Which medical websites are physicians visiting?

What websites do physicians frequent? A company called comScore recently released some interesting data about professional medical websites. Here are some interesting stats from their report titled, "4 out of 5 U.S. Physicians Online Visited Health Care Professional Sites in Q1 2010":

% Reach of Physicians Online
Medscape.com 57.0%
NIH.gov 30.5%


Healthgrades.com 26.0%

Sermo.com 21.3%
NEJM.org 13.0%

I'm surprised they didn't list Wikipedia as an online website frequented by physicians. We know that many physicians are using Google to search for medical information and Wikipedia is often one of the top websites that appear on the search results.

HPV vaccine probably did not cause sudden death in this young girl

A young girl receives an HPV vaccine at school and then suddenly dies. Was the vaccine the cause of sudden death? In this case, it appears that Natalie Morton (age 14) had a serious medical condition and even a large tumor in her chest. According to a news story on Medscape:

preliminary postmortem revealed that she had "a serious underlying medical condition which was likely to have caused death," according to Caron Grainger, MD, joint director of public health in Coventry.

Regardless, several health authorities in the United Kingdom announced that they were temporarily suspending their HPV vaccination programs.

This story on the BBC reveals that this girl had a large infiltrating tumor in her chest and this tumor was affecting her heart and her lungs. Since both are vital organs, it's possible that the timing of the vaccine simply had nothing to do with her death. In any case, this is a sad story and my heart goes out to her family and loved ones.

Top posts in July 2009 on Medicine and Technology

July was a really busy month on MedicineandTechnology.com and I saw some serious peaks in traffic because I hosted Grand Rounds and because my Facebook account got hacked. Never give anyone money on Facebook.

The top referring websites for this month were 1) Medscape (thanks to Colin for the article), 2) Twitter (thanks to my 17,000+ followers), 3) Pajamas Media (thanks to Glenn Reynolds AKA Instapundit for telling people about Grand Rounds), and 4) CNN (thanks to Sphere, my blog posts often appear at the bottom of health-related CNN articles).

Here were the top posts for July:

1. Grand Rounds July 14, 2009: Technology and Healthcare

2. Is Canada's health system better?

3. Jobs for Physicians with No Residency Experience

4. Things are getting ugly between Sermo and the AMA

5. Non-Clinical Medical Opportunities for Physicians and Other Clinicians

6. Medical treatment based on the color of your skin

7. CNBC debate between Gov Dean and Sermo

8. Fake NASA moon landings?

9. After Obama's speech last night, will more physicians look for non-clinical careers?

10. My Facebook account got hacked!

In July, so much traffic came from referring sites so search engines only represented 13% of my site traffic.

Top posts for last week on Medicine and Technology.com

Here are the 5 most popular posts from last week on Medicine and Technology.com

1. Grand Rounds July 14, 2009: Technology and Healthcare

2. Non-Clinical Medical Opportunities for Physicians and Other Clinicians

3. Jobs for Physicians with No Residency Experience

4. Fake NASA moon landings?

5. Medical treatment based on the color of your skin

Thanks for featuring me on Medscape

Colin, thanks for writing about me on Medscape. If you'd like to read the story titled, "Not Sure That Medicine Is Right for You? Get Career Tips Here," then click on this link: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/705576

Please note: you'll need to log in to view the article.

Something is Different at Medscape

Have you noticed the change at Medscape? They now have all their CME in an entirely separate section from the main Medscape pages. The URL is MedscapeCME.com, but you land on the subdomain cme.medscape.com. When you're there, everything you see is certified CME and you're not exposed to any marketing or promotional content. In the world of CME, any educational content that is not certified CME is considered promotional content. We live in a strange world, but that's just the reality of the CME environment.

Medscape Physician Connect

I've been reading some very interesting discussions on Medscape Physician Connect. Unlike Sermo, this discussion board allows users to post topics and comments anonymously. I'm sure that Sermo will implement this type of feature shortly.

There are obviously pros and cons to posting comments anonymously. I'm actually quite surprised when I see people posting very personal comments and then leave their name, phone #, e-mail address, and other contact information. There are some very angry and bitter people on these discussion boards and I'm not entirely sure that I'd want to hand that type of information out to them. I've seen professionalism fly out the window on some of these discussion boards.

Back to the original subject: Medscape Physician Connect. Have you given it a try? Or would you rather stick with Sermo?

Medscape is now FINALLY copying Sermo

Medscape, perhaps the largest online resource for healthcare professionals, is finally copying Sermo with their "Physician Connect" physician-only online community. Medscape has had forums and other features to foster an online community, but uptake and usage has been very low. WebMD has really dominated the online healthcare space, so I'm surprised it's taken Medscape so long to come up with something like this. WebMD has been gobbling up other online professional resources like Medsite, eMedicine, and theHeart.org. These are all being placed under the "Medscape" umbrella of services.

I remember when Medscape was born. Most users at the time was using Netscape, so the name medscape really made sense. Now, hardly anyone uses Netscape to browse the web. Safari, Firefox, and Opera have taken over. Can we come up with some creative names based on these browsers? Medfari? Medfox? Medopera?

By the way, just like Sermo, Physician Connect requires physician validation.