WARREN, RI – Blogging is becoming a major tool for the average person to convey his/her thoughts to the world. Its informal platform is ideal for communicating ideas from politics to the politically incorrect.

This is why Roy Poses, MD, decided to create a blog that would “address threats to healthcare’s core values, especially those stemming from concentration and abuse of power,” perhaps not the most popular issue to talk about, but one he believes will garner an audience.

In September 2008 a nursing Web site called RNCentral.com rated the 100 best healthcare policy blogs from pediatrics to public health. Coming in at number 11 under the category of ethics was Poses’ “Health Care Renewal” blog.

Poses is the president of FIRM: Foundation for Integrity and Responsibility in Medicine, a not-for-profit educational foundation devoted to upholding medicine’s core values. He practices general internal medicine and, as he says, “sees first hand the primary care crisis every week.”

Poses says 10 years ago he and many of his colleagues felt there was something “increasingly” wrong in healthcare. After conducting a crude study that asked what was wrong with healthcare, Poses found a common thread. Most everyone complained of badly run healthcare organizations, something he says is not normally addressed in healthcare literature.

Scot Silverstein,  MD, a senior medical informatics specialist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, blogs for the site about failures in information technology. This is also an issue not covered in literature, says Silverstein. Silverstein began collecting information on these types of incidents and had them posted on a static Web site. He says he began to receive mail from around the world that confirmed these issues were not uncommon. After attempting to write articles about his findings, he said, he was forced to “bypass traditional outlets and go directly to an audience.”

“A filtering process is going on. Companies don’t want to advertise problems and people in the field don’t want to talk about failures,” he says.

He says what drives him to blog is the fact that due to these IT failures there is the potential for patients to be harmed. When it comes to IT there is an “irrational exuberance about it, almost to the point of worshiping it,” he says.

“There is great value in not just writing up success but writing about difficulties and what not to do,” says Silverstein.

John Halamka, MD, chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, has been mentioned on the “Health Care Renewal Blog” a few times and says he enjoys its “dialogue and insights.”

Halamka is no stranger to blogging, with his own blog called “Life as a Healthcare CIO.”

 Halamka says he blogs “to communicate my experiences, both good and bad, and to engage the healthcare community in an ongoing dialog about pressing issues of the day.” He also says it has cut back his e-mail by 10 percent.