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A Report From The BlackBerry Clinical Collaboration Summit

Last week, Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of BlackBerry smartphones, held a clinical collaboration summit in Boston to discuss their vision of the future of mobile device integration into healthcare IT. Several vendors and app makers attended and shared how they are implementing mobile devices into workflows with RIM claiming their superiority in security and data protection through data wiping, access control, and audit trail.

One claim that several speakers made was that hours per week could be saved by making clinical and logistical data available on smartphones and that studies have shown clinical information presented on a small screen can be used for mobile situation diagnostic ability, notably for ECG and OB data through companies like AirStrip. A few studies have backed parts of this claim, [including] a recent paper in the Journal of Hospital Medicine by Wu. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

DrRich Initiates A Medical Ethics Smack Down With The ACP

Yesterday, DrRich noted (with his usual affecting humility, modesty, self-deprecation, &c.) that the Covert Rationing Blog has been named a Finalist in the 2009 Medical Weblog Award Competition, in the category of Best Health Policy/Ethics Blog. He now calls to his readers’ attention the fact that, among the other two finalists – both of which are of very high quality and undoubtedly are more deserving of this award than DrRich – is none other than the ACP Advocate Blog.

The ACP Advocate Blog, written by Bob Doherty, is a publication of the American College of Physicians, and its purpose is to explain, elaborate on and advocate for the ACP’s positions on important matters related to health policy and medical ethics that affect its members, namely, internal medicine specialists.  Doherty – who DrRich does not know, but of whom he has heard many very complimentary things – is an insightful analyst of matters related to healthcare policy, and to boot he is an excellent writer. DrRich is a loyal reader of the ACP Advocate Blog, which in fact has habitually led off DrRich’s blogroll.

Here’s why this is interesting. While both the ACP Advocate Blog and DrRich’s blog are finalists in the medical ethics category, it so happens that DrRich and the ACP are far apart on that very issue. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*

The 2009 Medical Weblog Awards: Vote For Your Favorite Blog

The 2009 Medical Blog Awards

The polls are now open in the Sixth Annual Medical Weblog Awards.

  • Best Medical Weblog
  • The Blog that Ate Manhattan

    Clinical Cases and Images

    Clinical Correlations

    Dr Shock MD PhD

    Gary Schwitzer’s HealthNewsReview Blog

    mobihealthnews

    Musings of a Distractible Mind

    Please vote here… Read more »

    *This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

    Introducing The New Medpolitics.com

    A year and a half ago we unveiled Medpolitics, a website for doctors to blog about the legislative, regulatory, and public policy issues revolving around the business of medicine.

    Today we’d like to present the new and much improved Medpolitics, that anyone can join and participate in using the new, more intuitive and much spiffier interface. Whether you are a health care strategist, doctor, nurse, patient, or just a citizen concerned about the state of medicine, this is the place for you to bring up debates, offer solutions, announce events, organize groups, or find friends and establish professional contacts.

    Healthcare is obviously a major topic today in society, and we feel that there should be a real forum for everyone to express their views, offer new ideas, and discuss details that are often ignored by all the noise in the media. Medpolitics allows anyone to blog, post videos from YouTube, and create discussion forums by topic.

    If the future of healthcare is important to you, this network will be an ideal outlet for expressing your individual voice. Registration takes seconds and you can start right away.

    Link: Medpolitics.com

    *This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

    Steve Wozniak Showing Off a Prized Gadget

    One of the attendees to this year’s TEDMED was the venerable Steve Wozniak, founder of Apple Computer. Steve is an engaging person so he wanted to show us his NIXIE tube wrist watch and how he uses it to intimidate fellow airline travelers. It ain’t medical, but is surely amusing:

    *This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

    Latest Interviews

    IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

    It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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    How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

    I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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    Latest Book Reviews

    Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

    I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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    The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

    When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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    Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

    I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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