If this is your first visit to the Health Blogs Observatory, please feel free to look around and explore. Consider submitting your blog to our directory, to gain better exposure and participate in our future research. We are conducting open research of the health/medical blogosphere and would be delighted if you would consider joining us.

We wish to dedicate this edition of the Grand Rounds to Florence Nightingale who was born on this day, May 12, 189 years ago. As you probably know, she is famous for being the ‘Lady with the Lamp’ who devoted her life to nursing and campaigning for better health care and sanitation for all. Her greatest achievement was to make nursing a respectable profession. Florence’s writings on hospital planning and organization had a profound effect in England and across the world, publishing over 200 books, reports and pamphlets. She died at the age of 90 as one of the most famous and influential women of the 19th century. Her writings continue to be a resource for nurses, health managers and planners to this day.

We love you nurses

Since today we celebrate one of the most famous nurses ever, we feel that the only right thing to do would be to start this edition of Grand Rounds with our nurse bloggers. Two of us hosting this edition are physicians, therefor we know just how much important nurses really are. They are our partners, we respect them and don’t know what we would do without them. We love you nurses! There we said it, and we mean it from the bottom of our hearts.

The first post describes it perfectly. So often we underestimate the power of words and compassion and just focus on technology, surgery, and medicine. In the story simply titled “Lisa“, Reality Rounds reminds us that miracles can happen in hospital rooms.

Let’s continue with the article that is as part of a series celebrating nursing sensibilities for Nurses Week. Barbara Olson (@SafetyNurse) explains why a new generation of U.S. healthcare workers should be warmly welcomed.

Keith at Digital Doorway turns our attention towards difficulties parents who work in low-wage occupations might experience with the CDC recommendations regarding swine flue, which mandate seven days of home isolation for any child exhibiting a flu-like illness.

Nurse Ausmed (@NurseAusmed) finds that cellphone TXT messaging is starting to untangle nurse-doctor communication. We too love TXT messages, and use them everyday at work.

Emergency Department

The basic rules of triage instruct us to continue with patients who have the most severe and life threatening conditions. Where do we find these patients? Maybe we can try Emergency Departments in Detroit and Perth.

Emergency physician Jonathan Sullivan has written a truly brilliant and emotional essay at Receiving. blog. He starts by describing the encounter with a scared patient who wants to know if she is okay, and then scares us into questioning if he himself is okay. A great reminder that patients and doctors are the same, just humans after all.

Dr Chris Nickson (@precordialthump) is a registrar training in emergency medicine and intensive care, a blogger, and a talented poet. Go ahead and read his “Tired and afraid” poem based on a recent real patient encounter.

Detective work

Here is an interesting case that had two of our contributors thinking. On April 10, an incident happened at North Shore University Hospital. A female patient’s head was shaved, anesthesia had been administered and she was laying on the OR table but here neurosurgeon, Dr. Paolo Bolognese, never showed up. Chief of neurosurgery, Thomas Milhorat, was then called, but refused to do the surgery because the patient wasn’t his. Eventually the two surgeons got suspended for two weeks. Personal injury attorney, Eric Turkewitz (@Turkewitz) salutes the suspension conduct, but suspects there is much more to the story. Editors of InsideSurgery.com agree that the details of this case remain sketchy, but believe that there is no justification in assigning any blame to Dr. Milhorat who had no ethical or legal responsibility to step in and start the operation on a patient he has not met, nor prepared for.

Investigation continues with a story that has, as Jacqueline (@laikas) said, caused a tsunami. You probably heard about it, you know about Elsevier publishing a fake journal, Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, to push Merck products Fosamax and Vioxx. Well, hearing about it doesn’t mean you understand it in a wider context. For an excellent in depth analysis be sure to read Jacqueline’s article at Laika’s MedLibLog.

Interviews

The first Canadian to live in outer space will be a physician! Wow, how cool is that! Pretty cool actually, because the average temperature in space is -270 Celsius or -455 Fahrenheit. Anyway, Sam Solomon (@CdnMedicineNews) talked with Dr Robert Thirsk who will begin a six-month stay on the International Space Station when he takes off on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on May 27.

Rich Elmore at Healthcare Technology News has interviewed Dr. Randall Brown, lead author of the report on the Promise of Care Coordination released by The New York Academy of Medicine and the National Coalition on Care Coordination (N3C).

Dr. Val Jones (@drval) is a huge fan of massage. She is such a huge fan that she decided to interview her massage therapist, sort of

Patients and their families

Unless you’ve been on Mars or something for the last four years, you’ve heard about Kerri Sparling (@sixuntilme) and her Six Until Me blog. Kerri has type 1 diabetes for over two decades, and marks her fourth anniversary of health blogging by meeting up with a fellow diabetes blogger.

Novel patient, who has a beautifully designed blog, writes about how her chronic illness affects her relationships, especially with her father and how lack of acceptance can drive a wedge between people.

Tim & Alison blog about living with type 1 diabetes on their blog called Shoot Up or Put Up. In the post Alison submitted, she wants to let you know about some of the useful things she learned about diabetes online, and that internet is not all that dangerous when it comes to health information.

Wendy has a beautiful daughter called Adalyne who has type 1 diabetes. She finally got the courage to order her daughter’s medical record, the one that mentions diabetes for the first time. Now she shares her emotions about it with us.

New research has shown Cushing’s syndrome to have a substantially higher prevalence than previously thought and that diagnosing and treating it is sometimes just as difficult as it was 70 years ago. Robin (@staticnrg) at survive the journey knows more.

If you are sick, you need help and compassion from your partner. However your partner is a jerk. OK than. No no no, Barbara Kivowitz (@bkivowitz) has some advice on her In Sickness and In Health blog to try and work things out with your significant other.

Stop for a sec and Learn how to:

• ask a doctor out – Doc Gurley
• feel good, even when it hurts so bad – How to Cope with Pain
• repair a torn earlobe – Suture for a Living (@rlbates)
• treat infection of the external ear canal – Medicine for the Outdoors
• bend right to avoid herniating discs – The Fitness Fixer

Medical research

DrShock (@DrShock) has difficulties learning how to program in the computer language called Python. This is probably because some parts of his parietal lobe and hippocampus used all the adaptation juice and probably still are, so his other parietal parts refuse to adapt very quickly in order to allow him to learn how to program. Go figure, as he presents the latest neuroscience research paper.

There is this thing they do every Monday at the ACP Internist (@ACPinternists) blog called “Medical News of the Obvious“, which is a compilation of recent studies that don’t always pass the “So what?” test. Let us just say two things: 1. being overweight hurts the entire planet 2. asthma and swine flue don’t go well together. Very amusing stuff!

Want to rub some Viagra on your hmmm… skin? Scientists can make it happen. More rubbing at InsureBlog.

“Evolution of patients with nonallergic rhinitis supports conversion to allergic rhinitis” is the title of the research article presented by Dr Ves Dimov (@AllergyNotes).

Marshall Scott, a hospital chaplain, wrote an interesting review and critique of a JAMA article on religious coping and care at the end of life on his Episcopal Chaplain at the Bedside blog.

Is conference attendance and self-directed reading of UpToDate really worth one year of residency as one study shows. Neil Dunavin (@ndunavin), intern in internal medicine shares his view at InternTips.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that

or

Young doctors in debt who feel inadequate are managing misdiagnosed smoking bats suffering from anxiety disorder, instead of worrying about vaginal discharge in teen girls

Louise Norris (@LouiseNorris) suggests that in order to cut health care spending, perhaps one of the things we need to look at is how we train doctors. She thinks that if new doctors didn’t graduate with hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans and work for peanuts for their first few years after med school, maybe they wouldn’t need $250,000 salaries.

Medaholic (@medaholic) is a medical student who has recently been shadowing practicing physicians. This experience was full of emotions like inadequacy and inspiration which Medaholic generously shares with us.

David Williams (@HealthBizBlog) at Health Business Blog thinks that the fact Sanofi-Aventis is trying to get into so-called “disease-management” field is a sign of serious trouble they are in.

What do you do when a colleague transfers a completely misdiagnosed patient to you? Happy Hospitalist (@happyhospitalis), a board certified internist, tries to realize why such mistakes happen, help his colleagues understand that an alternative course of action may have been better, and make sure they never do the same mistake again.

Do you know what Fourth-Hand Smoke is? Hurry up to Clinical Cases and Images Blog to see the answer.

Dr Am Ang Zhang (@croachcatcher) brings some distressing news about bats dying at alarming rates. She wonders about the ecological implications of it all.

Philip Hickey, a retired psychologist writes an extensive and informative article about anxiety disorders. Here is just a little taste of it: “The APA and the pharmaceutical companies have jointly developed this spurious system in which all human problems, including normal reactions to stress, are declared mental illnesses which need to be “treated” with drugs”.

Finally, Teen Health 411 brings the facts about vaginal discharge all teen girls should know.

That’s it

We hope you have enjoyed the Grand Rounds Diversity Edition. Thanks again to everyone who submitted their articles. There were posts from physicians, nurses, patients, librarians, lawyers, MBAs, health insurance professionals and even priests written in the forms of essays, reviews, critiques and surprisingly poems. If this doesn’t demonstrate the beautiful diversity of the health/medical blogosphere, we don’t know what does. The best way to keep enjoying it is to follow Grand Rounds in the future. The next edition will be hosted at Healthcare Technology News.

We will be hosting Grand Rounds, the weekly rotating carnival of the best of the medical blogosphere. A blog carnival is a special collection of blog posts that share a common theme but are written by different authors.

When?

Grand Round will be hosted at Health Blogs Observatory on Tuesday, May 12. Submissions are accepted until 11 AM (GMT-0) on Monday, May 11.

How?

The theme of our edition is “Diversity”. We want to demonstrate how rich, colorful, multidimensional and diverse the health/medical blogosphere truly is. So please send us your dearest posts, the ones that genuinely reflect your style and personality, no matter the subject. We will include one post per blog submitted using the form below.

Say It Loud – I Blog and I’m Proud

His goals were:

1. to assess the degree to which information postings on health blogs were expert moderated, potentially influenced by industry sponsorship (both drug industry and general industry sponsorship) or influenced by other factors, notably political partisanship
2. to assess the degree to which blogs protected users’ personal health
3. to compare the degree to which popular health blogs published and commented on clinically relevant news as compared with popular Canadian newspapers

Methodology
Neil identified the 100 most popular English-language health blogs and reviewed the top 50 according to his blog governance algorithm. Using Alexa he also calculated the three month average traffic rank for each blog.

Results

1. More than 90% of examined health blogs have no drug industry sponsorship or overt partisanship that is readily detectable by the user. Sixty percent of the most popular health blogs are moderated partially or fully by experts, usually practicing clinicians. Around 45% of the health blogs offer users clear confidence regarding the privacy of user-submitted content.
2. Major Canadian newspapers (on average) covered 37% of what clinical experts considered critically important medical news in 2007. The most popular 50 health blogs, on average, covered just 23% of these stories. However, general interest blogs fare at least as well as and usually significantly better than general interest newspapers in reporting critical medical stories.
3. Most popular blogs are not those that are all things to all people.
4. Expert moderation has a positive difference to the quality of health blogs regarding governance and user popularity.

Conclusion

The author proposes a strategic framework for a long lasting patient centered blog which suggests that, beyond the good governance practices, content accountability and journalistic best practices are important.

Reference
Inside the health blogosphere: quality, governance and the new innovation leaders. Seeman N. Healthc Q. 2009;12:99-106.

To learn more read the full version of the “Use of Facebook in academic health sciences libraries” article published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association.

If you are a first time visitor of the Health Blogs Observatory, please be free to explore our site, submit your blog to our directory, or even contribute to our research.

This edition is special to us not only because it is our first time as hosts, but also because both founders of the Health Blogs Observatory are at this very moment at the actual carnival. Each February for the last 26 years one of the biggest carnivals in the world is held in Rijeka, Croatia. The main event of Rijeka’s Carnival is The International Carnival Parade which takes place in the city center today at 12 am, Central European Time (UTC+1). The great thing is that you can watch the live webcast of the parade, and maybe even see us. We will be dressed as the ambulance crew

And now, without further delay, here are the great articles which compose another unforgettable edition of the Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival.

Personal Health Record (PHR)

David O’Reilly @IntelliMedBlog conducted a poll on LinkedIn to find out what people think the use and control of personal health information will look like ten years from now. You can see the screen shot of the actual pool on the left, but to find out the results please visit the Intelligent Medicine Blog.

@JohnSharp has informed us at his eHealth Blog about the speach Roni Zeiger of Google Health gave at the Towards an Electronic Patient Record conference. He has predicted that the adoption of PHRs will follow the path of online banking, from early suspicion to general acceptance.

When we talk about PHRs, there is no escaping Google, who is the major player in this area. @DanaBlankenhorn questions if Google Health is evil and corrupt as some are trying to make it appear.

It’s Twitter time

Michelle Kraft @krafty is wondering how to use Twitter within medical libraries or health care. At her blog, The Krafty Librarian, she draws inspiration from the 140 Health Care Uses for Twitter by Phil Baumann.

When Naimul Huq @naimul first heard of Twitter he thought it was a waste of time. Well he certainly doesn’t feel the same way now. Find out why at Crumple it up Blog.

Dawson, the creator of the Medical Student Blog @medicalstudent, brought PubMed to Twitter. He created an application which literally lets you search for PubMed articles using Twitter.

If all this talk about Twitter made you want to, well, Twitter. Check out the list of health and medical twitterers from David Bradley @ sciencebase.

Research

People from the International Council on Medical & Care Compunetic @icmccupdate have informed us of an interesting analysis of hospitals that use Web2.0 services to connect with consumers.

Here at the Health Blogs Observatory @HBObservatory we have written about the scientific paper by librarian Laura Cobus in which she describes her success in implementing blogs and wikis in a graduate public health course.

Gobbledygook is a blog on scientific publishing in the internet age written by Martin Fenner @mfenner. Recently he conducted an interview with Moshe Pritsker, the CEO, Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), a peer-reviewed, free access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format.

Clinical Librarian Shamsha Damani @shamsha has notified us about the new initiative from the BMJ Publishing Group which should make Evidence Based Medicine easy to swallow.

Web sites, tools, services….

Opening shop

VirologyWiki – wiki about viruses and viral disease
PeRSSonalized Medicine – a free tool of Webicina.com that lets you select your favourite medical resources and read the latest news and articles in one personalized place
PubMed Search & News Widget – use it in many social networks, websites and intranet sites, everywhere where it is allowed to put up html code
Health Blogs Observatory – online research laboratory devoted to examination of the health blogosphere

Have you heard about

Yale Image Finder – search PubMed Central articles for images
HINARI – a commendable endeavor on behalf of the WHO to bring to the carers in developing countries the power of evidence either at no cost or greatly reduced costs
Labmeeting – a social bookmarking site to manage and share journal articles
TrialX – free service to enable patients find new treatments in their area
ProQolid – Patient Reported Outcome and Quality of Life Instruments Database

This & That

At Nature Network’s Science Blogging conference last August in London, a call was put out to get senior scientists to start blogging. Corie Lok, Senior Editor of Nature Network, tells us about the winners of the Challenge.

At his blog, Science of the Invisible, Alan Cann has made available his report titled Assessment 2.0: Wikipedia writing projects.

Also now available are audio recording (MP3) and slides (PDF) from the webinar “Achieving Openness: Communicating With People Using Social Networks For Health & Wellness” – said @shwen.

Did you know that there are numerous discussions going on about “web native” lab notebooks? @CameronNeylon explains everything, so all that is left for you is to contribute.

John D. Halamka brings us the joint statement of the chairs of CCHIT, HITSP, and NeHC (AHIC Successor) about their commitment to work together on the healthcare IT.

Finally, GooMedic.com has a nice overview of the iPhone and its medical applications.

That’s all folks!

Hope you had as much fun reading this edition of the Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival as we had putting it together. Please consider submitting your articles to one of the future Medicine 2.0 blog carnivals or even hosting one yourself.

Her course was held in the computer lab with a goal to teach students effective information seeking skills and search strategies focused on public health outcomes. Alongside the lectures, students were required to write their own blogs and create their own wikis. These assignments were conceived to enhance their informational retrieval skills and critically appraisal, as well as to allow them to self-publish and collaborate.

It comes as no surprise that students were very satisfied with this elective course, which should in the future be incorporated into the overall curriculum. Laura Cobus has showed how a creative teacher can advance health education by utilizing Web 2.0 applications. Our only wish is for others to follow her path.

If you by any chance don’t know what a blog carnival is, we suggest that you read about it at Wikipedia.

We encourage you to learn more about us and our goals. Since the success of this website depends on people like you, please consider joining our community and helping us achieve our goals:

• To conduct annual surveys of health bloggers, which would be designed, analyzed and openly published by the bloggers themselves
• To create the most comprehensive web directory of health blogs
• To nurture new ideas and facilitate future research collaborations between health bloggers

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Abstract

Background: Blogs are the major contributors to the large increase of new websites created each year. Most blogs allow readers to leave comments and, in this way, generate both conversation and encourage collaboration. Despite their popularity, however, little is known about blogs or their creators.
Objectives: To contribute to a better understanding of the medical blogosphere by investigating the characteristics of medical bloggers and their blogs, including bloggers’ Internet and blogging habits, their motivations for blogging, and whether or not they follow practices associated with journalism.
Methods: We approached 197 medical bloggers of English-language medical blogs which provided direct contact information, with posts published within the past month. The survey included 37 items designed to evaluate data about Internet and blogging habits, blog characteristics, blogging motivations, and, finally, the demographic data of bloggers.
Pearson’s Chi-Square test was used to assess the significance of an association between 2 categorical variables. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was utilized to reveal the relationship between participants’ ages, as well as the number of maintained blogs, and their motivation for blogging. The Mann-Whitney U test was employed to reveal relationships between practices associated with journalism and participants’ characteristics like gender and pseudonym use.
Results: A total of 80 (42%) of 197 eligible participants responded. The majority of responding bloggers were white (75%), highly educated (71% with a Masters degree or doctorate), male (59%), residents of the United States (72%), between the ages of 30 and 49 (58%), and working in the healthcare industry (67%). Most of them were experienced bloggers, with 23% (18/80) blogging for 4 or more years, 38% (30/80) for 2 or 3 years, 32% (26/80) for about a year, and only 7% (6/80) for 6 months or less. Those who received attention from the news media numbered 66% (53/80). When it comes to best practices associated with journalism, the participants most frequently reported including links to original source of material and spending extra time verifying facts, while rarely seeking permission to post copyrighted material. Bloggers who have published a scientific paper were more likely to quote other people or media than those who have never published such a paper (U= 506.5, n1= 41, n2= 35, P= .016). Those blogging under their real name more often included links to original sources than those writing under a pseudonym (U= 446.5, n1= 58, n2= 19, P= .01). Major motivations for blogging were sharing practical knowledge or skills with others, influencing the way others think, and expressing oneself creatively.
Conclusions: Medical bloggers are highly educated and devoted blog writers, faithful to their sources and readers. Sharing practical knowledge and skills, as well as influencing the way other people think, were major motivations for blogging among our medical bloggers. Medical blogs are frequently picked up by mainstream media; thus, blogs are an important vehicle to influence medical and health policy.

Slideshow