January 20th, 2009 by Dr. Val Jones in Announcements
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Today I live-blogged the inauguration via Twitter. Thanks for all of you who followed my personal anecdotes and to those who felt it was TMI, sorry. I chatted about everything from Susan Sarandon’s Visine addiction, to police security instructions, to a near fight that broke out in a group of cold and frustrated people who weren’t allowed onto the parade route. And best of all, I speculated as to whether there may be an official “inaugural pooper scooper” to clean up after the horses in the parade.
I promised the folks on Twitter that I’d have photos on my blog later today. So here they are. Photo 1 was taken of me and my “peeps” in our parade perch at 601 Pennsylvania Avenue (thank you, AHIP). The rest are pretty self explanatory. It was a really fun and momentous occasion.
January 20th, 2009 by Dr. Val Jones in Announcements
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The weekly summary of the best of the health blogosphere is ready for your reading at MedPageToday. It’s dedicated to healthcare reform.
Grand Rounds 5:18: Ten Suggestions For Healthcare Reform
I’m this edition’s author, just hosting it on MedPageToday’s platform – please excuse the formatting.
Head on over and read it.
Next week’s Grand Rounds will be hosted by Chronic Babe.
January 19th, 2009 by Dr. Val Jones in Announcements
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I’m writing this post mostly to embarrass my girlfriend Gwen Mayes, but also because I’m mentally exhausted from preparing Grand Rounds for publication tomorrow, and thought I’d engage in some frivolity.
Gwen and her friend Scott are pictured here en route to the Kentucky Inaugural Ball in Washington, DC. Most states are hosting their own celebratory ball tonight – and Kentucky’s Bluegrass Ball won an “Editor’s Pick” from the Washington Post. It’s one of the largest and best balls, and I suppose that makes sense if one assumes that southerners do this kind of thing well (I lived in Texas for four years, so I’m allowed to joke about that).
The Bluegrass Ball has some predictable highlights, including the “Kentucky Bourbon Trail” sponsored by the Kentucky Distillers Association, and a guest list that includes everyone from Governor Steven Beshear and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to the band “Joey and the Cruisers.” What I did not expect, however, was that the caterer for the event would import “720 heads of Bibb lettuce” as part of a “Kentucky-friendly menu.” I soon learned that Bibb lettuce was first cultivated in Kentucky by Jack Bibb in the late 19th Century. Am I the only person who didn’t know this?
I’ll be attending a few events on Pennsylvania Avenue tomorrow during the inauguration day parade. Gwen and Scott will be spending the night at my place – and I can only hope that they bring me back a goodie bag filled with Kentucky goodness – especially the Bibb lettuce.
Addendum: My friends make a b-line for the Maker’s Mark booth…
And here they are horsing around:
And no, they didn’t bring me any Bibb lettuce back from the ball (dang it)… just a floral arrangement they picked up from some guy in the subway who was returning home from the Indiana Ball. Oh… and some Maker’s Mark.
January 18th, 2009 by Dr. Val Jones in Announcements
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Dr. Val is hosting the historic inauguration day Grand Rounds at MedPageToday. Please send your submissions to this email address: valjonesmd AT gmail dot com. Put “Grand Rounds Submission” in your email title and please use this format for the body of your email:
- Post title
- Post url
- Short description of the post
- Blog title
- Blog url
Although I have never done a themed Grand Rounds before, it would be terribly remiss of me not to acknowledge healthcare reform on the very inauguration day of our new President, Barack Obama. So please send me your best posts about the change you’d like to see in healthcare. If we do a really great job of this, maybe Tom Daschle will take a looksie? Don’t laugh, but DC is a small world – I share a hair stylist with Tom’s wife, Linda!
Please send me your submissions by midnight, ET, Sunday January 18th. I will include all submissions, but will give more weight to those that are about healthcare reform.
For those of you who are reading this and wondering what on earth I’m talking about – please read about Grand Rounds here. It’s the weekly summary of the best blog posts from the medical blogosphere.
My inaugural Grand Rounds will be published at MedPageToday at 8am, Tuesday, January 20th. (This link will work from that time on). I hope that we’ll reach an unprecedented number of readers on this platform.
I look forward to receiving your submissions!
Warmest Regards,
Val
P.S. Please enjoy Barbara Kivowitz’s Grand Rounds this week – it has a Sci Fi theme! The January 27th edition of Grand Rounds will be hosted by: Chronic Babe.
January 17th, 2009 by Dr. Val Jones in Expert Interviews
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Dr. Joe Kvedar is the Residency Program Director of the Department of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School. He is also the Founder and Director of the Center for Connected Health, an organization whose provocative goal is to help patients “become their own primary care provider.” I caught up with Dr. Kvedar at a recent health conference, and asked him to explain what his company’s approach contributed to the healthcare landscape.
Dr. Val: What is the Center for Connected Health?
Dr. Kvedar: Connected Health’s mission is to empower patients to be maximally in control of their own health destiny. As much as possible, we’d like to see patients become their own primary care provider.
There are three principles that must work together to accomplish this: first you must have accurate information about the health behavior that you want to change. Measurements must rely on quantifiable data (like the step count of a pedometer) rather than more general self-reports of how physically active you are. Second, the report must be in a format that offers specific feedback to the individual. Trending of information is critical, but the trends must be understood in context. For example a patient with diabetes needs to see how their blood glucose levels are behaving over time, but more than that they need to see how their food intake was influencing these levels. And third, data-driven coaching inspires the application of data to real lifestyle improvements.
Giving accurate information about yourself (in a format that is contextually trended over time) to a person that you trust can inspire behavior change. People are more likely to change their unhealthy choices when they know they’re accountable to someone for them. An appropriate coach can be anyone from a friend in a social network to a digital avatar, to a doctor or nurse.
Dr. Val: So what’s the rate limiting step in getting this behavior change model adopted? Is it lack of financial incentives?
Dr. Kvedar: That’s certainly part of it, but it’s even more than that. Healthcare providers gravitate towards human resource-intensive solutions. Providers are simply not used to thinking of technology as a tool. Instead, they often perceive the solution to better patient compliance as an increase in staff to serve them. But this is not feasible given our provider shortage and increasing healthcare burden. It’s just really hard for doctors to imagine that patients could be coached effectively by an avatar, yet there are many examples of it working. Read more »
