Not a long time ago, I was appointed as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University. That's a mouthful of a title, I know, but I am still proud of it... ;-)The decisive factors for the appointment were undoubtedly my association with the Cleveland Clinic, publications, and the support of the Department Chair and the Section Head. Some online projects were also listed in my CV but I am not sure if they played any role in the mind of the Dean of Academic Affairs who evaluates the applications.
Who knows, may be one day the online Web 2.0 projects will have a similar value to the printed manuscripts. It may sound like a stupid idea now until you realize that some medical bloggers have more readers than some lesser known medical journals. Kevin, MD, for example, has about 2400 visitors per day.
I am happy to see that Cleveland Clinic realizes the power of Web 2.0 -- we have podcasts, videocasts and RSS feeds that constantly search all major outlets for news.
Just think about it. There are more than 58 million iPods sold since 2002, 8 million of them were sold just in the 3rd quarter of 2006. If you are a CEO of one of the top 5 hospitals in America, you definitely want to see the name of your institution when somebody scrolls down the list of podcasts/videocast on the iPod screen. ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, NEJM, Lancet, JAMA, are all there. Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins and Cleveland Clinic also have their entries.
May be one day, any application for an academic appointment will have a special section: "What are your Internet projects?"
Until then, my advice to the medical blogger remains the same: keep on blogging, you make the web a better place.
References:
What IS Web 2.0? Future Tense from American Public Media.
Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine: Student Reflections of Class of 2012 - YouTube http://bit.ly/18cp7Ri
IPod, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
It is spot on to observe that Web 2.0 is going to be a force in medicine, not just the professional community. In fact, out there at the end of the network where health scales, lies the only force great enough to de-balkanize health. Wouldn't it be great if there were a union of health communities that could exert enough pressure to finally make health data portable?
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