Greetings from the Windy City! My name is Tony Chen, I started hospital impact one fateful evening in March 2005. I work at Healthcare Financial Management Association as the Director of Product Innovation. In this role, I'm responsible for developing and bringing new products and services to hospital executives. Thus, I am constantly thinking about the business side of hospitals, especially the financial management aspects.

Given my business background, I am also very interested in all aspects of hospital management / leadership and am curious to find leadership insights and strategies from other industries. I believe that hospitals lag behind many other industries in various respects, but most importantly in the area of business leadership. Still, I believe that hospitals can be the best run organizations on the face of the planet.

Before HFMA, I was in business school at the Kellogg School of Management, where I majored in non-profit management, marketing, and finance. I also worked part-time as a healthcare equity research associate for an investment bank and was an independent healthcare management consultant. Prior to Kellogg, I worked several years at Merck as a Project Leader and Management Analyst. Back in the day, I was a Chemical Engineering major at Cornell University.

Obligatory Disclaimer: the views and opinions expressed on this blog most definitely do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer, my employer's members, my friends, my mom, my goldfish, or anybody else besides me. Hospital Impact is not affiliated with HFMA, ACHE, or any other four-letter acronym and is purely a personal endeavor. I may refer to HFMA resources from time to time, but only when I believe it benefits hospital impact readers. [add your favorite legalese here]

Drop me an email at tony[at]hospitalimpact[dot]org. Hope you stay awhile!

Check out my very first post here. Wow, I was such a young, misty-eyed blogger back then!

It was very flattering to be considered in the same group as Shrinkette, MedPundit, and KevinMD - all 4 of our blogs were mentioned by the MSSPNexus Blog as "big dogs." Hospital Impact apparently is worth $15,000 or so. Find out how much your blog is worth here.

Using the knowledge that AOL paid between $25 - 40MM for Weblogs, Inc, we have our first benchmark of how much a blog is worth to traditional media companies. True - Weblogs, Inc is more than just a bunch of linked blogs - it's also an infrastructure as well as a brand. AOL ended up paying $560 - $900 per link source (using Technorati). That's obviously not gonna hold for us small-time niche bloggers, but it is the 1st data point (of hopefully many to come) of how much blogs are worth.

Also, check out this self-reported database of # of visitors & monthly Adsense revenue. This guy from Malaysia makes $6,000/year from his blog.

UPDATE: by the way, has anyone else seen their traffic increase dramatically since google launched their blogsearch tool?

That's right. A new study from Ball State University has come out that shows that we in America spend an average on 9 hours A DAY consuming various forms of media - internet, TV, radio, magazines. This constant barrage of information makes me wonder (like I have in the past), when do we have time to think?

This also makes me wonder about this blog. Is this blog helping to filter the noise or am I really just adding to the noise?

I have to admit that my entries recently haven't been as thoughtful as I would hope. Why is it that we bloggers aim to post something daily? If we have nothing good to say, shouldn't we just keep quiet? Isn't one real good insight better than 10 regurgitated pieces of news? On the other hand, the daily posting enforces a certain personal discipline to "think" about something fresh and new everyday.

One other observation about blogging on hospitalimpact: I get the most comments about medical stuff or healthcare industry stuff. In other words, it seems like the majority of hospitalimpact readers aren't the people that it's aimed at: hospital administrative folks. I'm beginning to theorize that hospital admin just don't read blogs very much, while industry and medical people do. Is this a demographic thing (are hospital admin older?)? Is this a technology thing (are hospital admin less tech savvy somehow?)? Or maybe it's just because of sheer numbers?

Why is it that there are scores, if not hundreds, of doctor blogs, while there are only a handful (maybe less than that!) hospital admin blogs? Then again, patient stories will always be more interesting than revenue cycle stories.