Health Train Express Hot Topics for 2014

There were many developments in health reform and health information technology during 2014.  Not the least of which was the first year of implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Health Train Express 2015.  The blog began in 2003, while I was still in clinical medicine seeing patients who had vision challenges.  As a surgeon opthalmologist for over 25 years at that time I felt the need to participate and contribute some of my ideas to physicians and also begin a second career as a physician and patient advocate. Authoring  a blog with meaningful content (no  pun intended) involves research, thought and actual writing time.  My posts are written by myself over 99.9% of the time.  Other bloggers  have many guest authors.

Clinical Medicine is a jealous mistress....it constantly demands one's attention, not just availability for patients, but also the blizzard of continuing medical education, regulatory and administrative functions. Physicians are now faced with analytics, something that electronic health records has enabled, for better or worse in terms of patient care.

I have always been suspicious about statistics. Statistics can be very misleading.  Averages mean very little unless one understands standard deviations, and other statistical metrics I once knew about, but have deleted from active recall.  For individuals the chances of occurences are new each time the dice are rolled.  In other words, all other things being equal having a cancer or diabetes do not alter the chances of  getting another disease.

An example is if you have diabetes the chances of getting hypertension are increased somewhat but says little about your individual chance of having both diseases.

I decided to look at the analytics for Health Train Express and my other blog Digital  Health Train.

The readers are mostly from the United States, Australia, Indionesia, India, The Russian Federation, and Europe. Most of the inbound links are from Google's search engine. Health Train Express enjoys as much international attention as from the United States, (a true measure of  how much the internet has encouraged openness and transparency and global access to knowledge.  The effects of 'democratization' of knowledge are easily observed.

So how has Health Train Express impacted readers?

Readership (as measured by Google's analytics) fluctuates wildly, ranging from 75 to over 800 per day. This of course is a paltry regular following, however it is limited by search engine ranking. There are many who  use our RSS feed.  Feedjit, which appears in the right hand side bar gives us a real-time indicator of our readership.