Health Discussions Forum

I am grateful to the readers of patrickWeb for years of visits to the blog and providing excellent feedback to me. I especially appreicate hearing about a typo or bad link or something that improves the site for everyone. As you may have detected, I have developed a strong interest in healthcare.  The interest in healthcare is not new — there are currently 54 posts in patrickWeb that are healthcare related. The involvement on the board and committees of Western Connecticut Healthcare has intensified the interest. I am also working on a doctorate in health administration.

About six months ago I learned about Dr. Eric Lutker, a retired psychologist who is my neighbor in Florida. Eric developed a learning institute at the club we belong to where he invites various resident speakers to make a presentation. I was one of his invited speakers and on election day last month I gave a talk about, guess what, the Future of the Internet. Much of my view about the future of the Internet correlates strongly with the future of healthcare, and my talks have gravitated toward the intersection of information technology and clinical technology. The Q&A session after the talk was 75% healthcare related, and afterward Eric suggested we start a blog on the subject. Hence, the Health Discussions Forum was born. Our goal is simple. We plan to post short healthcare related stories about things we read or opinions and reflections we may have. We have opened up the commenting feature of the blog to allow others to comment on what we write or on the comments other readers have written. We are not sure where it will lead but hopefully, it will be the beginning of a dialog on the important issues and innovations emerging in a very important part of all of our lives.

Now for the true confessions part of this posting. Most readers of patrickWeb visit the blog with Google Reader or other blog readers but there are approximately 300 readers who subscribe via email, receiving the entire post by email whenever a new story is created. I outsource this service through a provider called Feedblitz. In my enthusiasm for the new healthcare blog, I configured Feedblitz to send Health Discussion Forum postings to the patrickWeb subscribers. Less than 5% have unsubscribed so I hope that is because the posts were appreciated or at least tolerated. If you are a subscriber and prefer not to get the healthcare posts, you can unsubscribe at the bottom of one of the emails or if you prefer, just let me know and I will take care of it for you. I apologize to anyone that feels they got opted in unknowingly. If you are not a subscriber to Health Discussions Forum and want to give it a try, feel free to subscribe using the form below.

Tags: blogging, forum, health, health care, health discussions, Healthcare, patrickWeb

Health Discussions Forum

A new friend in Florida invited me to give a talk about the Future of the Internet. Approximately 50 people came on election day for a buffet lunch and an informal talk with Q&A. My intensified interest in healthcare has caused me to orient most of the Internet technology examples toward clinical cases or health policy. (The latest slides from my presentation can be found here). The Q&A session was dominated by healthcare questions–it is clearly a subject on most of our minds. My new friend, Eric Lutker, is a retired psychologist and lifelong learner. He suggested that we start a new blog to focus on, guess what? Healthcare. So, the early part of the weekend was spent setting up the new blog which we named the Healthcare Discussions Forum and you can find it at healthdiscussions.net. So far there are a half-dozen posts by Eric and me but Eric has let a few hundred of his friends know about it and by this post I am sharing it with patrickWeb readers. Who knows where this is headed but, if you are interested in what we are doing, please stop by the Healthcare Discussions Forum.

Tags: blogging, florida, health, Healthcare, Internet Technology

Blogging Reflection

My friend Irving commented that he is not so sure about my conclusion in the BioEverything post that the trend toward The Singularity is underway. Irving may be right although the things going on in bioengineering seem to fit the pattern that Ray Kurzweil describes in his book. More on that another time. What got me thinking from Irving’s comment is more about blogging. Now that I have been a student in the doctoral program for a couple of months I can see quite a contrast between scholarly writing with critical thinking and the world of blogging.

In scholarly writing it is important to back your assertions and conclusions with research and to provide a citation for all the reference material that you use. It is also important to think critically about what you read and to not jump to conclusions. Various points of view that you uncover should be compared and contrasted to bring out differences. The goal is to create new knowledge by extending or enhancing what you learn from others.

Blogging is quite a different process. Although it is certainly possible to provide a reference list and citations it is generally a much more informal communications vehicle. A skeptic might call it “winging it”. I am the first to admit that the things I write in my blog are not vetted in any way. The things I say are my opinion. I have many readers who trust me as a source but it is certainly not peer reviewed. An advantage of the blog however is that an author can easily change their mind and express a new opinion as a result of learning or feedback such as was provided by Irving. My book about the Internet took me six months to write. It took the publishing process more than six months to get the book on the shelves of book stores. In the world of Internet technology a lot changes in six months. With the blog as my book follow-on I can write weekly what I have learned and include things that have changed and in some cases caused me to believe something different than what I believed at the time I wrote the book.

The first thing students are advised in the doctoral program is to avoid using Google, Wikipedia, social networking sites, or general purpose websites and instead to use the thousands of journals containing peer reviewed points of view. Fortunately, the university library provides on-line access and search tools to utilize these journals. I completely agree with the university’s point that the easy access and availability of so many search engines can provide an avenue for poor quality work. I also agree with caveat emptor. There is a lot of great information on the web and a lot of not so great and some that is completely fraudulent. The ease of creating and finding information both has risks.

With regard to the peer review process I am not sure it is perfect. Perhaps it is like the jury system. It is not perfect but it is better than the alternatives. Shattell (2010) found that slightly more than 25% of authors found peer reviews to be less than constructive. Editors revealed issues with inconsistency, insufficient feedback to the author, reviewer bias, and disrespectful tone. The Internet has created a more level playing field and it is beginning to have an impact on processes that have previously been considered sacred. I believe the peer review process is critical to the integrity of scholarly learning and to the University of Phoenix Scholar-Practitioner-Leader model but I further believe that the peer-review process will evolve by using the power of the Internet to make the process more inclusive. Dan Cohen at George Mason University (Cohen, 2010, August 23) is one of the advocates for a more open web-based approach to the review of scholarly works. The New York Times article on this subject is enlightening and I am sure there will be significant research done on the points raised in the Times story.

Cohen, P. (2010, August 23, 2010). Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review, New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html

Shattell, M. M., Chinn, P., Thomas, S. P., & Cowling, W. R., III. (2010). Authors’ and editors’ perspectives on peer review quality in three scholarly nursing journals. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 42(1), 58-65. doi: 10.1111/j.1547-5069.2009.01331.x

Tags: bio-engineering, blogging, e-learning, irving wladawsky, irving wladawsky-berger, Kurzweil, peer review, peer reviewed, singularity, university

e-tirement

I was browsing through Pulse on the iPad reading the news and happened upon my friend Irving’s post “Reflections on the “Post-Retirement” Phase of My Life“. It reminded me that I have been meaning to write something similar about my “e-tirement”, a term coined by Irving back in 2001 when I e-tired. Irving wrote his reflection after three years and I have yet to write mine after nearly nine years. This is the problem with “retiring” — there just isn’t enough time to do all you want to do. It reminds me of a reflection by a retired friend who said that he needed to go back to work so that he would have more spare time. This post is intended to share what e-tirement is all about for this one fellow traveler.

For many people, the shift from full-time employment is all about golf. Nothing wrong with that and I can see how happy it makes many people. I played golf once. It was in August 1976 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. That was enough — the day confirmed that golf was not for me and I still do not see it in my future. Like Irving, I have found the shift to be from one primary focus area at one company to multiple focus areas with multiple organizations. As I say on my homepage, I am fortunate to have quite a few affiliations and I get to work with people from whom I am constantly learning.

Serving on boards, both corporate and non-profit, is a very rewarding experience. Not financially — but in the sense that you are able to help with a new idea, or to share an experience that can be helpful. In the old days being a board member meant going to a quarterly meeting and hearing from management and then voting to approve their actions. Governance has evolved significantly and in a positive direction. Directors are expected to read board materials and be prepared for discussion at meetings and to speak out when there is something they don’t understand or agree with. Directors also participate in committees of the board and that is often where more significant ground work takes place. Serving as a member of the planning and technology committees at the regional hospital enables me to be involved at the forefront of the rapid changes in healthcare. Serving on two compensation committees and as chair of the audit committee at two for profit companies is “continuing education”. All things considered I find that board service is a way to remain challenged while at the same time giving back some of the experience gained from nearly four decades at IBM.

When asked for “occupation” on various forms I usually say “consultant” but I don’t make visits and write reports in the classical consulting model. I do maintain a relationship with IBM and act somewhat as an ombudsman at various technology conferences. This enables me to provide an “outsider” perspective to the company from time to time. Not sure if I am an inside outsider or an outside insider. Conferences provide an important dimension of e-tirement for me. Speaking at them or just attending them is a way to stay involved in the industry. There are a lot of good conferences where technologists, investors, business leaders and media come together to network, share ideas, and explore the business impacts of key innovations. Catching up with former colleagues and making new friends is also a highlight. The social networks and many great blogs provide a huge amount of information but there is no substitute for getting together in person and chatting in the hallways during coffee and meal breaks a few times a year. The speaker circuit at company and industry trade group sponsored conferences has suffered an understandable slow down with the economy but hopefully will bounce back during the second half of this year. It has been a privilege to be on the roster of the Washington Speakers Bureau since 2002. Speaking at various not or profit events is also rewarding. Public speaking has been a key part of e-tirement.

And then there are hobbies — so many hobbies, so little time. The patrickWeb blog has many stories about the motorcyling adventures, conducting Beethoven and Mozart, personal computing, gadgets, hiking, geocaching, home automation, reading, and travels. The one hobby that dropped off the list is running — too many marathons and decades of pounding the pavement wore out my knee. Technology came to the rescue and the new oxinium knee has allowed for a full rehabilitation. Although running is not possible, walking and the elliptical cross trainer have enabled me to reach an average 13,000 steps per day — just short of 5 million steps since the new knee was implanted 21 months ago.

All of the hobbies are shared in the blog and, of course, blogging itself is an important hobby. As Irving pointed out, blogging is a way to chronicle one’s activities and connect with many people who have common interests. There are roughly 1,000 stories in patrickWeb dating back to 1998. Someday my grandchildren will find the blog of interest. How about if the Romans and Greeks had been bloggers? What an impact blogging will have hundreds of years from now as researchers try to understand what pepole were thinking and doing way back at the turn of this millenium. I marvel at the research done by Edward Gibbon as he wrote the six volmues of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. As I read his autobiography and also that of Benjamin Franklin recently I thought how awesome it would be if they had been able to blog their thoughts.

I don’t say much in the blog about my wife, our four children, or the three grandchildren (about to be four). I leave it to them to decide what and how they want to share. I will just say that I am proud of them all. Thanks to Irving for inspiring me to write something about e-tirement. Now when I mention the word in future posts I will have a permalink to point to!

Tags: blogging, board, board of directors, board of trustees, Gadgets, governance, hobbies, hospital, IBM, irving wladawsky, irving wladawsky-berger, public speaking, retire, retirement, running, speaking, washington speakers bureau