The Medicine on the Net Front Page article this month is on medical weblogs. It's a good article, but you have to pay to read it all. I hadn't read Medicine on the Net before. It looks like they are publishing a trade journal that aims to keep people informed of what is happening in the Internet related to the business and practice of medicine.
Last week, Bill Reith (Bill – do you have a weblog? I can't find it if you do!) .. asked me to write more about my "other job" and I recognized that I don't write much about it here.
I'll try to write some more about medicine and technology. It's an important topic, and I believe that technology and medicine have always influenced each other.
The important thing to remember about technology is that teh hard decisions are nto about what we can do with technology. The list is as long as my arm – and it's easy to dream up cool new applications of technolgoy. What we should do is much a harder question – and deserves great thought and understanding of both the technology and the process to which technology is being applied. In a paragraph – this is what I do. I help make the decisions about what we should do. It's therefore my job to know as much as I can about the work that we do in a hospital ("we" includes physicians, nurses, residents, medical students, ward clerks, phleotomists, pharmacists, speech therapists, administrators, billing clerks, finance specialists, and so-on), and I also need to know as much as I can about technology.
I can't have the "usa-today" version of how to build an electronic health record in my head. I really need to know the nuts-and-bolts of how this is done.
Thank you for your comments — I enjoyed them. I approach the question of technology and medicine from the other direction — I’m a computer guy — but the intersection of the disciplines is no less fascinating to me. Your comment, incidentally, reminds me of one written by “Herbert Lovelace”, a pseudonym used by the author of “The Secret CIO” column in Information Week magazine. He said once (I’m paraphrasing) that its much more important to figure out what numbers you *need* to track in order to steer your business than it is to merely generate more numbers, faster.
And in response to your question – yes, I do have a blog of sorts, but it is an occasional thing (http://www.ceruleanbill.blogspot.com/). Not nearly as interesting or substantial as your own!