by Tony Chen

I will be out of pocket for a couple of days - I've been busier than usual working on some projects for work. Will be back soon to introduce a new blogger that has recently joined the Hospital Impact team. In the meantime, check out the World Health Care Blog, including my post on recent news themes.

by Tony Chen

There's been some good conversations going on here at hospital impact and across the healthcare blogosphere right now:
- I continue to get comments on the "If Disney Ran Your Hospital" series, including a recent comment from Fred Lee, the author, and Chris, someone who helped published the book. Though there was some criticism about the book, a lot of people have benefited from it. I've heard that 60,000+ copies have been sold.
- Nick's post on the Passive Aggressive Organization really seem to hit a nerve with a lot of people, in and outside of healthcare.
- My recent post of Private Equity and M&A in Healthcare has generated some very interested discussion. One asset manager has chimed in on the real reason for LBO: to hide their fraudelent ways.
- There are some excellent comments in the recent post about healthcare 2.0. You know a concept has finally arrived when there's a conference around it - check it out, our friend Matthew Holt is helping to put it together. Check out the ScienceRoll blog that covers a lot of interesting health 2.0 concepts, including tons of screenshots from Second Life.
- The World Healthcare Blog has put up 20 posts in the last 48 hours. Check out the podcasts from Michael Porter, WalMart, Google, and tons of others.

by Tony Chen

Well, it's been a lot of fun doing Hospital Impact recently partly because I get to explore many nooks and crannies of the burgeoning blogosphere business. This blog gives me the chance to learn about blogging / media / publishing just as much about healthcare. So, today we go on a slight detour off our "business of healthcare" track and check out the business of blogging. The blogosphere is alive and kicking and people are starting to figure out business models to monetize blogs in new ways.

Some recent developments:

- Hospital Impact content is licensed by Newstex, a blog aggregator company that makes my blog and many others available to LexisNexis users worldwide. In January, ~150 folks did searches through LexisNexis and ended up on hospital impact posts. That's $5 for me, enough to pay my hosting costs.

- Hospital Impact content is also available via Blogburst, another blog aggregating company whose customers are big media outlets like Reuters, FoxNews, USAToday, and others. When editors see a good post, they'll put it up on their news sites. Take a look at the main Reuters Health page, and you'll see a recent post selected from Hospital Impact. Almost 1,000 people have viewed hospital impact content right on the Reuters site. I only get paid if hospital impact is one of the top 100 blogs referenced by these outlets - that's highly unlikely, given our niche audience. However, our fellow blogger Fard might have a chance - he was #92 last time I looked.

- As you'll see on the right, I've started running google ads (yes, I'm selling out, but to be fair, I've held out longer than most). I think the links are actually fairly targeted, but still deciding whether it just clutters the page too much.

- The popular social media giant MySpace recently entered the news business. They, too, are utilizing blogs as news sources. Hospital Impact has a story up on their front news page for health. Nonetheless, no one seems to be reading MySpace news at all.

- Fun! Memorial Hospital and Health System of South Bend, Indiana is quoting hospital impact on their main website.

- Some company in Arizona offered me $500 for the url www.hospitalimpact.org. (don't worry, I did not accept. Add a zero and maybe we can start talking).

- It's really through hospital impact that I have the honor of blogging over at the World Health Care Blog. Honestly, the last 2 weeks of posts there from all my fellow bloggers have been the best healthcare blogging I've ever seen. Definitely worth a read.

- A couple of months ago, an editor from a health IT magazine paid me to put one of my posts into his magazine. Sure, why not!

- It's really humbling to see hospital impact as a source for Advisory Board and FierceHealthcare news items. Increasingly, I see particular posts sourced for university blackboards.

- 200-300 folks a day stumble upon hospital impact through google searches. Some recent searches: tony chen enh (weird!), clinic in drug store, true incent of father and daughter regarding breastmilk sucking, hardwiring excellence, disney hospital, hospital marketing, world health blog, revolution health, hospital management getting departments to work together. The power of google is amazing - all businesses must incorporate "search engine optimization" in their web marketing strategy (and blogging can be a big part of that!)

Okay, enough hort-tootin'. At the end of the day, blogging is a lot like sports. 0.000001% of all people who play sports get paid to play sports. The rest of us play because it's good exercise, it's social, and it's just plain fun.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program...

Blacksburg, my hometown.

Before yesterday, Va Tech was known for our football, for being nestled in the Appalachian mountains, and for being the 1st community in the US to be internet-wired. On Saturday mornings, the place for breakfast is a little family restaurant, Gillie's. From now on, we'll be known as the site of the deadliest shooting in US history.

To all the media: please be respectful. Hindsight is 20/20.

My dad retired from VA Tech just a few years ago. He used to teach a 9am class in that Norris Building. I actually took one class on the 2nd floor of Norris. Our thoughts and prayers go out to those students and their families.

by Tony Chen

I've been avoiding this post for some time now. It's one of those topics that is sensitive, potentially uncomfortable, and definitely has multiple layers.

So, there's a lot of ways I could address this - I could writes pages upon pages about my experience as a Chinese kid growing up in southwest Virginia. I could write about how Chinese families typically view hospital administration as a career (though my family is very supportive). I could even talk about how I'm probably hypersensitive about being the only non-Caucasian in town hall meetings.

I just deleted a couple of paragraphs. All I'll say is that most of the "racism" I experience is self-imposed and lives in my head only. And I'm really enjoying my job, my progressive organization, and the fact that my path is a path less traveled for someone of my background. Mostly, I want to hear about other people's experiences with paths less traveled or being in the minority - please share in the comments. or if you prefer, send me an email (tony at hospital impact dot org) and I can post your experience completely anonymously.

UPDATE: A few anonymous comments I've received so far:

"In fact, the only time I've caught even a whiff of racism is on the odd occasion that an LCD projector doesn't work right and some people instantly look to me to fix it, rather than put in a call to IT."

The discrimination I sense in hospital administration seems to stem more from clinician vs. non-clinician conflicts ...which is likely another topic entirely.

I've worked very hard to establish a sterling repuation in the organization, but don't feel absolutely sure that race didn't play some part in some way, shape, or form. My hypertension comes more from feeling like I better do an amazing job than being the only non-Caucasian, but I often take notice of the fact that I'm the only non-Caucasian.

With much introspection, I've come to realize that I've experienced very little racism in the hospital.

Hospital administration positions are still dominated by middle-aged Caucasian men. The reality is that hospitals are conservative and risk-adverse organizations and senior level hospital administrators are almost viewed like elected officials. So it's difficult to have a minority or homosexual be the "face" of such an organization.

Just like any other ethnic background, a lot of Asian-Americans are most 'racist' or biased against their own race

I lack the 20+ years of experience of seasoned professionals in this field, and I am still working on completing my graduate degree. Strike one. I am a female, which carries certain stereotypes in the professional world, such as being too compassionate for co-workers, or “caring” too much about my work (hey, I’ve got passion, what can I say?). Strike two. To top it all off, I’m trying to prove to colleagues that not only is marketing a viable and fascinating field of study in and of itself, but also that it has important implications for the future of this industry. Strike three.

I feel as if this career path is reminiscent of grade school gym class, where I didn’t fit in and was always picked last for dodgeball. But, like you, I’m beginning to realize that most of this nonsense is all in my head.

by Tony Chen

I have the opportunity to be one of the bloggers at the World Health Care Blog, the blog leading up to the World Healthcare Congress.

The rest of the blogging crew includes:
- Matthew Holt of The Health Care Blog
- Emily DeVoto of the Antidote
- Vince Kuraitis of e-CareManagement
- Derek Lowe of In the Pipeline
- David Williams of Health Business Blog
- Scott MacStravic of a lot of books/articles and guest blogger at HFMA Views
- Lloyd Davis of PerfectPath

Among us 8 bloggers, you've got several PhDs, a WSJ Must Read blog, a Forbes Best Blog, a dozen or so books written, several dozen speeches made at conferences, a couple of companies founded, and one accordian concert performed. (note: I only contributed to one thing on this list - guess which one...)

My favorite quote from the blog so far comes from Vince:

Professor Gerard Andersen of Johns Hopkins describes the big picture of changing health system needs:

* 1900 to 1950 — Infectious diseases
* 1950 to 2000 — Episodic care
* 2000 to 2050 — Chronic care

About 6 or 7 years ago the light bulbs went on at Medicare — they recognized the upcoming challenges of baby boomers aging, increasing chronicity, and out of control costs. Medicare beneficiaries with chronic conditions incur health care expenses highly disproportionately; the more chronic conditions, the higher the costs.

I'll have to chew on this for a while and post something in response later.