In the days of live blogging, I know I am extremely behind in reporting my thoughts about the Healthcare Blogging survey that was presented at the Healthcare Blogging Summit last week in Washington.

The Healthcare Blogging Survey was conducted by Fard Johnmar at Envision Solutions, LLC and Dmitriy Kruglyak at The Medical Blog Network (soon to be Trusted.MD). There were 214 participants in the survey, and while it wasn’t a random sample, the size of the sample pool likely means that the findings represent a good cross section of those who blog regularly on healthcare issues.  Things I found interesting about the survey include:

  • The most common motivation for healthcare blogging is for helping or educating others. Editorial: This was not all that surprising for me.  Blogging is inherently personal activity/hobby or in my case, preoccupation. Additionally, comments are hard to come by and only the rare few bloggers make it to the fame level equivalent to Scoble or Rubel.  So blog authors put in a lot of time and effort crafting posts comparatively little objective rewards  Those who stick with it definitely are blogging because of some other subjective reward.  This finding really resonates with me. I am a helper by nature with a background in continuing education for patients and professionals. I blog for both of these reasons.
  • Most bloggers begin posting for modest audiences (<100 people per day).  However, as they continue they see their audiences growing.  Thus their influence and audience reach tends to increase over time.  Editorial:  This was good news for me and reflects my experience.  This information is very important for new bloggers.  It is very easy to give up on blogging because the impact is hard to measure.  It is hard to know how many people subscribe to your feed or regularly drop by your blog. It is also good to have some data that suggests that if you keep at it, the audience will come.
  • Many of the survey participants believe that most bloggers facilitate open and unbiased conversations about issues.  56% of respondents say that 61% to 100% of bloggers want to make sure that readers understand the complexities of issues they discuss.  Editorial: Fixing healthcare is a Herculean task because of the nuances and complexities of our system.  People are sharing their perspective and views. However, I find the elephant in the room is rationing healthcare.  Many, including me, discuss issues in hopes of finding ways to patch the system together enough without having to resort to rationing care.

There is much, much more in the report.  I would encourage to read the report and also read the summaries of others who have blogged about it including:  John Mack, Fard Johnmar, Unity Stoakes, Colleen Egan, and Craig LeFebvre

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