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Time to gather your peers and join fellow readers of Pallimed and GeriPal for our annual party at the Annual Assembly of AAHPM and HPNA (and anyone still in town after SWHPN's conference on Monday and Tuesday!). Since the last two years were such a success with the progressive party, we will be doing that again this year. We will begin at McGillin’s at 8pm. After that follow the hashtag #HPMparty or our Facebook event page where we will be posting updates on the next location.

All are welcome, this is no exclusive crowd. There will be many writers from both websites at the party and we always like to meet readers and hear your feedback.

McGillin’s is near the corner of 13th and Chesnut just a few blocks South of the Marriott Hotel and Convention Center.

Date: Thursday, February 26th, 2015 - Start time 8pm. End time TBD

Where: Depends

• Only way to find out is to keep up with our twitter and Facebook feeds, or type in #hpmparty in twitter to follow the live feed
• Pallimed Twitter feed / Pallimed Facebook page
• GeriPal Twitter feed / GeriPal Facebook page
• #HPMparty twitter feed
• Facebook Event Page for the party

Starting location: McGillin’s Olde Ale House

• 1310 Drury Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
• Near the corner of 13th and Chestnut

 Map:

Add it to your Calendar:

#HPMparty Tweets

Photo credit: Liberty Bell by Vishal via Creative Commons https://www.flickr.com/photos/9474286@N05/5996131042

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As longtime readers will know, we here at Pallimed have advocated for social media being an effective change agent for issues relevant to hospice and palliative care for many years. With a thriving blog community (43! But we could always use more blogs!*), a strong Twitter presence of senior leaders and new leaders, a weekly Tweetchat since 2010 and several quality Facebook pages, the specialty which emphasizes communication skills at the bedside has done a good job communicating to the world as well.

Paul Bisceglio (@PaulBisceglio) from The Atlantic featured some of these efforts and the newer trend of being very open about end-of-life issues online and in the public view in his article, "How Social Media is Changing the Way We Approach Death."  The article is nearing over 1000 likes on Facebook in just over 24 hours, which is really impressive for what some might consider taboo.  But what the article and the social media stats on this article tells us, as a field, is that people want to engage on this topic. What a call to us to make sure we are available not only online, but to our communities offline as well.  We as professionals and advocates for quality care for those facing serious illness need to realize the power in sharing the stories and research that we find online.

Sharing is the first and easiest step.  The next is commenting and adding to a fruitful discussion, whether on a blog, Facebook, or every Wednesday night (9p ET) at the #hpm tweetchat.  Even though there are some uncivil places in the comment sections of some sites (not ours!) a smart and genuine comment can really add a lot to an article, so please ignore the loud barks from those impolite faux-raconteurs. And lastly you can contribute by adding original thought and content.  I know there are some brilliant minds out there with great ideas to share.  There are platforms to deliver your message, you just have to try.

* If you know any blogs not on the list, please share.
Photo Credit: Unknown

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Twitter is changing how data can be accessed, which will more than likely lead to the demise of @tweetchat. :(
— TweetChat (@TweetChat) May 4, 2013

Ok anyways this post is not really about how great #hpm tweetchat is and how to use it, and the wonderful community. You can read that in our previous pallimed post here.

@twitter I am among the 100s of 1,000s of #twitter fans distressed by your decision re: #tweetchat @tweetchatplease let us in on why/what
— Wayne McEvilly (@waynemcevilly) May 6, 2013

While nothing replaces the website based simplicity of Tweetchat.com if you are thinking of participating in our Wednesday night weekly chats you can always try HootSuite and Tweetdeck (app based) and a newer site called oneQube has recently sprung up promising to fill the void.

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Ed. - Please welcome the first Pallimed post by Dr. Jeannette Ross (@RossJeanette), a geriatrics and palliative medicine specialist from San Antonio, TX.  

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I recently read a webpost called 20 Twitter Stats From 2012 noting some interesting statistic about the amounts of tweets thru the 2012 year, the most retweeted tweet (Obama’s victory tweet), the most followed twitter account (@ladygaga with 32 million+), and others.

I was curious about what are the twitter statistics for our field as measured by the HPM hashtag. I went to the Symplur Healthcare Hasthtag Project and ran the #HPM 2012 analytics and did a little “research” of my own.

So here are the top 10 twitter stats of the #HPM hashtag in 2012:

• There were 48,273 tweets sent using #HPM
• 67,869,558 Impressions* resulted from the #hpm community tweets
• 4,157 “Tweeople” participated in the HPM conversation
• During 2012 #HPM generated an average of 5 Avg Tweets/Hour
• The average #HPM participant posted 12 #hpm tweets
• @jfclearywisc (Jim Cleary, MD) was the top HPM tweeter with 2206 tweets.
• @ctsinclair (Christian Sinclair, MD) has 5,484 followers, which is the most followed #HPM account on Twitter. Ok that at least is HPM celebrity status! 
• With his over 20K lifetime tweets he beats @ladygaga on tweets With that many followers it’s no surprise that @ctsinclair 1894 HPM tweets led to the most impressions with 10,371,544
• The HPM tweets reached a 6594 tweet peak in March during the week of the @AAHPM meeting with March 9, 2012 generating 1156 HPM tweets on a single day

Ok that’s only 9 I wanted to find out which was the most tweeted HPM tweet but I don’t know how to figure that out. If only Justin Bieber had added the #HPM to his tweet in memory of a fan who died. They it would be 230,395 retweets. Any thoughts #HPM Tweeps?

RIP Avalanna. i love you
— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) September 26, 2012

If you want to understand more of how the statistics are generated and what they mean click here.  You can always join #hpm Tweetchat on Wednesday nights at 6p PT/9P ET to find a group of online advocates.  You don't even need a Twitter account to follow along.



Ok here is a 2013 New year resolution I can achieve. To Tweet more, and get others to tweet #HPM! You can always find me at @rossjeanette

*impressions: number of tweets per participant and multiplied with the number of followers

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The Institute of Medicine is searching for experts in the scientific, technical, and medical professions to be considered for a study committee titled “Committee on Transforming End-of-Life Care.” Nominations are due Monday, September 24, 2012.

The overall objective of the project is to advance policies to improve the care that individuals and families receive at the end of life through alignment with individual values and preferences and to stimulate a national conversation with individuals, families, and communities on improving the way we approach death. Specifically, the IOM committee will: review progress since the landmark 1997 IOM report Approaching Death: Improving Care at the End of Life, assess challenges and opportunities, and examine ways to integrate end-of-life care into a patient- and family-centered, team-based framework of health and community care; make recommendations about changes in public policy, health care financing, and clinical care to better align care with individual values and preferences and promote compassionate, high-quality, and cost-effective care at the end of life; and develop a communication strategy for promoting public information and engagement. 

A complete nomination will include uploading a current CV of the nominee (maximum size 500 kB).

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As you may have heard Facebook is going public as early as next week.  In a curious (or expected) show of goodwill and an attempt to make use of Google's (slightly ironic) mantra "Don't be evil," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that today you can add your organ donor status to your Facebook profile.  This will be an interesting social experiment in the wild to see if organ donation could go viral.  Palliative care clinicians will all recognize the issue with a shortage of potential organs for those in need.  We talk to patients and families all the time that are holding on to hope for a possible transplant. 


One quality measure as you can see from the picture above is the link to actual state registries.

Could something like this work for advance directives like durable power of attorney or a living will?  In addition to listing family you could also list who your DPOA was.  It may even lead to an interesting study to see how networked DPOA's are and even if they might be able to find each other better and talk about how to be a better DPOA. I'm unsure if I will post my organ donor status on Facebook.  I post a whole lot of other things, but this feels like it crosses a different threshold.

What will you do if you are on Facebook? (I already know what everyone who is anti-Facebook is going to say, but you can share your thoughts too of course!) Is Facebook the right platform to merge online registries for health issues that are struggling to get more traction?  You want to be where the eyeballs are right?

The New York Times and The Atlantic cover the issue in more detail if you are interested.

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Here is the slidedeck from the 2011 AAHPM/HPNA Annual Assembly. You can download them, use them, remix them anyway you want. If you are interested in publishing your slides online, feel free to email me (christian@pallimed.org) and I will promote good slidedecks in hospice and palliative care on Pallimed.

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•  managing our relationships and time as we become increasingly connected in this world where we are already feeling bombarded by emails, pagers, cell phones, list-serves;
• maximizing the potential of social media to share, with clear intention, the message that our field as to offer: about high quality and truly patient/family-centered healthcare that is built on evidence and compassion.

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The AAHPM took a bold step into social media last week in launching a short video about palliative medicine, which highlights the site PalliativeDoctors.org, the consumer oriented website supported by the Academy.  This is not your classic cliché'd video showing caring doctor/actors holding hands and nodding empathetically, with soft plain music and older people sitting on park benches with each other that you might expect to see from a awareness campaign. (Disclaimer: I was on the task force that worked on this video, but I am not writing as an official representative of AAHPM.)

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The New York Times had an interesting article last week entitled  "Cyberspace When You're Dead" about the approximately 375,000 Facebook users who die annually.  What happens to the account?  (We have covered this topic before: Amy Clarkson on Pallimed Arts: "Digital Afterlife" in 2009 and my 2010 post "Blogging Til I Die")

This topic is surprisingly gaining more attention for a culture typically described as 'death-denying.'  But I guess you can't really deny death after it happens.  It is very real then and probably easier to talk about since you may still have this online connection to the person even though in real life they are gone.  I suppose it can be eerie to look at someone's last post that may have happened moments before they died like Dr. Frank Ryan who drove a car off a cliff moments after a posting to Twitter.  

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With the 2011 AAHPM Annual Assembly coming up, I will post the 8th edition of Handy Hints for a National Meeting. The original version was written in 2005 (editions have been more often than yearly).  My first national medical conference was a whirlwind of new ideas and experiences some of which I was not necessarily prepared for.  Later this week I will feature How to Give a Great Presentation, 4th edition. And later this month how to use social media to its fullest at a national conference.  Please feel free to comment and leave thoughts from your experience.  And if you don't agree with any thoughts here tell me why!

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I've grumbled umpteen times that Wikipedia ought get a "Hospice and Palliative Medicine" article written. As it stood when HPM, as a subspecialty, was the intended idea, writers would usually cobble together links to the separate "Hospice" and "Palliative Care" articles. Then I suddenly remembered that we are Wikipedia, and such an article wasn't going to write itself. So I clicked the letters in red of an unwritten article, and wrote one.

Since this is a pretty active Web-2.0 community aligned with the "collaborative, publish first, refine on the go" paradigm, I thought I would turn it over to all y'all to grow it from an initial stub into its full-blossomed elaboration.

So sign in and edit as you see fit, and let's see what we come up with. Also go through the various other, related articles and fine tune the links in the web of Wikipedia knowledge.

Enjoy!