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 [...]

Syndicom, the creator of the Web 2.0 case collaboration platforms, SpineConnect.com and ArthoplastyConnect.com, announced a strategic partnership with Bacterin International Inc, an innovative biologic company and manufacturer of elutive bioactive coatings for medical devices. The alliance aims to implement a surgeon-to-surgeon online collaboration strategy for its surgeons to efficiently expedite their understanding of, and case [...]

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 [...]

Syndicom, the creator of the Web 2.0 case collaboration platforms, SpineConnect.com and ArthoplastyConnect.com, announced a strategic partnership with Amedica Corp., – an orthopedic implants company focused on silicon nitride ceramic technologies. The alliance aims to implement a surgeon-to-surgeon online collaboration

strategy for its surgeons to efficiently expedite their understanding of, and case discussions about the [...]

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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 [...]

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 [...]

Yes, that is right! The team from Syndicom spent some of their time at the Emerging Technologies in Spine Summit, capturing the event in photos, conversation and film for all of you there and those who missed out. It’s a great 5 minutes of conference time and chat introducing community members, presentations and SpineConnect members.

At [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Yes, it’s that time again — the Emerging Technologies in Spine Summit is being held from February 4-7, 2009 in Steamboat Springs!
It’s the Summit’s 5th anniversary so we hope to see many of you at the Steamboat Grand to discuss the most current thinking and evidence-based medicine in new technologies related to spine care from [...]

“A culture of separation will collapse of its own incoherence. We need communities of memory that experience time as a continuous flow, a shared rhythm.” -Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart
 
Time is precious. And because doctors provide services to one person after another, it can be a grind. You can lose your larger sense of purpose [...]

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 from [...]

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 [...]