The Official Omedix Blog

I’m writing now from beautiful (and breezy) Charlotte, NC where I managed to convince the hotel to give me a mostly undeserving room upgrade, and so I have a rather spectacular view of downtown right now!

This is our third consecutive year showing at the AAOE Conference (it used to be called BONES).  This is basically the premier conference for the administrators of Orthopedic practices around the country.  There are around 500 administrators total, and at least 50 different vendors.

A simple but meaningful thing kept happening to me today: I ran into people I’d met before, or clients of ours, or people I knew, or people I didn’t know but recognized from previous years.  First of all, it dawned on me that running into people you know and had fun talking to is FUN!  Some kind of neurochemical is released when it happens because it just makes me feel happy to catch up with people even if we’re only mildly acquainted.  There’s something wonderful about strengthening a human bond; it’s very fundamental to our existence.

The week before last we began a new project with a 3-physician pediatric group in Scottsdale, AZ.  I’d met the practice manager over a year ago and she expressed a strong interest in working together.  She still researched us along with two other companies, and it still took a year before she was ready to sign a contract.  At the end of our first meeting — which went very well and was also fun — we had an interesting exchange:

Her: You know, I actually compared you guys to two other companies.  Do you know why I chose Omedix?

Me: Charismatic personnel?

Her: Haha, well, you were still around 1 year later.  Both of the others had disappeared. 

How does this all tie together?  The “Life Truism” I referenced in the title is that business is built on relationships, that relationships are built on trust, and that trust takes time to build and is very precious.  It’s so easy to look from afar at a company and try to see why they’re business strategy made them so successful and completely miss the point that if your clients don’t actually like you and trust you, nothing will ever happen.

Initially, our company is almost always evaluated based on price, quality, and features.  But I feel like whenever I have a really good personal connection with a prospective client, we wind up getting the business.  I feel like I enjoy my work so much more when I have a good personal relationship with our clients.  It just makes the world such a happier place.

So, here at the AAOE Conference for Year #3, it’s kind of a cool feeling because we’re not strangers here anymore.  People know us.  People know we were here last year, that we’re here this year, and that we’ll be here next year.  That kind of thing is powerful and builds trust.

I’ll write another conference post probably by the end of the conference — talking one-on-one with so many practice managers is incredibly enlightening — but for now it’s time to get some sleep!

This graph (if you can’t see it, click the “Read More” link below) was on this morning’s iHealthBeat. This is basically yet another indicator that patients are going to become increasingly choosy about where they get their medical care in the future.

Offering your patients the ability to view their medical records online doesn’t necessarily mean you show them the ENTIRE medical record. One of our clients recently saw a patient who he felt was making great efforts to acquire narcotics from him. In his encounter notes for the medical record, he mentioned this to advise other doctors in his practice. Does he want the patient to see that? No, but does he want the patient to see that he diagnosed her with endometriosis as well as the medications and dosages he prescribed? Yes.

One thing that’s interesting about so many of these technologies is that they raise uncertainty more than anything else. And in the face of uncertainty, we tend to gravitate toward the status quo. It’s becoming apparent to me that as we continue to release a stream of more innovative services, we’re going to have to put a considerable amount of effort into identifying the potential issues, laying out the possibilities, and genuinely helping our clients decide if a new technology is a good fit for them.

That having been said, there are some very exciting things on the horizon so stay tuned!

So, as President of Omedix, part of my job is basically to promote the merits of integrating the Web with your practice. If I were presenting to a group of 100 doctors and practice managers on “Why Should I Bother with a Website for My Practice?” I would essentially say the following:

• New Patients
• The Yellow Pages costs you how much?
• For many people today, you don’t exist if you’re not on the Web
• Search engines will bring you new patients
• When someone wants to learn more about you by word of mouth, what do they do?
• Boosting Efficiency
• How to hire free labor: make your patients do your data entry with online forms
• Common questions should never be asked again: just put them on your website
• The Patient Experience
• Would you want to talk about bacterial vaginosis in your office cubicle?
• Patients are irritated that they can’t connect with you online
• Secure Messaging CAN be a good thing…when done right
• Patient Education
• An educated patient is a better patient
• Most malpractices suits aren’t because of malpractice but poorly managed expectations
• Why most practice’s patient education solutions basically suck

Here’s the interesting thing about this presentation: It all relates to technology that’s been around for nearly 5 years now. Translating the “benefits focus” into the services that are available for these kinds of things this is all basically just talking about:

• Building a website
• Search Engine Marketing
• Online Forms
• Secure Messaging
• Web-Based Patient Education

But despite being around technology-wise for 5 years, these tools are only in the last few months actually reaching a level of maturity to where they’re easy to use, easy to setup, and affordable for most doctors.

Here’s the other interesting thing about this presentation: I suspect I will be able to give this same presentation 2 years from now in 2010. That’s depressing, but true. Actually, I think I’ll be able to give this same presentation, but I think there will be another group of so-called “Early Adopters” who will listen to a different presentation that goes something like this:

• Being Connected To Your Colleagues
• If you’re not making electronic referrals, you’re not cometitive
• Save time and money by getting online with a Health Record Exchange
• The Power of the Network
• No matter how smart you are, the network is smarter
• How this worked for AthenaHealth
• How this worked for Omedix
• Why patients LOVE this
• How the Network grows revenue and reduces costs while taking less of your time
• How Patients Choose Doctors Today
• The Big Three: Google, WebMD, Find-A-Doctor Sites
• How to Manage Your Online Reputation and Why It’s So Important
• Building your “brand name” as a doctor
• Information Therapy (aka Patient Education)
• Your website does all of this for you
• You should never have to explain the same concept multiple times again
• All informed consent should be documented systematically
• Your clinical outcomes will actually improve (finally, we have data for this)

I’ll be honest. I’m being a little cryptic about some of the above things. If you’re really curious about what I’m talking about just contact me to chat; I love this stuff and would be more than happy to share my thoughts.

But the real takeaway here is how incredibly far we have to go before the “Healthcare IT” industry is even close to reaching its potential.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil authored a controversial essay in 2001 called “The Law of Accelerating Returns”. He basically argues that…

“An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The ‘returns,’ such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially.”

For our industry, that means to me that we are spending a HUGE amount of time laying groundwork right now — interoperable electronic health records, quality data to help consumers make an informed decision when choosing their doctor or hospital, patient portals to give practices an “online front’ to patients, social networks for patients, social networks for providers, developing “The Network” for each niche in the industry, I could go on forever. But once those pieces are in place, they will all start to fold in on each other and create some AMAZING things.

Of course, that kind of stuff is 5 - 15 years out, and in the meantime we all have everyday needs like paying the bills and enjoying our lives that dictate what services will actually sell today.

In the short term at Omedix, we’ll continue selling “web solutions for medical practice”.  We’ve set up an awesome system for consistently delivering high quality websites and it’s a good business. But the really fun stuff is in the pipeline.  It’s an exciting time to be in the industry, but we have so far to go.

I was recently cc’d on an email sent by one of our cardiologist clients (an 8-doc group) sent to the entire practice. I thought it was a really cool example of how they’re using their website. Here’s the email verbatim (I added the bullets format, though)

Subject: Our Website

Has been significantly updated and we should put our website address on all our handouts, perhaps with a sticker or stamp.

• It has animation and great descriptions of everything we do.
• It has an information prescription button that mirrors a prescription that anyone can give the patient to help them find it on our website.
• All the patients should get discharge instructions for whatever procedure they are getting with the admission instructions. These intructions are also retrievable from our web site if a doctor or nurse needs them on the floor or if a patient or family needs from their home.
• We have a complete medical library now as well under patient information that anyone can use if you have a medical question in any medical field. Encourage the patient to go the web site if they need information on what is wrong with them or if they have questions about their test and that you will be happy to answer any questions afterward if they need that.

Pretty cool stuff!

I am pleased to report that we have *finally* launched our own new website at omedix.com. We’ve built hundreds of websites and yet there’s something incredibly difficult about building your own. It’s sort of like the website equivalent of a doctor who does surgery on himself: he has all the skills but there’s just a weird psychological element to it all.

The other thing I discovered is how hard it is to write content. For most projects, our clients are responsible for generating their own content (with considerable guidance and input from us), but now I can really appreciate just how hard it is to come up with an official-sounding statement on every aspect of your business.  It actually forces you to have a “compelling position” on pretty much every aspect of what you do since now you have to write about what it is and why you do it!

I’d also like to give a major shout out to pretty much everyone in our company (and even some not in our company) for helping out.  This was a total team effort and a lot of people worked very hard to make it happen.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be continuing to add additional content — admittedly, we have a lot of “Coming Soon!”, which is a nice way of saying “We haven’t had the time to write this content and format it yet.”  We’ll also be adding additional case studies, helpful information, and even some special surprises! We’ll be sure to post news of the significant enhancements here to our company blog.

Okay, time to get back to normal. If you have thoughts about our site and how we can improve it, feel free to contact me directly at josh.padnick@omedix.com. Enjoy the new site!

We recently launched a website for a Phoenix-based podiatry group, the Arizona Institute of Footcare Physicians. There were a few interesting things about this project so I figured I’d share!

Patients Can Now Request Appointments Online

It used to be that when you wanted to make an appointment with the AIFP, you had to pick up the phone and call. For a lot of people and a lot of situations, this is still preferable. After all, if you’re not even sure if you need to see a podiatrist or just need some human interaction, a phone conversation is a good thing.

But there’s a growing number of patients who want to make their appointments online for any number of reasons:

• They’re at work and are embarrassed to make a “personal phonecall”
• They don’t have time to make an appointment until it’s after hours, when the practice is closed
• They’re embarrassed to tell someone their foot is “deformed” and would rather just request an appointment quietly and anonymously, where the computer’s the one interviewing them.

That last point may sound a bit fanciful, but at the last conference I went to, one of the speakers explained that patients were more likely to accurately fill out a medical history when done online than done in person. The computer could care less about the “Erectile Dysfunction” you’re reporting, but maybe you feel a little anxious when you’re talking to a human being.

This is a really fundamental thing, though. AIFP just launched their online appointment requests. I mean, this practice has taken appointments by phone only for over 35 years, and now they’re introducing a new way. That’s a big deal! It also tells me that if a practice who’s been doing something one way for 35 years is now ready to add a new way, the winds of change are starting to show themselves.

Focusing on the Practice’s Unique Needs

The other thing that was interesting about this project is that, unlike cardiologists, orthopods, or some other specialists, podiatrists are mostly targetting the general public, so their site should have a bit of a different feel to it. Instead of showcasing the docs upfront (who are pretty impressive, by the way), this site was all about getting patients the information they needed fast:

• Here’s our phone number
• Here’s our address
• Here’s how to get to us
• Same day appointments available

Any questions? It’s short, sweet, and to the point, and I think that’s exactly what they needed. For a cardiology practice, this would just seem awkward…and the cardiology practice website for the podiatry practice would be, well, ineffective.

Helping Patients Be Choosy

The final insight I got from this project was that the days of “pick a name from a list” are coming to a thunderous end. When people are curious about a practice or a doctor now guess what they do: they look them up online.

This client has some of the most impressive credentials of anyone we’ve worked with. But how are patients supposed to actually discover that? I mean, really, think about it. Before the Internet, what could you do to research a doctor or a practice other than “ask around.” And what if you don’t have anyone to ask around with? Well, it was just a roll of the dice.

But now patients are becoming choosy consumers, and it’s up to the practice to showcase themselves online so patients are excited about what they’re getting.

Summary

I don’t think I’d like my job very much if our projects were just about going through the motions. I like my job because each project is a mini learning experience and a harbinger of things to come. Props to AIFP for taking the first step toward maintaining their leadership as a great practice!

I’ll be honest. I was sort of conferenced out when I was heading to Park City, UT for the next Information Therapy Conference. I figure these conferences are only as valuable as the people I meet and the extent to which the information I learn impacts current or future behavior. “Conference Burn Out” is generally not a great foundation for conference-inspired behavior change!

Well, I’m actually really glad I went. This conference is sort of like the little gem in the industry in my opinion: it draws a lot of very forward-thinking people from some very well-known institutions and some very cutting-edge ideas are discussed.

For the uninitiated, here’s the definition of Information Therapy:

Information Therapy (n.)
Prescribing the right information at the right time to a patient so that the patient is elevated from “passive receipient of care” to ” educated and empowered active self-monitor of the care being received.”

Basically, it just means that a diabetic patient 30 years ago may have blindly gotten their A1C Test just because their doctor told them to. But his modern-day counterpart was educated by his doctor about what the A1C Test really is, why it’s so important, and what the different ranges mean. In other words, the patient is now empowered to monitor what’s happening to him in his healthcare experience.

I wasn’t too sold on the concept when I first started going to this conference a few years ago but today I take a long, savory drink of this particular Kool-Aid. It’s really game-changing stuff.

I think what’s most interesting is that it’s something very concrete, so people have used it to launch other ideas about what it means to be a patient in the “new” healthcare paradigm. Basically, there’s a growing trend toward people seeing the patient as a partner in the care process, someone who has a proactive care plan and works in partnership with his doctor to achieve his personal goals. It means the patients is educated enough to know at least generally why he’s getting the tests or treatments that he is.

It means that it’s actually possible that the patient might know more than the doctor does about her particular illness because she obsessively researched it prior to her visit. Dr. Paul Wallace, Chief Medical Officer at Kaiser Permanente and a former practicing oncologist, humbly admitted that one his more enterprising patients frankly knew more about her ovarian cancer than he did.

This isn’t a failure on his part; there’s simply too much information on every different type of cancer for him to be the world’s expert. Rather, it’s an indicator that we live in a world overflowing with more information than anyone can reasonably process. That means that the days of the doctors as the untouchable lecturer of all relevant knowledge are sort of gone, and the days of the doctor as highly-educated consultant who works together with the patient to make the best decisions are beginning to come here.

It’s funny because I sat next to a girl who was developing a wellness program for her Care Management company (for the uninitiated, Care Management Companies are hired by insurance companies to proactively call members who suffer from chronic conditions and help increase compliance to keep costs down). Anyways, I cynically told her that by the end of the conference we would have yet another “we know the healthcare system is broken and if we just close our eyes and squeeze our fists we can all change it.”

I was actually proven wrong, though. The seeds of change are already afoot. Here are a few examples from the conference:

This is a paradigm-changing practice started by Dr. Rushika Fernandopulle, who had possibly the most difficult-to-spell name at the entire conference. Dr. Fernandopulle studied healthcare policy at Harvard and utlimately decided the current system delivers systematically “crappy” care (his word; I like it). So he created a new model of primary care, which is supported by a different kind of labor setup and a different kind of business model.

Renaissance Health charges its patients $20 - $40/month and in exchange the patient goes from “episodic care” (i.e. visit doctor when I get sick) to having a proactive medical partner who works together to manage your current health and prevent future illness.

The sense of realism is what struck me most. Dr. F talked about a patient that had 5 co-morbidities. They determined that for her to do everything that was “optimal” for each condition would have required around 3 hours per day. So instead of unrealistically saying “go do these things” and then forgetting about her, they worked together to create a “care strategy”, they prioritized the list, and then they focused on the 1 or 2 issues that mattered most to her.

Dr. F also talked about how he wanted to change the paradigm of “protect the doctor from the patient at all costs” to “strategically avail the doctor to the patient in conjunction with supporting resources.” He introduced positions in his practice like “health educator” that simply don’t exist in most other practices. Sadly, Dr. F complained, the IT they wanted was more optimized to help the doctor code for the highest possible reimbursement rather than communicate proactively with the patient.

I thought it was a phenomenal model, and I have so much respect for Dr. F for “doing” instead of just talking. I hope we’ll get the chance to work together.

These guys actually presented at last year’s conference, but I ran into their CEO, Jeffrey Greene and we chatted a bit.  I obviously can’t share the details of our conversation, but just based off their public demo last year and other “winds” I’ve heard since, here’s another potential game-changer.

MedEnctive is a pay-for-performance company (for the uninitiated, that means they help setup incentive programs so that doctors who provide higher quality care are rewarded by earning more money), except that they set up a very clever incentive scheme: the patient is incentivized financially to engage the doctor (the patient gets 30 bucks if he can get the doctor to give him an information prescription) and the doctor can earn up to 10% - 15% more income per year if he gives the patient an information prescription and gets high satisfaction ratings from the patient.

The results from their first pilot were IMPRESSIVE.  Like, I’m talking 30% overall cost savings in the system.  That’s crazy!  Crazy good, that is.

Finally, we have another game changer.  This was the first conference I’d been to since Microsoft announced their HealthVault product last week, and their was a palpable excitement in the air.  Essentially, MS has setup a Personal Health Record (that’s a medical record that patients can access and update) and set up an open, free interface for accessing it.

That’s huge.  It means that Omedix systems can talk with some random EMR company we’ve never even heard of as long as both of us talk with Microsoft Healthvault.  Here again we have the seeds of change being sowed.

Overall, I guess you could say I’m almost kind of euphoric.  I feel like American Healthcare — in all its big, clumsy, excessively wasteful and inefficient glory — is finally beginning to lumber around to a better system.  For the first time, I actually feel like there are things I can do as an entreprneur that are simultaneously fun, good for America, and profitable.  Finally, capitalism works the way it’s supposed to.

It’s an exciting time in our industry…as much as I’m suffering from conference burnout, I can’t wait to go to the next one!

I’m still here in San Francisco, and yesterday (Thu, Sep 20) was the Health 2.0 Conference. The idea behind the conference was to see how the latest & greatest on the Web (”Web 2.0″) applies to Healthcare. Does it get any more relevant for what we do?

Most conferences are better for the people you meet than what you learn in the sessions. I thought the panels here were actually quite interesting (except for the insurance company one which was extremely boring and overly “health 1.0″), but the attendee list here was incredible: CEO of WebMD, Former CCHIT Head David Brailer, CEO of AllScripts, the list goes on.

During the boring insurance company panel I was joking with the woman next to me that I think someone forgot to tell them it’s a Health *Two*-point-oh conference, she laughed, we introduced ourselves and it turns out she was the head of Internet Services for all of Kaiser. Cool!

Anyways, here are what I saw as some of the key trends:

Key Trend #1 — Social Networks for Patients
Seeing some of the social networks for patients was pretty interesting. Personally, I felt the two best were:

www.DailyStrength.org — This was an online community built around different disease groups. Its core concept is basically “social network for patients” but the way it was implemented was clever and fun (I give you “Hugs Received Today”).

www.PatientsLikeMe.com — This concept was just amazing. The business model is another story, but the actual user experience is incredible. Hopefully you can see in the screenshot below, each patient joins a “disease community” (the example here is Parkinson’s) and reports their history of medication usage, symptoms, weight, etc. The brilliance is in how the data is visually shown. Trends over time and relationships between, say, medications and symptoms are clearly visible. Your data can also be compared against that of other patients. Although it’s limited to chronic diseases and moreoever to just a few diseases, the potential to connect patients throughout the country (world?) is really amazing.

Key Trend #2 — Social Networks for Providers
There was also a panel on these. Sermo.com is basically the leader in terms of both visibility and number of physicians registered. Within3 was also interesting, though Sermo appears to be focused around connecting physicians to each other whereas Within3 seems to center around connecting physicians to other healthcare researchers or industry members.

Key Trend #3 — Everyone Remains Pissed Off at the Healthcare System but No One in Incentivized to Do Anything About It

Okay, so this is me ranting, but it’s just getting so frustrating. Even at a conference like this where discussions were all about the next generation of healthcare, the “the system is broken and we KNOW we can fix it someday” attitude was still quite prominent.

I agree the system’s broken — defensive medicine, perverse incentives for doctors, rising premiums, unacceptably high numbers of hospital errors, 1 out of every 6 Americans is uninsured, etc. — but the problem is after a conference like this I go back to my world and think about how I can do a better job of helping our physician practice clients use the Web to become a better practice. I help them; that helps grow our business; but does the healthcare system itself change? Sadly, I don’t think so.

It’s like my (cardiologist) Dad says: “Some things are bigger than you.” It’s a defeatist statement from someone I know to be the anti-defeatist, but it’s kind of true.

Key Trend #4 — Patients Will Soon be Presented with “Find a Doctor” Services

There are a few startups I saw that aim to help patients find doctors and dentists the way they find what movie theater they want to go to:

www.xoova.com — Patients can search their zip code for a doc and learn about which one they like the best.

www.vimo.com — Vimo is the same concept as xoova, at least for finding a doctor. But Vimo is cool because they focus mostly on letting you shop for health insurance in a nifty online “apples to apples comparison” kind of way. Simple model, simple business, easy to make successful. These are my favorite kinds of business models.

Closing Thoughts

My first thought is that this is a reallly long blog post. I can’t believe you’re still reading this (j/k…I know it’s interesting stuff). My second thought is perhaps (*perhaps*) more profound:

It really is clear healthcare is undergoing a quiet revolution. Maybe I’m being ego-centric, but I think companies in our space have some of the greatest potential to effect change out of everyone. I mean, we help the doctors do cool things online that help them appeal to patients and become more efficient, and how do we earn revenue? The practices pay us money direct because we offer valuable services to them.

Case in point: Earlier this morning, I spoke with a wonderful client of ours who runs a 2-physician OB/GYN practice and she shared with me how they get now upwards of 5 online appointment requests PER DAY and how their website has really altered the dynamic of their practice — they get patients from search engines, patients read information about their condition before and after their visit, etc.

What if when we equip this client with our Patient Portal we linked them into “PatientsLikeMe” via some kind of cool partnership? What if we made sure that patients searching on xooma or vimo are guaranteed to find our clients for relevant searches? What if our doctors logging in get automatic access to sermo or within3?

The future is exciting and unknown. You can probably see now why I love my job so much. ) Thanks for reading!

Well, it’s been about one year, so it’s time to gear up for the annual BONES Conference! To the uninitiated, BONES is the national society for Orthopedic Practice Managers and is one of the major shows of the year for us. About 500 practice managers show up, and an army of vendors readies their booths, free pens, and most physically attractive employees to sell-sell-sell like they’ve never sold before.

I’ll be honest. I love what I do, and I really love meeting clients/attendees, but occasionally you run into the attendees who equate the word “vendor” with “scum of the earth” and treat you as good for nothing but supplying free candies and free contests. I understand that giving away fun free stuff is just plain part of the game, but when people approach you solely in the context of freeloading, it’s just demoralizing on some level.

My conference pet peeves aside, there are quite a few interesting realizations to be had about conferences and I’ve gone to enough now as the exhibitor that I feel at least somewhat authoritative writing this. So here goes!

Observation #1: Managing the “Surge” Effect
Unlike normal day-to-day operations where the Law of Large Numbers safely ensures that a relatively manageable stream of leads will come in, a conference is a three-day massive surge of exposure. Unless your company is going to conferences every week (we don’t…at least not yet), I would estimate that at BONES we will probably generate 10 times the normal demand we receive for our services. Ten times!

That sounds great when I tell that to my parents, but the problem is I get back to the office later that week and I have a stack of business cards so high the sun no longer shines in my office. I try to delegate some of the contacts but in the end it’s just…overwhelming. It’s a good problem to have, and maybe I should really do a better of job building in scalability to our processes, but, hey it’s challenging!

Observation #2: Fallacy of Composition
Of all the fallacies taught in a basic economics class, my most favorite of all is the much-adored Fallacy of Composition. It’s just a fancy way of saying that if you see a company do awesome at a single conference, it doesn’t say anything about that company overall, but that people often make the fallacy of making a lot of other conclusions anyway.

At last year’s conference, we had a pretty awesome booth location along with a pretty awesome booth. All in all, we may have had one of the best locations of the conference. Naturally, we had GREAT traffic while some of our competitors were tucked away, hidden in the tenements of the exhibitor hall where few attendees dared roam lest they be attacked by roving gangs of hungry wolves. Well, something like that at least.

But my point is that they saw us get this huge amount of traffic and suddenly it created this adversarial thing that wasn’t quite there before. It was weird, and I was thinking that the only new information they got about us was “Omedix do good at conference.” On the flipside, I saw gynormous companies like Canon have a total of two people stop by their booth the entire conference.

It’s not that there’s no correlation between heavy conference traffic and company success, but it just doesn’t really tell you much except, well, how the company did at that conference.

Observation #3: Forging Personal Relationships
Hands down the best thing you get at a conference is the opportunity to meet your clients in person and become a real person instead of some anonymous phone voice. I happen to really like people in general and I think it’s fun to talk to people, so I think I do well in this kind of setting.

Observation #4: Building Your Brand
We also recently exhibited at the AzMGMA Conference and one vendor admitted to me that his company once decided not to exhibit at a conference at which they’d exhibited for four years straight. He said everyone then thought they were going out of business, just because they didn’t show up. That got me really worried, actually. In a way, it almost makes it better to never exhibit than to exhibit just once. In either case, I guess the reality is we’re BONES Exhibitors for life now, or else people will wonder why we left!

Observation #5: Vendor Socializing
The other funny thing about conferences it the social dynamic among the vendors. Everyone there is basically in the same boat: away from home and nothing to do but the conference itself. There’s quite a bit of downtime as a vendor, particularly during non-exhibiting hours, and so you socialize and meet the other vendors. They’re usually sales people and therefore fairly outgoing and interesting. I actually kind of like this feature of conferences.

Summing Up
All in all, there’s no question it’s a total pain to drag the booth, organize the furniture and carpet, pay $500/day for Internet, print fliers, etc. But, once it’s all done, it’s actually kind of cool to rep your company on a national level and do some travelling you might not otherwise get to do. Check back here for some updates I’ll post either at the conference itself or when I get back. Wish us luck!

My job is basically to help doctors and medical practice use the Internet effectively.  I help them attract patients with their website, use patient education on their website to make their lives easier, etc.

In a lot of my meetings lately, it keeps coming up that it would be really cool if the doctor were interested in blogging on their website.  Here’s how it would work:

Either the doctor writes quick blogs posts written for patients.  They’d have information on what’s timely for their patients, new ideas in preventive care, new relevations in the literature, etc.  Or the doctor writes a sort of “online grand rounds” where he reviews interesting cases online with the goal of educating referring physicians.

The thing is, patients would absolutely LOVE this.  I kmow I’d certainly love it.  It’d be awesome to go to my doctor’s website, read his latest blog entry on say, eating healthy, or the importance of low sodium, and then to see him/her a few weeks later and be able to discuss what he had written about.  How cool would that be?

It would also serve an important role in helping me choose a doctor. I think the same goes for referring physicians.  Suppose you’re a PCP and you go online to read Dr. X’s cardiology blog where he talks about a common misconception PCPs often have when requesting cardiology consults.  Wouldn’t it be helpful for the PCP to read that?  Wouldn’t it make him that much more likely to refer to that doctor?

I don’t have the data (or raw anecdote) to back it up, but I’m convinced a doctor’s blog would make a big difference.

The thing is, almost every doctor I talk to seems, well, not to be so into it.  I met with a group of wonderful, passionate, very well-trained hematologist-oncologists today and they were really passionate about providing great care, but the idea of writing a blog entry represented “yet another thing at the end of the day” and it seemed like one too many.

I can undertand that position, but I think in 5 years (if not sooner) most doctors will be expected to blog, and there may even be specialized “medical blogging” software designed to make the process more efficient.  Patients will then go to a doc’s website not just to find the office location, read the patient education, or check out the doc’s profile.  The patient will go to read the doc’s thoughts on the best way to treat atrial fibrillation.

Docs are already talking a LOT at places like Sermo.  When will they start reaching out online to patients?