Syndicom

SpineConnect’s new features were designed with you in mind – to improve overall usability, and make posting cases faster and easier. Want to learn more? Read about the enhancements and additions to our case creation process in the latest release of SpineConnect.

Streamlined Case Creation…
means the time it takes to submit a case [...]

Whether during a meeting, on a specialized project, group research, non-profit committees, you’ve witnessed it! He/she comes out of the woodwork and: engages, challenges, warms up the debate, cools it down, makes you think, stops you in your tracks, brings in an expert, makes a great point, tells you like it is, uses technology, teaches, [...]

I wanted to revisit one of my favorite presentations/studies on physician and web2.0. Manhattan Research has more than just documented the desires of phycisians and web2.0, but they added insight into why… In their paper, they mention five important trends on phycisian communities:

1. This isn’t a “new internet”, just an evolved one…
Here it is all [...]

“To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.” Milton Glaser.
What better way should I start a posting about design and its influence on our lives/shopping/communication/emotions/ETC. than a quote about it. But ahhh, design has come so far. Remember when we could all purchase something designed by engineers for [...]

“Most research is collaborative…” At least that’s Sir Paul Nurse’s view as presented on this Vanderbilt University video series. And who could disagree? Sharing ideas, information and resources enables intellectual capital growth, which means efficiency. But is the concept of collaboration too distant for most researchers? In other words, is it Practical, Professional and Programmatic?

Practical:
It [...]

For a WOWing and critical look into what may be the future of business organization design, check out David Armano’s blog on THE SOCIAL busines.
He starts off the conversation with an idea:
Imagine if a company like GM, was at the core “social”. Not just participating in “social media”—but through every part of their business ecosystem, [...]

Case, cases and more cases = orthopedic collaboration. Syndicom.com has done it again. We have launched ArthroplastyConnect.com, a Community of Practice (CoP) for orthopedic surgeons to collaborate on difficult, unique, teaching, novel, research, innovative, design-oriented, clinical, (and more) cases. Already the membership has taken off and so have the collaborations. Hundreds of images, case commentary [...]

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I had the opportunity to talk with Lawrence Sherman (you can follow him on twitter now if you want). A medical education expert who took me through how the internet is changing continuing medical education (CME), who to follow and what trade shows to go to.
As CEO of the Physicians Academy, Lawrence [...]

Depending upon your vantage point, the topic of health care can be a complex issue, or a question of simple and immediate need. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of separate entities participating in the American health care discourse, all jostling to place their interests as paramount, most representatives of industry.
While it is easy to [...]

It’s that time again….. Spring time…. and conference time. This week, the Syndicom crew are at the AAOS (American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons) conference in Las Vegas to connect with others about leading edge technologies and techniques; discuss product development; attend demonstrations and collaborate with other companies from around the world. The AAOS annual meeting [...]

Over a year ago now e-patient Dave finished reading a white paper about the nature and status of the e-patient and its connection to participatory medicine. The white paper offered up several main conclusions — that patients are valuable contributors and providers should recognize them as such; that the art of empowering patients is [...]

Last week we discussed how surgical communities draw in innovators, an insight gleaned from our discussions with Dr Paul Slosar and his own involvements with innovation and mentoring within the Spine Connect community. The Syndicom team have just returned from the Emerging Technologies in Spine Summit where they hosted an afternoon session on Surgeonuity and [...]

Last week, we had a terrific discussion with Dr. Paul Slosar about his involvement with SpineConnect, among other things. He spoke meaningfully about innovation, mentorship, and interdisciplinary interaction as means to enhance patient care. Even more, he suggested spine communities help physicians, administrators, and medical device companies come to a shared vision to serve their [...]

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This week we had the very distinct pleasure of speaking with Paul Slosar, MD of the San Francisco Spine Institute and the Spine Care Group. Paul is a well known and very active Spine Connect user, working in and across multiple and diverse public groups as well as with emerging technologies in [...]

Innovation happens through connection. As such, we are on the road again with an exciting conference schedule!

First, Emerging Technologies in Spine Summit will be held February 4-7 2009 in Steamboat Springs for the Summit’s 5th anniversary! On the first day of the conference, Syndicom is holding a meeting with Surgeon Experts from 1230 to discuss opportunities [...]

There is much talk these days about the recent yearlong study revealing that surgeons following a 19-step checklist in the operating room can reduce the rate of deaths and complications by one-third. But what does the checklist mean for our current understanding of communication and collaboration in the clinic?

The yearlong, eight-nation project lead by Atul Gawande, [...]

What does it mean to be a surgeon? And what does it mean to do surgery?
Do you love being in the operating room? Do you like the art of medicine? Do you like the technical side of medicine? Do you like the challenge of medicine? Do you love helping people, perhaps saving people, through [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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: [...]

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 from [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

There are good things coming out of Harvard these days. I’m not just taking about the, well, everything that they do. If you listen to their content creation machine HarvardBusiness.org then you know. One of their most recent podcasts, described how Hollywood has been one of the longest running innovators. But, at times, has been [...]

The advances in web collaboration can’t be understated. We can text, chat, post cases, comment, reply, email, web conference, teleconference, second-life-it, skype-it, google-it, tag-it, upload, download and ftp-it. More businesses than not have reaped the collaboration rewards, however, as a culture are we neglecting the value of the face-to-face meeting?

Try this: the next time you’re [...]

Last weekend I joined up with some of my favorite people in the world to run the Gunnsion Gorge- a black rock canyon filled with clear, cold, tumbling water. The pools and rapids make for excellent fun in a boat, and river otter, big horned sheep, and other families of charismatic megafauna frequent the scene.
My [...]

So, I’m sitting at my desk when I get a call from a reporter in Durango, Colorado. She quickly confirms who I am and asks, “can you tell me more about what Syndicom does?” I’m taken by surprise and answer. A few more questions later and her part of the call is finished. I ask, [...]

Collaboration depends on the people you’re working with, right… So what happens when you’re working with someone that you don’t quite “gel” with?

Perhaps you’ve taken one of those workplace personality tests? What about the Myers-Brigg? If you’re lucky, you spent a few hours with a gypsy named “moonbeam” who gave you insight into your inner [...]

The Committee on Medicine and Public Health created a monograph which elucidates and presents collaborative strategies and efforts/activities of medical communities which focus on particular problems/solutions. The outcomes of the specific collaborative initiatives bring light to a larger collaborative vision to improve healthcare.

According to the monograph, the Committee on Medicine and Public Health created a [...]

Sunday mornings deserve most the credit. Call them what you will: “slow Sunday mornings”, “day of rest” or “beginning of your week”. For me, they are spent researching, reading and rewinding. I try to go deep so to speak. I pull back and think about ideas. My time includes a few Google searches to find [...]

Remember fire drills in grade school? The principal would come to the front of the auditorium and explain the escape method, goals and how to help each other. You were 10, so about half of what she said sunk in. The day of the test would’ve been a Wednesday (seemed like they always were). The [...]