Tweeting About Blogging About Facebooking About Digging

Today's (May 27) Gaping Void cartoon (down a ways in the right-hand column) makes an interesting point about blogging and social media, specifically that it's easier these days to write ABOUT social media than to use the tools of social media to "write about something more personal or esoteric."

Instead of idea-driven lives and blogs with content about real topics and original thoughts, we're writing about writing and Tweeting about Tweeting, Digging Digg and Friending Facebooking. It's all 'how to...' and 'why should you...' and "how to score millions of followers...'

We're blogging about blogging and tweeting about tweeting. Self-referentialism running amok. Shall we ask the last person with an original idea to turn out the blogosphere's lights?

Comments

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...

gapingvoid cartoon #378

Buy your own, here.

"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information ...

Health Care Strategist

Search This Blog