always juggling

Steve Daviss MD wrote:

I typically have more balls in the air than I have hands to deal with, so am always juggling to keep some on top and let others fall to the ground through lack of time and/or attention. The ones that bounce back up, for whatever reason, get another chance to stay in the air.

Balls bouncing back up is "push": you subscribe to an e-mail list or follow a blog or someone on Twitter, and messages ("balls") are pushed to you. Balls having to be picked up is "pull". How many of you return to web sites just because you feel a pull to?

And what does it mean that we accept balls falling to the ground?

Consumer rating sites can be beneficial to patients

People are very familiar with [consumer rating sites], so I think this is an opportunity to engage them in the process of improving health care quality, to really let hospitals and doctors know what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong.

http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2010/08/09/social_media_meets_health_care

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This made me wonder if consumers will be represented at Medinfo. And at our workshop!

Mayo Clinic starts social media center to train physicians and hospitals

The Mayo Clinic's effort to start a social media center to train physicians and hospitals in the ways of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and podcasting is one of the biggest signs yet that social media in health care has gone mainstream.

http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2010/08/09/bil20809.htm

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This workshop is a similar, though of course also very different, effort. Is social media as mainstream in the informatics community?

FDA says use of Facebook Share button violates requirements

"The shared content is misleading because it makes representations about the efficacy of Tasigna but fails to communicate any risk information associated with the use of this drug," said the FDA letter

"We have addressed its concerns by taking the direct and immediate action of taking down the widget referenced by the FDA," the company said.

Facebook should be responsible for creating safeguards for the marketing of medications and other health products on its site, said Jeffrey Chester, a privacy advocate

http://www.businessweek.com/idg/2010-08-06/us-fda-warns-pharma-firm-about-facebook-promotion.html

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What I thought was especially interesting was how the FDA was concerned about content and the privacy advocate said Facebook should create safeguards.

overlapping online communities

Our online community is bumping up against a couple others. First, on Twitter, the hashtag we planned to use, #medinfo, is mostly in Korean. I think another community is using it for "medical information". Maybe we should switch to #medinfo2010 to disentangle us.

Second, the Medinfo2010-AMIA2010-bridge is "a collaborative group environment for exploring common themes in international health and biomedical informatics linking the Medinfo2010 and AMIA2010 conferences, and beyond". It seems duplicative to me to have discussions about the same issues going on in different places, but we need to use the structure we proposed, and I think they're committed to using grou.ps, so we may just continue to overlap. At least we know about each other!

learning curve

I did say I have a steep learning curve. This reply is to "reply to the group" Didn't know going forward when I respond should I "reply via the web post"?

We're learning together! I received your reply by email. That doesn't strike me as a very helpful distinction, "to the group" vs "via the web post". The less informative the software, the steeper the learning curve! :-)

Bob

access to online groups

I did not receive the invite to the yahoo group so [someone else] shared hers with me. I am not sure how this works in terms of Yahoo Groups since I clicked on her link and was able to sign up. As the moderator do you have a list of who was invited and who responded? If you do have such a list, am I signed up as [her] or was I able to join the group as me. The fact that I was able to click on the link on [her] invite and join the group demonstrated that others who did not receive an invite can join a group if someone in the group forwards an invitation?

These types of details on how the technology functions would be important if one was trying to establish a closed clinical group. Let me know what you see as moderator.

All members can access the list of who's joined:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/medinfo_socmed/members

I set up this list as:

Membership Type: Open (anyone can join)

so it might be because of that that you were able to join using her link. You wouldn't want to make a closed clinical group open. :-)

Bob