Best of Medical Blogs - weekly review and blog carnival

The “Best of Medical Blogs - weekly review and blog carnival” is a weekly summary of the best posts from medical blogs. Feel free to send your suggestions to my email at clinicalcases@gmail.com. Best of Medical Blogs (BMB) is published every Tuesday, just like the old Grand Rounds.

Putting the “A” Back in SOAP Notes: Time to Tackle An Epic Problem

From the inventor of the word “hospitalist”, @Bob_Wachter: “At UCSF Medical Center, we went live with our version of the Epic electronic medical record three months ago. It beats pen and paper, and it beats the EMR system that we traded out (at a cost of a hundred million dollars or so) by a long shot. But the effect I witnessed on patient care and education was less positive.” Read why here: http://goo.gl/HuvUd

Whatever happened to personal contact?

From the surgeon who writes Skeptical Scalpel blog @Skepticscalpel: "No one has time for lunch nowadays and the hospitalist movement has succeeded in eliminating the primary care doctors from the hospital environment. I have been practicing at the same hospital for over three years and have never even met 95% of the local primary care docs. Something is lacking when you aren’t able to attach a face to a name." http://goo.gl/MTS3Z

ACP: Stop making laws telling physicians how to practice medicine

From db's Medical Rants, ACP President, David Bronson, had this to say: "Government doesn't belong in the physician-patient relationship. It's a one-on-one, very personal, very private relationship. The patient has to have confidence the physician is giving them their very best professional advice and judgment." http://goo.gl/3NpOl

On Outcomes

Dr. Wes @doctorwes: It is difficult to follow pre-defined guidelines when there are many, many independent variables that weigh on patient management decisions. Payers want perfect outcomes or they will not pay for care, as if people are widgets on a production line with interchangeable parts. But for the majority of individuals who fall outside the center of normative data sets upon which standards, guidelines, protocols and checklists are based, the doctor and patient must face the reality that there are often no perfect answers for treatment. http://goo.gl/xQFQn

How To Integrate Twitter into Your Workflow

Krafty Librarian: If you have tried to do Twitter for professional communication but you use it through Twitter’s site and it hasn’t gone well, try TweetDeck or Hootsuite. http://goo.gl/3Dw0a

Sherpaa founder: How $1.85M in the bank are not enough to buy 2 Apple workstations http://goo.gl/J6yht

#FOAM Party! (The Future of Medical Education) http://goo.gl/5qZXF

Tweet Pearls of the Week

A good tweet is a terrible thing to waste. The blog Academic Life in Emergency Medicine (@m_lin) started collecting and posting important Twitter pearls in Emergency Medicine and Critical Care from the past week. Here is an example: http://bit.ly/RBhcbo



I think "Tweet Pearls" summary is a good idea although the perceived usefulness of the tweets will obviously vary according to your interest in the topic. The slideshow uses Storify and considering Twitter, Inc.'s increasingly restrictive approach, the ability of some 3rd party services (Storify, Flipboard, etc.) to display tweets may be limited in the future. The easiest approach is to copy/paste the text of the interesting tweets in a blog post but that may be against the Twitter guidelines for the use of their content (tweets) which is actually ours.