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Every once and a while Eric and I are contacted by people hoping to start a blog.  Sometime people follow through and start a new blog.  One terrific example is GeriTech, a blog about technology to improve care of older adults, started by Leslie Kernisan, MD.  See her recent postabout the need for a good blood pressure monitoring app.

Here are 3 blogs that are just waiting for the right dedicated people to get started.  Some of these are ideas that have been talked about but haven’t taken off yet.  Maybe you, dear reader, will be the one to get one of these blogs going?

  1. PediPal – A Pediatric Palliative Care Blog.  We’ve carved out a niche by focusing on the intersection of Geriatrics and Palliative Care.  Pediatrics is in a remarkably similar position.  In part our success was born out of some existing tensions between the fields of Geriatrics and Palliative Care.  I suspect (though I’m not in the know) that some degree of tension may exist between pediatric and adult palliative care.
  2. PalliTech – Technology for Improving Palliative Care.  Leslie has done outstanding work in the field of Geriatrics.  The same should be done in Palliative Care.  As I’m writing this, in the background a webinar on Palliative Care Technology is playing (sponsored by the Coalition for Compassionate Care of California), and the speaker Jill Joseph is talking about ACTIVE – Assessing Caregivers for Team Intervention Through Video Encounters.  This technology allows caregivers to videoconference in to participate in hospice interdisciplinary team meetings.  This is such a neat idea!  A PalliTech blog could feature, review, and disseminate new and useful technologies in palliative care.  Also related – new perspective on mHealth and need for regulation in JAMA.
  3. GeriPal EM – Geriatrics and Palliative Care: Emergency Medicine.  I used to do research about palliative care in the emergency department, and my most cited article is a qualitative study about emergency providers (docs, nurses, social workers) and their perspectives on palliative care (discomfort).  I got out of this research because emergency medicine is such a new field, that it’s rightly somewhat insular and protective.  Change should come from within, and I’m not an emergency medicine doc.  There is some terrific innovation in creating Geriatric and Palliative friendly emergency departments.  Related – new geriatric emergency department guidelines; and story in New York Times.

Look forward to reading your blogs!  Any other blog ideas?  Please list in the comments.

And if you’re not ready to start your own blog, you’re welcome to write on GeriPal.  You could be the “GeriPal Technology Writer,” or lead for an “Emergency Medicine Series”.

by: Alex Smith

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