two new ones:
HITSphere, which is focused on healthcare IT
HealthVoices, which has an interesting "Open Medicine" vision about healthcare. See their healthcare blog list here.

two older ones:
Healthcareblogs stopped refreshing its feeds for a while, but now it is back on track.
MedLogs which categorizes the blogs nicely between physician, nurse, biz, etc.

so, which one is the best?

HealthVoices, MedLogs, and Healthcareblogs all segment the various healthcare blogs well. Nonetheless, I think that niche aggregators like HITsphere are going to pick up steam. Healthcare is simply much too broad to aggregate it all for anyone to make sense of it all. Besides, most people only care about one or two professionals/specialties. I can only read so many M.D. blogs before I feel a little out of place.

Then again, maybe all of these will be leapfrogged by more sophiscated RSS aggregation technology, like a TiVo for webfeeds?

Medgadget is now taking nominations for the 2005 Medical Weblogs of the Year. If for nothing else, head on over there and see what other blogs are being nominated - there will probably be a few more undiscovered blogs worth checking out.

My prediction: Hospital impact will be an underdog in one or two categories because this blog doesn't fit well into any of the categories. Just goes to show - there just ain't many hospital and/or hospital leadership blogs out there.

Plus, Dr. Helen was nominated also in one of my potential categories. Since her blog has 40x more readers than mine, and her husband's blog has 1,000x more readers than mine, with one link, we already know the results for that one! Plus, Dr. Helen is slightly more good-looking than yours truly.

Grand Rounds 2.09 is up at CodeBlog.

Not only has Geena done a great job adding her commentary on each post (including one from hospital impact), but this edition of grand rounds marks the start of a new era in medical/healthcare blogging. Thanks to Nick over at blogborygmi (a play on the medical term borborygmi, meaning stomach growling), Grand Rounds will be picked up by medical media giant Medscape. Click here (reg req.) for this week's (and 1st ever) Medscape article on grand rounds.

I'm pleased to announce that Nick Jacobs, CEO/President of Windber Medical Center and Windber Research Institute, will be blogging at hospital impact as a guest blogger, sharing his humorous and insightful thoughts on hospital leadership. You can also find his thoughts on his blog, Nick's blog, the first hospital CEO blog ever.

His background is quite interesting (as I posted previously). Among many other things, Nick was previously a high school music teacher, a director of a regional arts organization, executive director for two different healthcare foundations, a VP at Mercy Medical Center, and a chief communications officer for a health system.

What I especially appreciate about Nick is his ability to tell stories (something us financial types really need to learn), his right-brained way of thinking (check out tomorrow's post), and his approach toward leadership. It should not be lost that under Nick's leadership, his Medical Center has a 1% infection rate (9x lower than the national average) and was recently nominated as one of the top 50 places to work in the U.S.

For a full bio, check out his blog bio. Given his busy schedule as a hospital (and research institute) CEO, I especially thank him for his enthusiasm to blog at hospital impact from time to time.

UPDATE 10/2008: Nick also now blogs at askahospitalpresident.com

Welcome Nick!

Just in case you wanted to read hospital impact in Chinese, click here

You can translate any website to a few different languages using google's language tools - the simplified Chinese translation has just been added as a beta). I'm still waiting on the Dutch to English translation so I can read the blog of Martijn Hulst, who works on internet/intranet strategy for a large hospital in the Netherlands.

I went on a search for other healthcare bloggers who happen to blog in other languages. After looking everywhere, not surprisingly I found that non-English medical / healthcare-specific blogs are few and far between. Some had potential but have sinced been abandoned. A few interesting blogs I did find:
- This one looks like a Danish blog about living with diabetes. Unfortunately, Google doesn't have Danish-to-English translation yet.
- Dr. Chong's blog (in Chinese) discusses some health-related news items. Unfortunately, with sentences like, "the menopause woman keeping in good health four wants," we start to see pretty quickly that Google's translation tools still needs some work. Makes me wonder what exactly even the words "hospital impact" becomes in other languages.

After all, the blogosphere is still nascent - even more so for the healthcare blogosphere. But with the # of blogs doubling every 5 months, I'll have to check again soon - never know when someone in China or Iran or Germany will start blogging and become the next KevinMD or Matthew Holt.

by Andrew Barna

I am the guy that always sat at the front of the class. I wasn’t always the best student nor did I make the highest grades, but I was always engaged. In these early days of my career as a hospital administrator, I find myself again in the role of eager student. I am not the professor. I don’t have all the answers, but I have a long career in healthcare ahead of me and I am interested in how healthcare and hospitals evolve over the next few decades.

My front-row-sitting started at Baylor University, where I studied psychology (B.A.) and philosophy (M.A.). My interest in ethics, the experience of illness, and technology steered me toward bioethics. Fortuitously, it wasn’t until after I attended a hospital bioethics meeting that I realized that I wasn’t cut out for a career in bioethics. At that meeting, I saw the role of the hospital administrator and took a leap of faith. That led me to the University of Iowa for my MHA, where I discovered the complex world of hospitals and healthcare.

My current role, Director of Strategic Development for a hospital in the Bay Area of California, has given me a front row seat to an organization that shares many of the same challenges as other urban hospitals across the country. I have been blessed in this role to take on a number of projects around the hospital and to be a part of an executive team that is transforming a hospital. My hope is that my posts will encourage discussion on where hospitals and healthcare should be headed and how we can get there.

Note from Tony: look for Andrew's hospital leadership insights every Wednesday here on Hospital Impact (and every Tuesday at Healthcare Tomorrow). Email Andrew at andrew[at]hospitalimpact[dot]org

UPDATE 12/2005: Andrew has moved on to the next chapter in his healthcare career.

That's right - hospital impact now has another blogger - Andrew Barna. I'll let him introduce himself later this week, but I will tell you that I've enjoyed speaking with him and reading his thoughtful hospital blog, Healthcare Tomorrow. Look for his out-of-the-box insights on hospital leadership regularly on Wednesdays (and occasionally during the week) right here on Hospital Impact. Welcome Andrew!

GrandRounds is up at KidneyNotes. A couple of my favorite links:
- The best rapping nurse I've ever seen and I will ever see. This guy from UAB is hilarious. "we are ER nurses, medications we disperses..." "we treat every patient, from the womb to the tomb" "room 3 has got the flu, room 4 can't poo poo, room 5 is just cuckoo." What would you do if you were in this hospital and he was taking care of you?
- CodeBlog tells of ICU Nurses who dress up the babies on the unit for Halloween.
- GruntDoc grunting about the overhead "code blue" calls.