Rural Doctoring

Tweet Archive: How to Stay Awake During a Conference

I'm just back in Rural after several days in San Francisco where I attended the Care of the Hospitalized Patient, co-sponsored by UCSF and the Society of Hospitalist Medicine.  In an attempt to render my note-taking as paperless as possible I used Adobe Acrobat Pro to annotate the PDF files corresponding to each lecturer's slides.  This gave me an excuse to drag my MacBook everywhere and keep Twitter open for the entire conference.  What resulted was a line-by-line report of the conference, which has been kindly featured on Clinical Cases and Images as an example of using social media such as Twitter to share information about curent medical practice with one's colleagues.  In total, I tweeted 192 times from the conference.  Here's a selection of the top tweets:

Twitter Archive: September 26th, 2008

Some days are simply endless. The only way is to begin at one end of the hospital and slug your way through. And tweet as you go.

Twitter Archive: I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends

Recently I've been stymied in trying obtain articles from medical journals in order to support my own research and patient care. There is no major institutional library in Rural. The two major hospitals have reading rooms but, as far as I know, no librarian support. This means that I have to work with an institutional library 260 miles away to obtain papers in journals neither of my local hospital libraries carry--which is most of them. The distant institutional library charges a $15 fee for each article sent, which makes things expensive for this independent rural scholar. Thanks to Twitter, I've found a lower-cost solution:

Tweet Archive: Yesterday's Hospitalist Rounds

As a lone hospitalist, I find solace reaching out to my online colleagues. Yesterday, as I tackled the challenges of the rural hospitalist's life, I updated my progress (and lack thereof) on Twitter. Here's a sequence of tweets, demonstrating the arc of a day at my hospital:

The Next Big Idea

Excerpt from a Twitter conversation earlier this week. I'd been describing infected wounds on my hospitalist service when the discussion became a bit more exotic. I believe we were inspired by Ramona's recent post, or perhaps we were feeling peculiarly entrepreneurial.