On the topic of healthcare innovation, there have been some very interesting conversations going on in the blogosphere. Here are a few to browse:

Facebook is a promising innovation that has nothing to do with healthcare. Or does it? In response to my hospital impact post on what healthcare needs to learn from facebook, Vijay Goel wrote:

consumer technology has been tremendous at improving distribution– bringing content and connectivity to the user so its there when they want it. Healthcare has tended to focus on building walls, making it harder for the user to navigate and engage with health systems. Only by engaging the user on their turf and helping them to make healthcare an easy and desired component for them to incorporate into their life will we truly start to move the population. What good is the perfectly logical, scientific, evidence-based system if most of the population doesn’t understand it and doesn’t end up using it?

On a related topic, Amy of DiabetesMine is asking her diabetic audience: what do you want in a healthcare community? Jens wanted the following:

==a site that isn’t graphics intensive, so low-bandwidth users aren’t stuck in cyber space.
==a site that is more factual than opinion/rant/complaint.
==a site that gives me current research findings that have a bearing on the way I live with my diabetes.
==a site that has options for those who desire “community” but doesn’t make that the focal point.
==a site that deals with the realities of self-care in the US world of poor health care, insurance, MDs who, apart from endos, seem remarkably ignorant of what diabetes care entails.

Speaking of physicians, RateMDs now has more than 100,000 physicians rated. Now physicians are striking back, asking patients to get their permission before they can rate them online. In response to the WSJ health blog’s post on this new “medical justice” dynamic, Carol thinks RateMDs is moot anyways:

The only ratings website I’ve ever looked at is one rating teachers (pre-college). What a joke!! Clearly, many of the posts are serious in their positive or negative reviews. But many, many more are just rants, jokes, silliness or insults for no other reason than it’s possible for anonymous people to say whatever they want on the web. Having seen teacher reviews, I wouldn’t take doctor reviews any more seriously. If I want to know what a doctor is like, I’ll call the office, or ask a fellow doctor.

On a separate topic, we all know that the nursing shortage is really a nursing faculty shortage (which is arguably a nursing faculty salary shortage). In response to Brian Klepper’s post on how to solve this problem, Barry Carol had this to say:

Rather than have hospitals subsidize nursing faculty compensation, I would rather see it done by federal taxpayers. It could be another federal budget line item similar to NIH, CDC, FDA, and medical education subsidies to train doctors.

And finally, Scott’s post here on “Does Prevention Saves Money?” garnered this response from Brian Baum:

Market forces will ultimately resolve this issue. If the market can produce a prevention experience that consumers want and will utilize – everything else falls into place.