Blogging, general - The Best Health Care Blogs and Where to Find Them

Here, for better or best, in sickness and in health, are my picks for the best health care blogs and blog aggregating sites. Most good bloggers are also blog aggregators. i.e. they refer to other bloggers and their comment sections contain entries from other bloggers.


Read their blogs, and you’ll inevitably come across other bloggers. Good bloggers are by nature incestuous – they interconnect intimately with other bloggers. Indeed, the blogosphere is a collective term encompassing all blogs and their interconnections. Bloggers exist together as a connected community(or as a collection of connected communities). That’s why blogging has become a form of social networking – of consulting and commiserating with fellow professionals.


I haven’t included my own blog www.medinnovationblog.blogspot.com in the following list of best blogs. That wouldn’t be kosher.


1. Health Care Blog (www.thehealthcareblog.com)


Matthew Holt, this blog’s creator, is a British-born health care analyst and futurist, with 14 years of experience in U.S. health care. He spent time with Alain Enthoven and at the Institute for the Future and hangs out in San Francisco. He started his blog in 2003 and speaks with an authoratative, acerbic, and humoros voice on everything imaginable under the health care sun – policy, technology, and life on the mean streets of health care businesses.

2) Val Jones and the Voice of Reason (see www.revolutionheath.com)

Val Jones, MD, a Canadian-born psyhiatrist, has been senior medical directors of Revolution Health, Inc, Steve Case’s consumer website, since it began. You can catch her blog on the Revolution Health website and also subscribe to her Best of the Blogs newsletter. Val triples as a website professional executive, a personal blogger and an aggregator of other people’s blogs. At her blog, she give links to the 35 blogs she trusts and reads. She’s a bottom-up person who believes doctors and consumers hold their health destinies in their own hands.

3) The Doctor Weighs In (www.thedoctorweighsin.com)

Patricia R. Salber, MD, is an emergency room physician who has held numerous executive positions for health care organizations, including Kaiser and the College of Emergency Room Physicians. She and her husband, Dov Michaeli, an oncology researcher, live in San Francisco. She started her blog, now known at TDWI, several years ago to share her thoughts on fat, fitness, health, and longevity. Recently her blog has offered more diversified fare by featuring blog hosts such as her husband, Brian Klepper, PhD, a nationally known health reformer and analysist, and William Bestermann, an internist who implements“best practice” techniques in a large multispecialty group to avert or minimize cardiovascular catastrophes.

4) Kevin, MD (www. kevinmd.com/blog)
Kevin Pho, MD, a practicing family physician in his 30s at the Nashua Medical Group in New Hampshire is widely considered to the dean of medical bloggers. Among fellow bloggers, he is a hero because of his generosity in citing their blogs, many of which he reads daily. His self-effacing and candid comments on the true and sometimes ugly faceof American health care have captured the attention of the media and public as well. In the process, he has made his personal blogging profitable by attracting a number of paying sponsors.

5) Sermo.com. (www.sermo.com)

This isn’t a blog, but it attracts a number of bloggers, including myself. Sermo.com is the brain child of Daniel Palestrant, MD, a general surgeon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who thought doctors ought to have a free-wheeling online forum, accessible only to licensed physicians, where they could exchange their views as to what they really thought was going on in American health care and where they could share views of fascinating cases, technological issues, and matters of health reform. Sermo.com is an example of a new phenomenon in the Internet world known as social networking where doctors and others can consult and commiserate with each other. Only doctors licensed to practice can participate in sermo.com.
I conclude with a list of other blogs, and blog aggregation sites worthy of your attention.

• www.medgadgets.com - features latest news of technological innovations transforming the health system.

• Google reader and google blog searcher – Google has unleashed the blogosphere by making it possible for anybody to create their own blog free of charge.

• www.medweblog.com – Everything you ever wanted to know about medical blog content and how to start a blog.

• www. trusted.med.network.com – This is an emerging social network of physicians empowering physician relationships with other health care sectors.

• www. healthcarewonkreview.com - a biweekly compendium of the best of health blogs. More than two dozen health infrastructure, insurance, technology, and managed care bloggers participate by contributing their best recent blog postings to a roving digest, with each issue hosted at a different participant's blog. For participants, it's a way to network and share ideas, and for those readers who don't live in this space every day, it's a way to sample some of the latest thinking and the "best of the best."


• And here are other medical blogs that come heavily recommended.

www.docnotes.net
www.docnotes.com
www. pundit.com
www. repairinghealthcaresystem.com
www.thecheerfulconologist
www.theonion.com
www.blogboyrgmi.com
www.emergiblog.com
www.emergiblog.com
www.pandabearMD.com
www.thephysicianexcutive.dom
www.runningahospital.com
www.the unintelligentdesign.com
www.urgeonsblog.com
www.moofie.com
www.sutureforaliving.com

Summary

Physicians may find the following blogs and websites useful - www.thehealthcareblog,com, www. revolutionhealth.com containing Val Jones and the Voice of Reason blog, www.the doctorweighsin.com, www.kevinmd.com, and www.sermo.com. Most of these blogs are also blog aggregating site, meaning you can find other timely blogs mentioned in them. Other medical and health care blogs are also listed. Health care blogging represents a new Internet phenomenon – social networking among professionals so they can consult and commiserate with each other in an innovative, rank, soul-searching, non-judgmental,and no-holds barred fashion.
See www.medinnovationblog.blogspot.com for full story