Health 3.0 Blog

Grand Rounds

Welcome to this week’s edition of Grand Rounds. You can find the medical blogosphere’s best next week at Covert Rationing.

We’ve taken a different approach this week to organizing Grand Rounds. You can find all the submissions below in this post. But, we’ve also selected quotes from each blog and highlighted those on the main page. Consistent with our themes, we’ve also tagged all the posts related to health, happiness, design or innovation. You can search for these tags to see how each theme plays out. We’ve also added bits of commentary to some of the individual quotes and summaries - especially when we’ve read something recently that relates to the general topic or idea.

Jesse Gruman at the What It Takes blog from the Prepared Patient Forum talks about decision-fatigue and the need to design systems and processes that account for finite ability to focus and pay attention to details.

Dr. Charles uses the same decision-fatigue article discussed by Jesse to defend the value of vacations - regardless of who you are. 

Networkitis and networkectomies are new obstacles to achieving REAL Wellness, according to Don Ardell in his post: “Techno Gizmos Sensors and Other Wonderment Devices Combined with Social Networking: A Boon for Wellness or a Road to Perdition?”

The importance of high quality patient-doctor communication to achieving person-centered health care is the focus of two posts this week:

• Jordan Grumet beautifully relates an interaction he recently had with an elderly patient - and how listening, not ‘fixing’ became the most important thing he could do
• Stephen Wilkins at Mind the Gap urges us to reconsider how we evaluate those interactions and suggests that many doctors remain stuck in a paternalistic communication pattern (though that certainly doesn’t apply to Dr. Grumet if his post is any indication)

Dr. Elaine Schattner reminds us that despite implicit cultural pressures to reveal information about ourselves, people, no matter how iconic or famous, still have the right to privacy - especially when it comes to their medical conditions.

Steven Seay urges us to consider the mental health benefits of taking care of oneself from time-to-time. I imagine Dr. Charles might agree!

It’s not a matter of if we’ll face depression at some point in our lives, but rather how we deal with it according to Philip Hickey in his post at Behaviorism and Mental Health.

Beth Gainer tells the story of adopting her now-three year old daughter, despite a few hiccups along the way.

Two announcements this week of considerable note:

• The John A. Hartford Foundation announces the recipients of its 2011 Paul B. Beeson Scholars
• Diabetes Mine provides information about the upcoming Diabetes Art Day (September 1st) and offers a few great examples from last year

Henry Stern at the Insure Blog questions the security and effectiveness of electronic health records.

Pranab and Parijat present MediQuiz #4 and provide some compelling hints along the way.

Laika does a little investigative digging into a suspicious phishing email that recently turned up in her spam folder.

The ACP sends along two blog posts regarding recent studies:

• At the Internist, the relative safety of vaccines was shown in a massive literature and research review by the Institute of Medicine
• The Hospitalist blog discusses a new data about the speed of treatment for heart attack patients

For those of you who are interested, here’s a quick survey of of the song “Goodnight, Irene” - I hadn’t known its eclectic recording history…