Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Twitter makes your life easier. Really.

Not long ago, the idea that I would be sitting at my laptop typing merrily away at something called a blog for something called H&HN Daily—well, the idea would never have occurred to me. As a boomer who didn't grow up with the Internet, I could barely get my brain around what a blog was, back then; I didn't read any and I certainly had no interest in writing one. And though H&HN Weekly had been growing in popularity, taking it daily was a thought better left unthunk.

I'm embarrassed to admit it now, but I was one of those people who chuckled every time somebody uttered "Twitter" out loud. It was a fad. It was for teen-agers and 20-somethings. It wouldn't last a year.

Did I mention that in addition to regularly posting blogs, we here at Hospitals & Health Networks now send out a steady stream of tweets every working day?

I know how busy you are and how overwhelming it is to have so much health care information coming at you in so many different formats. I apologize. Far from trying to inundate you with more and more stuff you don't have time to read, our goal is the contrary: to sort out information about health care, organize it in a way that is most accessible to you and then let you decide what you can reasonably invest the time in reading further.

Take Twitter, for an example. As the managing editor of H&HN, one of my jobs is to check dozens of health care Web sites every day. They include organizations like the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and many others. Several Web services aggregate news reports about hospitals from around the country. And I keep a steady eye on the Web pages of national and state hospital associations, the Joint Commission, Health and Human Services, CMS and other major players. Other editors and writers here do the same.

From that reading, we try to judge which news reports, which research findings, which policy proposals, which upcoming webinars, conferences, podcasts, etc. H&HN readers might find useful and we post about it on our Twitter page or we spotlight it in H&HN Daily. We always include links for more information. By reading a concise, to-the-point tweet or blog, you can decide if this particular item is relevant to you, and whether to click on the link to find out more or simply zap it into the ether.

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H&HN Daily extends the conversations that readers began in other health care management publications and media. Each daily e-newsletter contains at least two topics with exclusive insights from high-visibility, recognized names in health care. All comments are welcome and may be posted to the blog. Comments may be edited for clarity or length.

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