Feeds for Fauquier ENT Blog Has Changed

Fauquier ENT blog has recently changed its email subscription service from FeedBurner (run by Google) to FeedBlitz.

Why?

Well, it is because Google appears to be shutting the FeedBurner service down.

• FeedBurner API will be shut down on October 20, 2012. At that point, feed metrics will be gone, though feedburner itself will continue to work.

• FeedBurner Twitter and Blog accounts were abandoned on July 26, 2012.

Though Google has not specifically stated they will shut down FeedBurner, such actions (or inactions) stated above does not exactly build confidence in me.

As such, rather than waiting for the complete shutdown to occur before making a move, transition has been made to what I believe is a superior email subscription service for blogs called FeedBlitz.

I do expect a few errors to pop up while all bugs are worked out, so please be patient.

What do current subscribers need to do?

If you have subscribed by email already, there's nothing for you to do. You will continue to receive email updates with new blog entries.

BUT, if you subscribe via RSS reader, you will need to change / resubscribe using the new feed run by FeedBlitz as the FeedBurner feeds will soon be discontinued.

Here are the new RSS feeds:

Feed URL:	http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedburner/fauquierent
XML URL:	http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedburner/fauquierent&x=1
Mobile Friendly:	http://m.feedblitz.com/feedburner/fauquierent

Thank you for all your support and understanding!

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Does Social Media Advance Medical Knowledge?

According to a recent paper, the answer is absolutely!

A survey was distributed via email to a random sample of 1695 practicing physicians in the United States in March 2011 with responses from 485 physicians (28.61%). Rather than rehashing what was said, I quote from the abstract,

Overall, 117 of 485 (24.1%) of respondents used social media daily or many times daily to scan or explore medical information, whereas 69 of 485 (14.2%) contributed new information via social media on a daily basis. On a weekly basis or more, 296 of 485 (61.0%) scanned and 223 of 485 (46.0%) contributed. In terms of attitudes toward the use of social media, 279 of 485 respondents (57.5%) perceived social media to be beneficial, engaging, and a good way to get current, high-quality information. In terms of usefulness, 281 of 485 (57.9%) of respondents stated that social media enabled them to care for patients more effectively, and 291 of 485 (60.0%) stated it improved the quality of patient care they delivered. 

I should mention that this study was brought to my attention via tweet by Dr. Ves, an allergist who is an active blogger and tweeter.

How medically efficient, relevant, and useful social media is to a practicing physician utterly depends on "who" physicians follow on the variety of social media platforms whether twitter, facebook, linkedin, or blog. Even videos on YouTube.

It also depends on the willingness of physicians to than share interesting medical information they found useful with others who than in turn share with others.

Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects in getting started in medical social media is finding who to follow in the first place who is worth following for useful medical tidbits.

If you are new to medical social media, I would suggest the following to get started. I should also mention that twitter IS the best and most efficient way to get started learning from and sharing information.

KevinMD (Primary Care)
Dr. Ves (Allergist)
Dr. Wes (Cardiologist)
Skeptic Scalpel (General Surgery)

Of course, I should add myself to this list:

Fauquier ENT or Dr. Chris Chang (Otolaryngology)

Reference:
Understanding the Factors That Influence the Adoption and Meaningful Use of Social Media by Physicians to Share Medical Information. J Med Internet Res 2012;14(5):e117

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Fauquier ENT Blog Redesigned

Over the past two weeks, Fauquier ENT blog has secretly undergone a major facelift which has finally gone public today...

I anticipate that there are a few errors here and there that will need to be addressed as I discover them over the next few weeks. So, please help me out and let me know if there's any errors you come across. I would be much appreciative.

The custom blog template redesign was done by an Indonesian company 30Dzign who I highly recommend for any customized blogger template work.

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Website Development Help

Given how extensive the practice website is (250+ webpages; 1300+ if including blog), I often get asked by patients and other offices how did I go about developing it.

First off, I am fortunate that I have some computer programming skills and have been creating websites since the 1990s. I have decent HTML knowledge with a dash of CSS understanding. I am clueless with  making new javascripts, but know how to use ones that have been already created.

As such this baseline knowledge of mine is sufficient to extensively look for answers to questions using google and if necessary, plagiarizing code that accomplishes a task I require.

However, I also bring in help when I need it. I have a few absolutely awesome and reliable computer programmers I tap when I need it including Chris Ferrell with PettyGroveFull (New York City) and Chris Mohler (Memphis, TN) who is a freelance programmer. 

They are both diligent, fair, trustworthy, and provide regular feedback (I have never even met them face-to-face).

Chris Ferrell re-designed my entire website incorporating HTML5 and CSS3 a few years ago.

Chris Mohler than optimized the website further and enabled mobile viewing more recently.

For other programming tasks that Ferrell and Mohler are unable to help with (programmers have their areas of specialty just like doctors!), I go to Elance which is an awesome website where one can post a job ("I need somebody to redesign my blog and move it to Wordpress") and various contractors looking for jobs can than bid on it.

Just like Amazon.com, contractors have star ratings from prior clients.

And given the work is digital, the you can tap anybody in the WORLD... so bids can come from not only North America, but India and Russia.

As such, prices can be quite competitive and much lower than what one would expect given contractors are competing against everybody else in the world!

Indeed, I currently have an ongoing project I granted to a programming group in Indonesia. So far, so good!

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Fauquier ENT Reaches 5 Million Web Visits

It is with some amazement that a certain milestone was reached this past week...

Fauquier ENT's online presence received over 5,000,000 web visits since first coming into existence in 2004. This number includes practice website and blog.

There has been exponential growth year over year with daily web visits now averaging close to 8,000 hits per day with some occasional peak days exceeding 10,000 views.

Our YouTube channel has done even better on its own with over a QUARTER BILLION VIEWS since we first established it in 2007. As of today, our videos have collectively received over 228 million views, averaging 45,000 views per day.

Thanks for all the online support!

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For a Physician, When is the Best Time To Tweet or Publish a Blog?

According to professional bloggers and tweeters, timing of content publication is important in order to maximize getting noticed and shared. From a general topics viewpoint (not healthcare specific; data taken from here):

• 4PM Eastern is the best time to Tweet
• Friday is the best day to Tweet
• 9AM Eastern is the best time to Facebook share
• Saturday and Sunday are the best days to Facebook share
• In the morning is the best time to blog
• Publishing a different blog article multiple times throughout the day is better than once per day

However, I've always wondered if such "rules" similarly apply to healthcare content as by their very nature, people tend to search a problem after seeing their doctor or seeing/reading it on the news.

Ever since I've been monitoring my website statistics starting in 2005, I've noticed some undeniable trends of "when" website activity occurs which presumably reflects "when" healthcare keyword searches occur.

For any given 24 hour period of time (graph shown below is for Nov 14-15, 2011), my ENT practice website got THE most activity between noon and midnight; peak activity being from noon - 3PM.

On a weekly basis (graph shown below is for Mon Nov 14 - Sun Nov 20, 2011), the greatest activity is Monday thru Wednesday after which web traffic drops off almost 50% by Saturday before bouncing back up 100% on Monday.

Such statistical fluctuations have been true for the past 5 years I've been tracking this stuff.

Now I certainly can't explain the "why" this phenomenon happens without more google analytics data from more healthcare websites, but I certainly can take advantage of this knowledge as it pertains to ENT problems (though I suspect that what is true for ENT is true of other health problems when it comes to web traffic).

How can I take advantage of this knowledge?

People are CONSTANTLY adding to the content found on the web, all vying for the attention of eyeballs. Being the first is important as it seems to me that google values original content (not copies that appear later), but just as important is "when" the content first appears as one would like to ride the wave of when healthcare keyword searches occur.

Overall, the holy grail is to come up with great original content, be the first to publish it, but publish it at the right time.

Great, Original Content

Good content is king and #1 in the priority of getting noticed. If your content stinks, being first and when you publish won't matter.

Be the FIRST to Publish

I can't prove it and I don't have supporting evidence for it, but it seems that google does prefer content that appears "first" over copies that appear later. The prime example is Associated Press articles that are syndicated and re-published over a wide variety of different newspaper websites throughout the world.

If google encounters the same exact article 100 times, how does it rank one over the other?

I suspect, it ranks based on two factors:

1) "Popularity" of the website publishing the content
2) Being the first to publish

Obviously, an individual only has control over timing. Take advantage of it.

WHEN to Publish

Though being the first to publish is important, the timing of when to publish is also extremely important. It's almost like surfing... You want to be the first to stake out a place to ride a wave... but you need to be where the waves are.

Given the dramatic... but consistent... fluctuations in healthcare web activity, it is better to wait and publish when people are actively searching. It is more likely to get noticed and hopefully shared, emailed, liked on facebook, tweeted, etc. Going viral is the goal all content publishers dream of.

So, WHEN is the golden moment to publish?

It is around 11AM on Mon, Tues, and Wed based on my limited data.


Conclusion

Now, do I even follow my own advice?

Not necessarily... I tend to go with the "be the first" rule regardless of the time, not because I feel it more important than the timing of publication, but it's just that I have so much other things to do (like taking care of patients), that if I come up with an idea to write about, I just publish it and not worry too much about timing.

BUT, if I do have a moment, I WILL tend to publish things timed between 11AM and 3PM during the week.

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Healthcare Blogging a Losing Proposition?

An interesting blog article from the folks at Compete came to my attention recently. Compete for those who don't know is a fantastic analytics site to see how ANY website is doing in terms of popularity (number of visitors in a given time period). The basic data is free. For more in depth information, there's a charge.

For example, for our practice's website, here is the Compete data I pulled which is "relatively" accurate based on my own analytics information:

My nearest local competitor in terms of website popularity is the hospital, Fauquier Health System:

Though I may smile that my solo private practice website is getting nearly 30X the number of visitors as a community hospital, such numbers PALE in comparison to what truly is driving website searches by the lay-population... celebrity, entertainment, and political topics which collectively garner more than 80X the search volume compared to searches related to healthcare. Here is the graph by Compete.

Healthcare is the purple line WAY down at the bottom.

Assuming people ARE searching for healthcare topics, what might those topics be?

They are pregnancy and cancer related by a vast margin (chart taken from here).

What is the take-home message?

Healthcare blogging is truly a niche market... and a small one at that...

BUT, if one wants to become a successful healthcare blogger, it should be slanted towards pregnancy and cancer topics.

"Thyroid" made the top 20 list, but beyond that, ENT healthcare topics are left out in the dust... perhaps  even smaller than dust.

Take a look at the stats for perezhilton.com, a website dedicated to celebrity and entertainment news:

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