Surveys, blogging and surveys about blogging
In catching up on some e-mail from the past week, I see that the European World Health Care Congress, which took place in Barcelona, Spain, last week, has its own “official” blog.
I think this might be the same site that Matthew Holt of The Health Care Blog fame (infamy?) contributed to last year, when organizers and session moderators put the kibosh on any attempt by audience questions to ask the obvious question of then-CEO of UnitedHealth Group Dr. Bill McGuire, the same day the Wall Street Journal reported on some alleged misdeeds involving a mere $1.6 billion in stock options. Still, it was cool to see live blogging of an event. (Personally, I chuckled when someone asked me via e-mail before last year’s HIMSS conference if I would be “blogging from the show floor.” Read my memorable rant from February about how much time I might have to do something like that.)
Anyway, the next U.S. version of the World Health Care Congress is scheduled for April 22-24 in Washington, and I suspect someone will blog that event as well. Matthew, care to chime in? And anyone care to remind me to book my trip soon?
You can bet that finding a viable business model for regional health information organizations will be a hot topic at that event and others coming up this spring and summer. On that note, the Healthcare IT Transition Group, publisher of the HIT Transition Weblog, is looking for opinions for its second-annual survey of RHIO finance. The deadline to opine is April 20.
And to my fellow bloggers, a team from the School of Medicine of the University of Rijeka in Croatia is taking a survey of health and medical blogs that may be fodder for a scientific paper. I’m leaning against participating because I want to maintain my objectivity as a journalist, but does the mere act of blogging compromise that anyway?
How did a Croatian medical school find the names of American bloggers? The invite came from Ivor Kovic, a student at Rijeka, who also happens to be a contributor to MedGadget, an online journal about medical technology. So there you have it, another example of the Internet making the world smaller.
First of all, thank you for mentioning our survey. I have some corrections to what you wrote so let me mention them. Thank God, I am not a medical student anymore ☺. I graduated some 6 months ago and now I am an intern. I do not contribute to Medgadget anymore, although I used to and although I am still their biggest fan. I am really sorry you decided not to participate. You can still do it, since the survey will be open for another two weeks and we need as much participants as we can get. We invited only carefully selected bloggers and they represent our sample, so we basically need only those who got the invitation to answer the questions. If you DIDN’T GET THE INVITATION, DON’T PARTICIPATE because this will pollute our data. How did a Croatian medical school find the names of American bloggers? No conspiracy here. Not all of the people who received invitations are Americans. We don’t know and we don’t want to know bloggers names, the survey is anonymous. Anyway, although you chose not to participate we will as promised in our invitation send you our preliminary results that will I believe answer most of your questions, as well as those regarding our methodology. Kind regards,Ivor Kovic, MD
Hi Neil, Hylton Jolliffe of blog-publisher Corante.com here. We’re actually working with Matthew and several other leading health care bloggers we’re convening for a group discussion of innovation in health care in the weeks leading up to the Washington DC conference and hopefully beyond. Expect to see lots of blogging, podcasts and videocasts as well.
My apologies, Dr. Kovic (which I can call you now). I have removed the link to your survey so your data doesn’t get skewed. I’ll also take a look at the survey again before deciding whether to participate. As always, thanks for reading and for keeping me honest.