical Weblogs, and he has been active in this nascent community ever since. In 2004, he founded “Grand Rounds,” a weekly compilation of the best medical blogs, hosted by a different blogger each week. He writes about that project in a weekly column, “Pre-Rounds,” for the Medscape Med Students site. He also writes regularly on his own blog, blogborygmi.com, and is a partner in medgadget.com, a blog about emerging medical technologies.