Sermo bills itself as the “MySpace for physicians”.

Here, physicians aggregate observations from their daily practice and then - rapidly and in large numbers - challenge or corroborate each others opinions, accelerating the emergence of trends and new insights on medications, devices and treatments. You can then apply the collective knowledge to achieve better outcomes for your patients.

O.K. I am skeptical- I have not seen it but I am still skeptical. This is based on my experience as a nurse of several years ago so I might be out of date. While it was some time ago, and I know more docs have adopted PDAs, etc. The one thing a physician (and a nurse) lacks is time…TIME. Seriously. Never, ever enough time.

I recall doing many late night and early morning rounds with doctors I learned very quickly that time was the most valuable thing they have or didn’t have. Don’t waste it, be efficient, and know your stuff. Now I am not saying Sermo is a time waster- I think it would be great if more physicians tuned into the Net. I still think most would do it to get a date first- they just don’t have time.

Nascent thoughts on where and how I would use the “Twitter Concept” in an enterprise. This is inspired after (caveat- haven’t practiced in ten years)

a) Having worked in various hospitals
b) Having to have been hospitalized
c) More than once, due to weather, having to work back-to-back triple shifts, sleep for eight, and get up and do it again. Man talk about the intercom being surreal.

The Problem: The hospital intercom. Nothing more annoying than that squak box. There is a reason we had:

Code Blue- cardiac arrest, resuscitation needed stat.
Code Whites- Hostile patient- back up needed.
Code Reds- Fire- we have a fire.

We didn’t want to alarm patients, never mind we interrupted them all the time.

Scenario: This could use more thought. This is just a five-minute brain dump…to get thinking aligned.

The hospital would employ an enterprise version of the twitter structure- yes I know some work would be needed for HIPPA compliance- but usually a room number will do. I am sure it can be done with more thought. Each nurse call station could easily send a short message that would go to the phone of the charge nurse, one particular charge nurse, or the med nurse, or to a Doc on call, broadcast all over, etc. Short, fast, quiet, use SSL and posts to the intranet too. You could color code the message for priority, have pre-made messages to save time,and/ or a program on the PDA could sort, rate, prioritize, etc.

By viewing the intranet trend data one could see problems that needed correcting, trends, shortages, surpluses, staffing and any abuse of course. I am sure modern Pixus machines already do this for pharmacists- they can look at a nurses’s PRN dosing patterns to spot abuse by comparing it to the standard deviation from the mean. Still simple problems solved can have real savings.

I remember coming up with the simple idea to use the antiquated dumb waiters in one hospital to do routine after-pharmacy-hour medication restocks. Doesn’t sound like much, but imagine 14 units, a nurse having to go up to the pharmacy and gather meds, (say on average 30 minutes off unit.), and three shifts 365 a year. Average wage of ~ $15.00 hour back then. That is a savings of about $115,000.00 a year, not counting increase in patient care with time spent on unit and maybe nurses could get a REAL break.

Twitter- Short Codes - SMS- etc-think short chunks of vital information that must be relayed and read quickly, quietly, and the ability to trend the information by type. Yes the whole micro-blogging concept has many uses yet untapped.

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