Personal
Personal reflections, comments about things I've been doing, etc.
Dr. Strong, Meet Mr. Friedman
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 02/05/2011 - 18:05As social media manager for Community Health Center, Inc. in Connecticut, I try to build healthy communities using online tools. It requires trying to stay on top of news about technology and health care and spending time thinking about things like the relationships between doctors and their patients.
Last week, I read two interesting articles. The first was the Health Topics report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. It said
Eight in ten internet users look online for health information, making it the third most popular online activity among all those included in the Pew Internet Project’s surveys.
Of that, 44% of Internet users have looked online for information about doctors or other health professionals.
Let me digress for a moment. I am writing this on my own blog on my own time and it expresses my own opinions and not necessarily those of CHC. This blog post also has a little criticism of CHC. It is generally poor form to criticize one’s employer in a blog, even if such speech may be protected, but I am hoping that the criticism will be taken as something constructive and I will be given a chance to help address the criticism.
CHC does not do as good a job as I wish it did in providing information about its medical providers online. We’re having some good discussions about it, but it isn’t there yet. On the other hand, many health organizations fail in this category, and some make CHC seem stellar.
This brings me to the second article I read last week, and the title for this blog post. A Texas television station ran a story about Doctors asking patients to sign gag orders to stop unfavorable online comments.
To me, this is a red flag. I’m a free speech fanatic. Any doctor asking me to sign something like this is sending a message that they aren’t very good and they want it hidden. It is sort of like the doctors offices that have big posters asking patients to support tort reform. A doctor that is telling me that they are really concerned about how much money they could be sued for also seems to be telling me that maybe they aren’t that good. Side note: I recognize the issues of malpractice insurance premiums, so this second concern is not as prominent for me, although I will admit that I’ve left practices because of their strong advocacy for tort reform.
Back to the gag orders: A few years ago I heard Tom Friedman talk at Personal Democracy Forum. He was talking about the power of the Internet in politics and the importance of political figures having websites. The phrase that I remember him saying was something like,
On the Internet, either you do it, or someone does it to you.
These doctors that are asking patients to sign gag orders are missing this key aspect of what the Internet has done for American life. We have more of a conversation. Good doctors join in conversations with their patients. They make their practices patient centered.
CHC, from what I’ve seen is a leader in patient centered medicine. There is much that can be written about that, and I hope to, over the coming days. Unlike the doctors from Texas, CHC, as well as other high quality health centers around the country should take Tom Friedman’s lead and facilitate patients talking about their practices. Those who fail to do so are perhaps hiding their light under a basket.
By encouraging comments, we may get a few negative comments. No matter what you do, you are likely to get a few. If you are lucky, they will be ones that you can learn from, and get better. However, I suspect that CHC, given its great staff, will get many more comments like the one on the Google Place page, Community Health Center Inc: Gellrich Gabriella MD:
Finally!! Real doctors who listen to the problems of their patients rather than just giving a nod and pretending they understand or care. Everyone from the reception desk to the physicians were helpful, knowledgeable, and respectful. I had no problems contacting them on the phone to set up appointments in the two years of going to them. They are, in my humble opinion, the best health care providers in the Danbury area.
One friend said that perhaps Friedman has it wrong and instead of saying ‘they will do it to you’, he should have said, they will do it for you. Politicians, and doctors, who are afraid of the public, are likely to be afraid people with ‘do it to them’. Politicians, and doctors, who are well respected should hope that the public will ‘do it for them’. CHC has every reason to believe that its patients will spread the word and do it for us.
“Fire and Ice”
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 02/03/2011 - 08:35Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
The words of Robert Frost come to mind this morning as I sit down to confront my day. Yesterday, I had parked at the end of my driveway, and although the storm was raging, I managed to safely drive to work. The roads weren’t that bad and there were very few people on the road. When I got to the office, there were very few people there as well.
At ten, I had a conference call and was on the phone for the next hour or so. During the call, I started getting emails, about a roof falling in. A building about a block and a half away from where I was working collapsed under the weight of the ice. I stopped by and spoke with the only other person that had made it into the top two floors of the building I worked in. He said that he felt our building shake about that time and wondered what was going on. I had missed that. I guess I was too engrossed in my conference call.
Soon the road was blocked off and there were all kinds of vehicles dealing with the collapse. Surrounding buildings were evacuated and the cleanup began.
I had to take a detour on my way home, circumventing the area around the collapse, but the drive home was uneventful. My wife had called and talked about how icy everything was and wondering if I would even be able to walk up our driveway.
The entrance to our driveway is fairly wide as it lets out onto a state highway. When the driveway has been bad, I’ve parked at the end of the driveway in order to be able to get in and out easily. Beyond the wide entrance, there is a section of steep hill. This part is shared by four houses. It is often icy and difficult to traverse. I had thought that this is what Kim was concerned about. Yet when I got into our driveway, I saw that the hill was mostly dry pavement and I drove up the hill without a problem.
At the top of the hill, our driveway turns off to the right. It was still snow covered, but the snow didn’t look very deep except for one little pile that I managed to get past. What I didn’t realize, until I tried to turn around, was that although it was shallow, it was almost nothing but ice. So, now my car is safely in the driveway with no way of backing out.
We’ve been trying to get in touch with our landlord as well as the plow guys in hopes that we can get our driveway properly plowed out so that Kim and I will be able to get out of the driveway. Until then, Kim and I have no way to get to our offices.
Fortunately, Fiona spent the storm and her grandparents house. We have a delayed opening for school, and they should be able to get her to school.
Meanwhile, I’ve been reading various reports of other buildings that have collapsed under the weight of the ice. There have been quite a few in Connecticut.
To return to the words of Robert Frost,
...for destruction ice
Is also great
Be safe, everyone.
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 02/01/2011 - 06:54A new month starts. Another snow storm rolls in. Tomorrow is Groundhog’s day. If he sees his shadow,it means six more weeks of winter. What does it mean if he can’t dig his way out of his tunnel? Thursday is the lunar new year. The year of the rabbit. Will this year be a better year, particularly as we invoke the rabbit in the childhood wish for luck at the beginning of each month? Friday is National Wear Red Day, to fight heart disease in women.
Besides the hearts damaged by disease, there are also hearts weary from the weather. As I think about the coming month and the record setting snow we had in January, I remember the great song, February, by Dar Williams:
First we forgot where we’d planted those bulbs last year,
Then we forgot that we’d planted at all,
Then we forgot what plants are altogether,
and I blamed you for my freezing and forgetting and
The nights were long and cold and scary,
Can we live through February?
...
And then the snow,
And then the snow came, we were always out shoveling,
And wed drop to sleep exhausted,
Then wed wake up, and its snowing.
It is a beautiful song, not only about the cold weather, but the cold that can seep into relationships. Later in the song, as a thaw comes, both literally and figuratively, and they see an early flower of spring.
You stopped and pointed and you said, "That’s a crocus,"
And I said, "What’s a crocus?" and you said, "It’s a flower,"
I tried to remember, but I said, "What’s a flower?"
You said, "I still love you."
I don’t know if the groundhog will see his shadow tomorrow. I don’t know if we will have six more weeks of winter. I’m not even sure how I will make it through six more weeks of winter. But I do know that there is beauty waiting to break forth once winter loosens its icy grip, and if we remember to tell our loved ones that we love them, the image of the long awaited first crocus can sustain us.
How Do You Tell Your Children Not to Paint Each Other Green?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/29/2011 - 15:07Yesterday, my middle daughter who skipped high school to go to art school, and a couple months after she turns 18 will start her master’s degree program in art in Boston, posted a picture of me on Facebook. It was from when we went to pick a Christmas tree last month. To the photograph, she added the caption, “This is the lecture face.” Her older sister responded, “ Or the ‘...Mairead, did you really HAVE to paint your sister's head green?’ face”. Miranda responded, “ I think it's a similar idea :P”
When they were much younger, Mairead did in fact paint Miranda’s head green. It was hilarious and made the Blue Man Group look like amateurs. Fortunately, it was some water soluble poster paint that would come off easily in the bathtub. Unfortunately, there was paint everywhere, some of which may never have gotten completely removed from the floors, ceilings, walls, grout around the bathtub, etc.
It raised an important issue. How do you tell your children not to paint each other green? Somehow, bursting out laughing and acknowledging the great creativity seemed fraught with risks. While it was greatly imaginative, it wasn’t something I wanted to encourage. They were, after all, at that tender age where if you tell them something funny, they would keep repeating it long past it stopped being funny, and I suspect that it wouldn’t take too many times of cleaning up paint everywhere for such art projects to become pretty annoying.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to stifle the budding creativity. So, I took as close to a middle course as possible and put on my ‘lecture face’. I don’t know what I said, I hope I complimented them on the creativity, compared it to Blue Man Group as well as to rites in various aboriginal cultures, and then spoke with them about what a mess it made and told them they had to clean up, and not make any more messes that large.
I don’t recall how they reacted to the lecture, but they did take a bath, or perhaps two, and watched the green water go down the drain.
Did I strike the right note? It’s hard to say. Miranda is heading off to a graduate program in art. However, Mairead may have felt the rebuke more strongly. So, how do you tell your children not to paint each other green?
Remembering the Challenger
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/28/2011 - 21:26It seems hard to believe it was twenty-five years ago. I was working at 360 Hamilton Ave, White Plains, NY as an external consultant on IBM’s Advanced Accounting System. If I recall properly, my officemate’s wife was a junior high school teacher, and we were all very excited about the shuttle taking off. However, Steve was a bit of a practical joker.
So, shortly after the shuttle was scheduled to lift off, he received a phone call. It was his wife calling. I don’t remember overhearing the discussion, but after he hung up, he turned to me and said in a complete deadpan voice, “The shuttle exploded”, or something like that.
It was so deadpan, so unexpected, I thought he was joking, but it quickly became clear that he wasn’t. Back then, IBM had an internal network called VNET. I had already connected with IBM employees from around the world on this very early precursor to social networking. VNET had a connection to BITNET, and from BITNET you could get out to ARPA and Usenet, although it was pretty restricted.
One of IBM’s big locations at the time was in Boca Raton, which is a couple hundred miles south of Cape Canaveral, and I remember the emails flying in from Boca Raton about the explosion. There were a lot of people at IBM that were deeply emotionally invested in the space program.
I remember reading the emails, being in shock, sharing thoughts with Steve. In many ways, it was my first experience of a major news event through information I was receiving online.
Later, I listened to President Reagan’s speech. I was not a fan of President Reagan, yet on this day, his simple but elegant speech summed it up better than I could ever have imagined.
The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them....
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."
So, this evening, I watched a clip of CNN’s broadcast of the Challenger explosion and a clip of President Reagan delivering his speech. Kim and I talked about the event with Fiona.
