This post is a summary, from my point of view, of events from day one the Annual Spring Conference of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) meeting in New Orleans. Yesterday, the meeting kicked off, with, what else, with a jazz band marching into the lecture hall to the thrilling applause of a semi-sleeping and semi-awake audience. Quite entertaining.
The plenary speaker was Paul Grundy who is president of the Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative. He is one of may speakers who state that medicine needs to move beyond episodic care of illness to more of a management of health and wellness. "We now have the data," Dr. Grundy says, "And I don't want to buy this anymore."
He challenged the audience and he challenges medicine to transform the care that we give now. During the question and answer session, there were some good questions from Family Medicine educators on how to implement these steps, especially if there are outside forces fighting this. I'm curious to hear more stories about how to deal with detractors of the PCMH model.
In the afternoon, I don't believe that this has ever been attempted before, but we tried to video stream a session here at STFM. I know that other organizations and meetings have done this, but this was the first time here. I'd really like to thank the STFM and its staff for allowing us to try this out.
You'll see an archive of the live video stream above. It is Mark Ryan and Ben Miller presenting on applications of social media to medicine. (Their powerpoint slide deck will be made available in the future. When it is, I will place the link here). In a total social media moment, Ben was watching the talk live on his phone, in the cab, since his flight was running late. So, he knew exactly what slide Mark was on when Ben walked in the door. It's a very cool moment of the video above.
Last night, in the hotel lobby (actually the hotel bar), the 2nd ever #FamMedChat took place on twitter. We had a great small group of people in person here at the meeting also taking part in the chat. You can see some of them in this picture. I admit that I wasn't typing that much during the chat - since I was chatting with the people in person. Great fun was had by all. (Ben even quipped that enjoyed the car that I drive - Hehe) Did you miss the chat? You can always click here to read through the archived chat.
As far as today, continue to keep track of the meeting in real time on twitter by using the hashtag #stfm. This afternoon, if you're not already at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, or watching the final launch of shuttle Endeavour, or gossiping about today's Royal Wedding, I invite you to check out my presentation about Family Medicine and Social Media which will be taking place live on ustream at 4:30pm Eastern Daylight Time. If you're on site, it'll be in room Napoleon D3. Don't worry if you miss it live, the archived talk (hopefully) will be posted here. Have a great day everybody!