Thursday, May 28, 2009

Back to the Blog

I am pleased to announce that there is finally a blog! For as much fear and trepidation as the concept caused it arrived with very little fanfare. It launched on a Thursday in the afternoon in “soft launch” mode. This just means I asked for it to go live, but did not link it to anything, so you really had to know the URL to find it. This gave me a few weeks to play with it. I spent about 2 weeks getting used to the process of putting in posts, fine tuning the navigation and getting feedback.

The good news is, the feedback from inside has been great. I have heard from lots of people inside, and I think they are pretty proud of the product. There are currently multiple requests from faculty who want to write for the blog. Initially we were afraid that we would'nt have enough content, and estimated that it would be years before we had the need to evolve to a multiple blog structure. If the process continues at it is, I expect that we will soon have a need to support separate blogs for news, research and maybe a few of the cancer support topics.

I'm also pretty proud of the guidelines. These guidelines were the main reason we were allowed to proceed with development of the blog. I think that they are strong enough to keep legal and HIPAA happy, but flexible enough to allow honest, mostly uncensored feedback to the posts.

Lessons Learned
If I had it all to do again I would have asked for more feedback from the outside world earlier in the process. I learned some things about the perspective from outside the hospital that I did not consider until about 2 days before the full launch. I realized that I should have put even more thought into my navigation structure than I did. I am semi-happy with it now, but I think there is room for improvement.

I would love to know what you think? I am up for any constructive criticism you can offer. I think I have probably heard most of the feedback about what is wrong, but you guys are pretty creative, so I may be pleasantly surprised. Read the Blog

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