Grand Rounds, Vol. 8 No. 11: The Tumblr’d Edition
Hello and welcome to this collection of medical links from across the web, written by providers, patients and analysts that work on the frontlines of modern healthcare.
This is my sixth time hosting Grand Rounds (three prior times on blogborygmi’s blogspot site, twice on Medgadget.com), and my first time with Tumblr.
I’ve been hearing about Tumblr for years, and after finally making the leap a few weeks back, I figured it might be a good fit for Grand Rounds today, as well.
Grand Rounds has traditionally been motivated by traffic – hosts wanted their efforts rewarded with new visitors. Submitters wanted people to follow their links.
Now, however, I think the motivations are a little more muddled. Do people want followers? Likes? Retweets? Customers? Klout?
Well, what I want to do today is simply this: serve up some links to compelling healthcare writing from around the blogosphere.
There are no comments on this Tumblr. If you want to say something, you can offer your two cents via a link on Twitter, FB or G+. Or better yet, join the Tumblr community and give one of these links below a heart — or reblog it (with or without your commentary).
That’s my vision, for this week at least. Next week, the carnival moves on, and you can check out the next interpretation of Grand Rounds at GlassHospital.com.
Although living with uncertainty can often be uncomfortable, in some situations it leaves room for hope and can be a blessing.
Dr. Pullen (@doctorpullen) reflects on his interactions with patients, and wife’s ovarian cancer, in a moving post at DrPullen.com.
Reduced resident “code blue” experience in the era of quality improvement: new challenges in physician training. In this paper, they looked at the number of Code Blues (Codes Blue?) that took place in the hospital, 2002-2009. From maybe better patient care and “Rapid Response Teams,” there are a ton fewer codes. They then ran analyses to figure out how many codes an internal medicine resident now experiences: < 10 a year.
Seems like Emergency Medicine is the only place to get your sick people anymore!
As a Palliative care physician and general internist, I have had excellent results using low potency opiates for RA and OA pain. The palliative care literature is significantly more supportive of this approach vs. the Cochrane review.
Preventable deaths are always tragic, but when they occur at the hands of alternative medicine hucksters who profit by selling fake medicines, there’s an additional cringe factor.
Sabehgi said he was vomiting and had diarrhea, and that the nurse on duty only offered him a suppository, which he refused to take. After 18 hours someone had the good sense to call for an ambulance to take Sabehgi to a hospital. He was taken into surgery for repair of a lacerated spleen…
But, as I look back, the Skin Horse was right – Real is a process, bit by bit, day by day. Over the years, residency has taken its toll, the wrinkles are there, my hair has been loved off, and the memories of all of my patients – through life, death, and everything in between – are present in me, subconsciously affecting my decisions at each critical moment. And real hurts, too – more than you would imagine. And no one ever said it was easy. It is scary sometimes. Sad sometimes, too.
“But more than revolutionizing how we see disease, the stethoscope had a powerful effect on defining the medical profession. It changed the way we see ourselves. For those powerless to understand what was evolving within body cavities, the stethoscope put control in the hands of the physician. And the bedside is where it happened.”
— Bryan Vartabedian (@Doctor_V) writes on the stethoscope’s quiet eclipse, at 33 Charts.
This case proves that — used judiciously — the data stored in EHR systems can be more than just a paper-saving technology; they can save lives. It gives CIOs tasked with implementing EHRs and building data warehouses a human face to attach to all the seemingly soulless bits and bytes.
medicalschool: Blood vessels of the small intestine
(via mywhitecoat)
Source: medicalschool
jayparkinsonmd: Philips just released a new iPad 2 app called Vital Signs Camera that uses the camera to measure your heart and breathing rate. It detects subtle beat-to-beat changes in the color of your face to measure your heart rate.
We’re slowly living in the future.
(via stenciledheart)
Source: jayparkinsonmd
Patients, if they choose to connect, are no longer isolated from others facing the same or similar circumstances. This, potentially, could make a huge difference in outcomes, besides their mean level of happiness.
Efforts to improve the effectiveness of health care, and contain its cost, have produced a number of innovations designed to help us more easily shoulder some of our new responsibilities for our health.
But those of us who have yet to recognize the tasks that are now ours often mistake those “patient-centered” innovations as new barriers between us and the help we need.
That concludes this edition of Grand Rounds.
You can follow @grandrounds, like us on Facebook, +1 us on G+. Learn more about hosting GR at Better Health. Want to host, yourself? Just ask.
Be sure to head over to GlassHospital.com next Tuesday for Dr. John Schumann’s edition, Vol. 8 No. 12.
