One thing that comes to mind is that with reminders, one of the drawbacks can be that people start ignoring them. I know this myself as I often have daily or weekly reminders that I just hit the “snooze” button on until I’m tired of being reminded and just ignore it. Perhaps the SMS could be more interactive, such as asking for a person’s glucose level every day. Maybe this data could be input to the patient’s EHR. I’ll have to check out your references and read more on the studies!

In addition to the comment above, I realize there are a lot of doctors who blog anonymously because they don’t want their patients to be concerned that their doctor may be blogging about them. However, for patients who do read blogs, I would think there would be a lot of benefit to having regular information related to their medical problems. Those could also be a different type of reminder to take care of yourself.

However, I think that the way the essay is organized lends itself to being one article rather than two.

I’ll make the changes tomorrow before it goes “live” on the wiki.

2 comments for now.

I think it would be good to address blogging as a means for promoting wellness. While it is good that you can manage chronic diseases and give information out about different diseases it is also a good idea to promote wellness habits that could prevent them from coming to visit you. This could also fit into all the pay for performance coming down the pike.

Second, I think you should address the Doctor’s potential legal concerns addressing anonymous questions. I’m not sure I know many doctors would want to do this because of potential liability issues.

As a side note it gave me a good idea of how I could create a blog for one of my providers that has been creating newsletter info for a while. Perfect blogging material.