Syndicom

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

In 2003, Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs wrote that particular technologies radically reorganized the ways in which individuals cooperated in societies. Rheingold, one of the first scholars to discuss the rise of virtual community in his case study of The Well, is considered an authority on the ways in which society is [...]