Wednesday, February 18, 2009

The State of the Blog

As many of you know, one of the early projects that I was tasked with was development of a blog for the hospital. At the time this was sort of daunting, because there were only a handful of hospitals blogging, in any capacity. From the perspective of our institution on only a few of those were doing it well.

But I must give credit to blogs like this one http://sharing.mayoclinic.org/ and http://neuro-ortho.org/blog/ for helping me to make the case.

So I began the process of making a case for the blog, I wrote the beginnings of the guidelines documents while on vacation. Submitted the project to our IS new project cue for approval and assignment. Just in the past few months, I have begun to recruit bloggers, test layouts, and take my guidelines and work-flow concepts to our legal department.

I hesitate to report this because I feel that as soon as I do so, all "heck" will probably break loose. But the state of the blog project is good.

Other than the time that it took to make it to the table of the IT project review board, the processes has not as difficult as I imagined it would be. There have been very few heated discussions or disagreements. Most of the criticism has been absolutely constructive and has prompted me to go back, do a little more research and find creative solutions to gaps in the process.

I think the secret here is that people have been slow to warm to the concept, and our pace has allowed them to warm slowly. Also at no point has the project been half baked. We were careful to really spend the time thinking through all aspects of the project before we took it "public" There have been times that we did not have all of the answers, but those were all moments where I learned a bit more about the institution and the volumes of guidelines and standards we strive to adhere too.

I really believe that I am just a few months away from launching this project. Stay tuned...

1 comment:

Richard Laurence Baron said...

Morning, Jennifer. Rebecca Castillo mentioned that you were blogging - I think she sent you a note yesterday about my own blog and the upcoming American Marketing Association SIG event, "Marketing Healthcare under a New Administration."

If I can help out with your own blogging project, let me know.