Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Exciting developments in the medical blogosphere

Just as I endeavor to increase the readability and usability of Notes from Dr. RW as a hospitalist (primarily clinical) blog two other developments are noteworthy. First, Docnotes (formerly known as Family Medicine Notes) plans to rev things up after a period of dormancy. Jacob Reider, the blog author, put it this way in a recent post:

The past two years - this blog has been stale - due to my professional role mirroring my personal interests in a way that makes my thoughts potentially company secrets that can't be shared.

I'm working on ways to change that so that this blog once again becomes the valuable asset that it once was. Stay tuned.

Those not long in the blogging world will under appreciate this development. Jacob (who also maintains the aggregator Medlogs) is a medical blogging pioneer. Family Medicine Notes started in 1999 and as far as I know is the oldest medical blog extant. It, along with Medrants, Medpundit and RangleMD got me interested in blogging. For its first several years it was a place for lively discussions of clinical medicine, healthcare informatics and the state of blogging in general. Then, as a result of competing interests and responsibilities, things began to slow down. For the past couple of years it has functioned mainly as a listing of links, largely on informatics topics of narrow interest, with just enough content to avoid Grunt Doc’s obituary listing. I didn’t always agree with Jacob but I enjoyed reading his clinical discussions and valued his expertise on blogging.

Then, just today, I discovered Hospital medicine Quick Hits written by academic hospitalist Danielle Schuerer. This is another SHM sponsored blog and it’s purely clinical---a nice complement to Bob Wachter’s blog which emphasizes the administrative side. Judging from the content posted so far it looks to be another valuable clinical resource for hospital medicine. I’ll be lurking and linking often.

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