How can Blogging help AHS?

One of Alberta Health Services five priority areas is:

Innovation and Performance Improvement

Transformational Improvement Program (TIP) #4 supports this priority

Enabling Our People to Achieve Excellence in Providing Health Services

A Blog is a tool that can provide support and resourses to help us excel at our work. It provides educational and development opportunities and can bring like-minded individuals together, regardless of geographical boundries, thus supporting TIP #5:

Enabling One Health System

Blogs can help us be the best we can be so we can make our Health Care system the best it can be. It can give us "SUPER POWERS"!

Delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking web service (http://www.delicious.com/), for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks (websites) for our interest groups. Use it like your favourites you save on your computer. The great thing about Delicious bookmarks is they are portable, accessible anywhere with an Internet connection. Key benefits to Delicious:

• access your bookmarks anywhere
• tag your favourites to sort them
• share your favourite sites with others
• see what other people are bookmarking

All bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable by default; however, you can mark specific bookmarks as private.

A collection of bookmarks on Clinical Practice Guidelines has been started here:
http://www.delicious.com/YongtaoLin

and started a collection of bookmarks on social media and health care here:
http://www.delicious.com/kathryn.ranjit/social_media

Ready to build your own online bookmark collection?
1. Go to http://www.delicious.com/
2. Click on “Join Now” at the top left corner

Why a Clinical Practice Guideline Matters?

What are Clinical Practice Guidelines? What makes a high quality guideline? How do you seek out an evidence-based practice guideline? Are you in the process of developing one? What are your experiences in guideline implementation? We will explore these questions and more in the coming week.

Possible topics or posts for discussions
- What is CPG? What Makes a High Quality Guideline?
- Develop a guideline question
- Finding evidence for the guideline (Searching the literature)
- Guideline development tools:
- Guideline scoring tools, e.g. Agree II
- Implementing a CPG
- Your experience developing a guideline
- Your questions to the group about developing, implementing or evaluating a guideline
- Tools for Evidence-Based Decision Making

Writing Good Content

• Usefulness and uniqueness:
  contribute to the dialogue with your own ideas, make it current, useful, unique and relevant to our group.
  
  
• Original content and be brief:
  It's about both writing your own and fair use of other people's content (always giving credit for it).
  
  
• Start with good headlines:
  Sometimes it's the only thing your audience will see before making a decision about whether to read the post.
  
  
• Make the post scannable:
  Your reader should be able to quickly glance through the post and pick up the main points without reading too deeply.
  
  
• Write in a plain, concise, common-sense style:
  The key is simplicity, even on a complex topic.

Our discussions are all around the topics that you are the content experts at, so relate to your own experience and be open to different opinions.

Basic Blogging

Basic blogging rules:

1. “Chunk” the information into brief concise sentences.
2. Keep the information within the size of a screen. Try to reduce the amount of scrolling down the page the user has to do.
3. When using images, ensure that they are an appropriate size which compliments the text (see Image Guidelines).
4. Keep the title brief.

To post to the blog:

1. Log into your account at: www.blogger.com
2. Click on create content on the left side of the page.
3. Select Blog entry from the list.
4. In the Title box, type in the title of your blog post. Keep your title brief and concise.
5. Add content by typing directly into the body area of the edit screen. If you already have a story written in a Word document you can copy and paste from the Word document.
6. Please refer to Editing the Content Area - Body Section for full details on using the body section.
7. Keep in mind the content of your post should be contained within one ‘screen’ size. This is for the convenience of the user, the less scrolling the post requires the better.
8. Leave Input format, Book outline, Revision information, XML sitemap, URL path settings, URL redirects, Authoring information and Publishing options settings as default.
9. Scroll to the bottom of the page. Click on “Save”. Your post will now appear on the home page.

What is Social Media?

Social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue, such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Distinct from industrial or traditional media, such as newspapers, television, and film, they are relatively inexpensive and accessible to enable anyone (even private individuals) to publish or access information, compared to industrial media, which generally require significant resources to publish information.

One of the foundational concepts in social media has become that you cannot completely control your message through social media but rather you can simply begin to participate in the "conversation" in the hopes that you can become part of that conversation.

The main increase in social media has been Facebook (www.facebook.com). It was ranked as the number one social networking site. The main increase in social media has been Facebook. It was ranked as the number one social networking site. Other examples of social networking websites LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/), MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/), Ning (http://www.ning.com/).

Blogs are usually maintained by an individual or a group on a particular subject with regular entries of commentary, or descriptions of events. Most recent entries are commonly displayed first. Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other websites. Blogger (www.blogger.com) is one of the most popular platforms for blogs. While a blogger's anonymity is often tenuous, a blogger's code of conduct is often developed to justify acceptable behavior and online security can also be enhanced by not making the Blog publicly available.

Some of the social media tools that can help with collaboration or/and authority building are Wikis such as Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org/) and Wetpaint (www.wetpaint.com/), social bookmarking sites including Delicious (www.delicious.com) and Google Reader (www.google.com/reader). In addition, Content Management Systems (i.e. Drupal at drupal.org) and Document Managing and Editing Tools (i.e. (Google Docs) are very widely used.

Social media also plays an important part in multimedia and entertainment. People use Youtube (www.youtube.com) for video sharing, Skype (www.skype.com) for livecasting, Flickr (www.flickr.com/) for photography and art sharing, and SecondLife (secondlife.com) to create virtual worlds.

References:

Social Media. Available from Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media. Retrieved July 4, 2011.

Rutledge, P. (2010). Research Survey Launched: Social Media and Influence of Photos on Body Image. Retrieved July 4, 2011 from: http://mprcenter.org/blog/2010/08/04/research-survey-launched-social-media-and-influence-of-photos-on-body-image/

"Statistics". Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics. Retrieved July 4, 2011.

Blog Guidelines

PURPOSE

Welcome to the Clinical Practice Guidelines Virtual Interest Group Blog!

This blog was created to make information sharing easier, to combine a variety of communication platforms into one convenient tool, and to facilitate the exchange of information and ideas amongst colleagues who work in the area of Clinical Practice Guidelines. These blog guidelines have been developed and implemented by your librarian facilitators and will be reviewed on a regular basis and revised as necessary.

The Clinical Practice Guidelines Virtual Interest Group Blog is located at http://hinccpg.blogspot.com/. Blogger is the software used to create the blog www.blogger.com.

BLOG MANAGERS

Managers/Administrators of the blog:
Yongtao Lin, Kathryn Ranjit

The blog managers reserve the right to edit blog content and labels to conform to our style guidelines and delete any misinformation or any inappropriate information.
Any feedback regarding content, labels or design can be directed to the blog managers.

BLOGGERS

Bloggers must be Alberta Health Services, Calgary Zone or Cancer Care employees who have an interest in Clinical Practice Guidelines. Access and writing privileges are granted by email invitation. Please contact one of the blog managers if you are having trouble accessing the blog.

ACCEPTABLE USE

The blog supports a Culture of Collaboration and Contribution. It is a Health Information Network Calgary-sponsored tool for use within the Health Information Network and Alberta Health Services Calgary Zone and Cancer Care. Lively opinion and commentary are welcome in blog posts. However, it is expected that blog postings will be professional and reflect well on the Health Information Network and Alberta Health Services Calgary Zone and Cancer Care. Bloggers are strongly encouraged to check facts, cite sources, present balanced views, acknowledge and correct errors, and check spelling and grammar before making a post live. All bloggers acknowledge receipt on registration of the blog acceptable use and copyright guidelines. Please be advised that all comments and suggestions are moderated for clarity, brevity, and appropriateness. We do reserve the right to post as is, decline to post, or edit if comments that contain obscenities or otherwise lack civility and respect for any persons, groups. Links to related posts are encouraged, but bloggers should post original content rather than reposting entire items from other blogs or lists.

CONTENT BEST PRACTICES

All blog items must fall within the purpose of the blog. If the item does not fit within the purpose, it may not be an appropriate item for this blog. Blog posts may be text or video and images can be added if they are related to the content of the item. Before entering a new post into the blog, check that the item has not already been posted.

COPYRIGHT

Contributors shall not upload, post, or otherwise make available on the blog any content protected by copyright without abiding by the doctrine of fair use, or without the express permission of the owner of the copyright. By contributing to the blog, you also acknowledge that your individual entries to the blog are licensed under a Creative Commons license. Your Creative Commons license allows people who use your content in whole or in part, to take the following actions:

-Distribute it
-Copy the work
-Display or perform it publicly
-Make digital public performances of it (e.g. webcasting)
-Shift the work into another format as a verbatim copy