“What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all the man hath, his house, his wife, his children.” (William Blake, poet).
If I was to ask you what it meant to be a surgeon [...]
As we approach the holiday season, let’s spare a thought for all those to whom our patients are connected. Recently, I called my pediatrician to set up a well child visit for my son to find out he is on leave as he is having back surgery. An older gentleman who suffers from scoliosis, I [...]
Last week, we wrote about the issues of posting, participation and presence in online communities such as SpineConnect. Recently I was commenting on a blog post about crowdsourcing and participatory medicine and raised the question — what is the difference between crowdsourcing and collaboration? I did so, because over the last few months, I had [...]
“to be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?” Hamlet, act 3, scene 1.
When you arrive at an acquaintance’s party where there are a lot of people unfamiliar [...]
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, in his book Weaving the Web, claims that his original vision of the web was one of collaboration. He wanted people to participate in two-way sharing of information and decades after the web was born, web 2.0 is breathing life back into his original vision. Medicine has always [...]
Last month Jane Sarasohn-Kahn posted about how medical technology is the #1 factor driving up health spending in the US according to the Center for Studying Health System Change and their recent report, High and Rising Health Care Costs: Demystifying U.S. Health Care Spending.
It seems that these pieces of hardware used by surgeons in curing, [...]
Earlier this month, Businessweek published a major story on Health 2.0 and the rise of patient power in reforming the way health is practiced. Drawing extensively on their case of Patientslikeme, they discussed how members of the social network had enrolled themselves in their own clinical trial for lithium treatments of ALS, issues surrounding Pharma, [...]
Sensibility: The ability to feel or perceive stimuli; a keen intellectual perception; mental or emotional responsiveness toward something, such as the feelings of another.; receptiveness to impression, whether pleasant or unpleasant; acuteness of feeling; refined awareness and appreciation in matters of feeling; the quality of being affected by changes in the environment.
Last week, I wrote [...]
For some time now, you may have noticed a small announcement on the right side of the SpineConnect community page when you arrived to post or review cases about OneSpine. OneSpine is an organization dedicated to improving spinal health in the developing world. Their goal is to provide access to spine care for a greater [...]
As I wrote earlier on this blog, one of the most liberating facets of web 2.0 technologies is their disruptive influence on the time-space continuum. This facet of their nature, coupled with the need to reach patients where they are, how they are, in remote, rural or just dispersed locations gave birth to the [...]
Listen to the podcast:
This week we were fortunate enough to speak to Gary Ghiselli, MD, moderator of the Young Surgeons Group on SpineConnect. Gary is a board-certified, fellowship-trained spine surgeon specializing in cervical, thoracic and lumbar surgery with a subspecialty interest in complex deformity and degenerative conditions of the cervical spine. He works with Denver [...]
This past weekend, the folks from Syndicom headed to Nevada to attend the annual SMISS (Society for Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery) conference and catch up with friends there! Did you know that MIS started to take off about 10 years ago?
The conference involved the usual presentations, networking opportunities, exhibitions and an intensive two-day course demonstrating [...]
I read a lot of health 2.0 related material and recently three things have caught my eye which I think are relevant to changes we may begin to see in healthcare soonish. First, the number of health 2.0 consumers has jumped; second, I wanted to share a recent entrant into this space — icyou – [...]
I have been meaning to catch everyone up on the news this month so this week I have two tidbits to share in the digest…
First up, as you may know, a couple of weeks ago, while on a whirlwind conferencing tour, Walker and Scott jetted out to San Francisco to attend the Health 2.0 conference [...]
Why do people join communities or groups? Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs gives us some clues — there are those pesky survival needs around safety, shelter, food etc but then there are also middle order needs of belonging and esteem as well the most important of all, self actualization. Recently, I conducted a survey of [...]
A recent study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research detailed the requirements and services available for optimizing how scientific collaborations are established on Facebook. Facebook????? Yes, Facebook. You read it right! The researchers found that beyond expertise…..
1. Compatibility in personality, work style, and productivity were essential;
2. Communication was also central in finding the right [...]
In the last blog, we discussed the impact technology has on participatory medicine and ended with the idea that what was lacking to really bring health 2.0 into full force were the networks of networks. Alongside concerns around technology expressed in the end session of the conference, were concerns about people. As Clay Shirky writes [...]
After the successful health 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week, there have been several different “where to next?” discussions across the blogosphere. Accompanying these discussions are articles such as the one in Newsweek recently on web 2.0 and the coming of health 2.0, emphasizing “health as a social concept” and therefore, its commitment [...]
Just as they got back from Toronto, Syndicom’s CEO Scott Capdevielle, and Walker Thompson, VP of Sales and Marketing, went a-roving once more…this time to the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week. Walker’s been texting and tweeting all day to bring us live news from the conference which is dedicated to innovations in [...]
Hopefully everyone has recovered now from your journeys to and during the annual NASS conference just past in Toronto. During the meeting, NASS recognized three of its members for their extraordinary contributions to the field of spine care. Eugene J. Carragee, MD, of Palo Alto received the Leon Wiltse award for excellence in leadership and [...]
There’s some debate currently around the exact nature of health care reform that we may expect with the “googlization of everything”. According to Manhattan Research this week, a new study of “cybercitizens” shows that more U.S. adults used the Internet than doctors to obtain health and medical information over the past year; a noticeable change [...]
Recently Jane Sarasohn-Kahn over at HealthPopuli posted a blog about a new report on the Medical Device Industry by Ernst and Young, entitled Pulse of the industry: US medical technology report 2008.
The report argues that while the medical technology sector is one of the most innovative within the US economy, it too could suffer at [...]
Camaraderie = from the French, camarade or comrade, circa 1840, meaning a spirit of friendly good-fellowship.
Ah yes, the first years out of school are always the hardest and you find yourself screaming silently ‘they never told me that during my training!’ But in all fairness, they couldn’t because the diversity of the ‘real world’ and [...]
Yes, that’s right…. more news from Syndicom and SpineConnect(TM) about to hit your email inboxes as we prepare for the upcoming NASS conference in Toronto next week (October 14-17)! Hope to see you all there - remember it is booth 1311!
In more news, the COLLABORATIVE CASE OF THE QUARTER was posted by Alpesh Patel and [...]
Susannah Fox, an associate director with the Pew Internet and American Life Project and founder of e-patients.net recently completed a research study focusing on e-patients and estimates that between 75% and 80% of Internet users have looked online for health information. More importantly perhaps, people who have a lot at stake, or who live with [...]
This week Syndicom and Titan Spine announced that they will be working together to implement an online surgeon-to-surgeon collaboration strategy to enhance surgeon understanding and implementation of Titan Spine’s Endoskeleton (R) TA Interbody Fusion Device.
The idea here, Walker Thompson, VP of Sales and Marketing for Syndicom states, “…is to connect experts to surgeons who are [...]
The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently released a report on the impact of web 2.0 on what they describe as ‘participatory medicine’. According to the authors of the report, Susannah Fox and Mary Madden, the inroad web 2.0 technologies have made in the health arena as well as their transformative potential will result [...]
Recently we were introduced to a very fine blog by Dr Kenneth Cohn, www.healthcarecollaboration.com, and after reading through a series of his posts, were inspired to consider our understandings of collaboration vs. partnership. As healthcare moves more towards this notion of ‘partnering’ be it between physicians and hospitals as Dr Cohn discusses, or between physicians [...]
RNcentral released this week their list of Top 50 health 2.0 blogs. As I read through the list, I was interested in its diversity and also the youth of some of the major players. But I was also interested in how this blog intersected with several others I have read recently heralding the demise of [...]
Two recent articles on iHealthbeat this month discuss the ways physicians use the Internet hint at the fact, that as a group, physicians are starting to use the Internet and web 2.0 technologies in particular, like many of their patients. According to Manhattan Research, in 2006 64% of doctors went online to find information on [...]
In one of the final chapters of Groundswell, Li and Bernoff describe the future where the social media of web 2.0 are embedded in every activity on mobile devices and into the real world, where social networks maintain our connections, feeds inform us constantly of any new information, all transactions will be rated and reviewed [...]
As a followup to last week’s discussion of the annual conference of the Scoliosis Research Society last week in Salt Lake City, I thought we would get a report from Syndicom’s VP of Sales and Marketing, Walker Thompson on his experiences at the conference!
K: Walker, you recently attended the annual conference of the Scoliosis Research [...]
Spine surgeons involved on the www.SpineConnect.com network wanted to dig a little deeper and explore the emergence of internet based collaboration in surgical decision making and new technology training. This meant surveying SpineConnect users (Spine surgeons) to explore the impact of how www.SpineConnect.com changed their surgical plan or provided additional information in order to learn [...]
Last week we asked how many people in the SpineConnect community classified themselves as creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators or inactives. Building on the numbers, this week we wanted to discuss the list of Syndicom ‘homes’ listed to the right of this blog. You will notice now that you can join Syndicom and your colleagues [...]
As an avid follower of health 2.0 and medicine 2.0 news, I was inundated last week with reports, tweets and blogs from the Medicine 2.0 conference in Toronto. Medicine 2.0 is an international gathering focused on web 2.0 technologies and their impact on health and medicine. It is organized and co-sponsored by several journals and [...]
Welcome to Syndicom’s first podcast in its 2008 series!
Listen to the podcast:
In this interview, Walker Thompson, VP Sales and Marketing at Syndicom sits down to chat with Dr. Ray Miles from UC Berkeley, author of the book “Collaborative Entrepreurship”. In this conversation, Dr Miles discusses the companies which inspired the book (set in 2010) and [...]
“The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration.” Said Tim O’Reilly, arguably the Godfather of web2.0. But how to bring about the amazing effects of collaboration with all these tools? Oh, what is a manager to do?
With new products, innovative marketing programs and “business as usual” comes teams [...]
Or perhaps one of the 18% “creators”? Maybe you are a “joiner”, as are 25% of US adults online?
Recently I revisited Groundswell and Li and Bernoff’s social technographics ladder where they define classes of web 2.0 participants according to their activity or contribution to the technologies with which they associate. I thought we might [...]
When we think about centers of excellence, what comes to mind?
State of the art buildings and equipment? Innovative research projects and programs? The sharpest minds on the planet? Urban or metropolitan locations? All of the above? These all sound like extraordinary attributes and strengths to house in one place but what could be the [...]
One of the health 2.0 bloggers I follow, Bertalan Mesko at ScienceRoll, recently uploaded a presentation on Slideshare– The impact of web 2.0 on medicine and healthcare, demonstrating the difference web 2.0 technologies are making to medical education and medical practice.
One of the main components of this revisioning of medical education involves web based communities, [...]
A recent post on www.ceoforum.com by Les Williamson, Managing Director CISCO NZ and AUS, highlighted what all CEO’s should know: collaboration is web2.0. The post goes on to illustrate the past, present and future of the internet. The breakdown was significant, because Williamson was able to highlight what a lot of us web-people already know: [...]
You’ve got a dilemma. You are faced with a challenging case. You can’t decide which instrument to use. Who do you turn to for advice? Do you choose an expert? A colleague? A peer? A friend? All of the above? You call them. Not in their office. Probably in surgery. Where do you turn now? [...]
One of the cruxes of business process today is the quandary regarding innovation: in a time where true innovation seems fleeting, as if its all been done before, from where do the true quantum leaps emerge? Images of a CEO with a very large, pulsating brain sitting in a locked room with a chalkboard, a pot [...]
One of my mountain biking artist friends is often overheard telling others on the trail when encountering a technical section, “speed is your friend”. Our family physician was also often overheard saying ‘more haste, less speed’. These two diverse expressions of professional artistry revolve around the experience of ‘coodinated velocity’ or the speed that comes [...]
Consider the following…(From Manhattan Research and Greystone.net)
99% of physicians are online for personal or professional purposes, and 83% consider the Internet essential to their practice.
Physicians are turning to the web and their Blackberrys for clinical information, increasingly using them to replace physical sources such as journals, textbooks, drug references and conferences.
Physicians who participate in social [...]
“If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” Sir Isaac Newton.
In making this statement, Sir Isaac Newton paid homage to the collaborative nature of all innovation and development. These are not solo activities. We do not have the capacity to see all angles and [...]
“In flow we feel totally involved, lost in a seemingly effortless performance. Paradoxically, we feel 100% alive when we are so committed to the task at hand that we lose sight of time, of our interests, even of our existence”
M. Czikszentmihalyi ” Good business: Leadership, flow and the making of meaning.”
When was the last time [...]
Donald Schon in his book, Educating the Reflective Practitioner, argues that in considering professional practice solely as a process of rational problem solving, we ignore the artistic process of problem setting, or how we choose the decision to be made, the ends to be met and how we will get there. This artistic process is [...]
When we consider how work gets done in the medical realm, we very often focus solely on ‘the physician’, ‘the nurse’, or ‘the surgeon’ and consider them as individual actors. But is this a fair representation of the work they do and the people they are? Should they act as solo professionals or are those [...]