The Jefferson Colloquium on Population Health and Disease Management

The Disease Management Care Blog is getting prepared for travel. PowerPoint files are being updated, literature searches are being finalized, graphics are being prettied up, hotel rooms are getting reserved and planes, trains and automobiles are being arranged. It has two speaking gigs coming up and one of them is Jefferson's once-a-year Population Health and Disease Management Colloquium.

In a three-for-one bargain, the Colloquium will be collocated with the National Retail Clinic Summit and the Second National Medical Home Summit at the downtown Marriott in Philadelphia. It promises to be a premier event, what with speakers from Health Affairs, AHRQ, government, academia, physician organizations and industry. The DMCB is especially looking forward to hearing what the disease management organizations are up to and what advanced versions of care management are being assembled in conjunction with patient centered medical homes. There's also the happy prospect of seeing old friends and making new ones.

And the loquacious DMCB is looking forward to serving double duty at the conference. On the first day, the Colloquium organizers were foolish enough to cede the DMCB the last 45 minutes of the day so it can discuss 'health communication and social networking.' When THAT's over, it'll be time for celebratory beverages. On the second day, the DMCB will be part of the closing panel discussion on Innovation, Strategy and Practice.

If you can't go because your boss is a short-sighted cheapskate who doesn't want to pay for travel even though the DMCB will be there, point out that you also have the option of watching the conference via live streaming video. It'll be available on-line afterwards, making it even easier for you to liberally quote from it.

Finally, as a bonus for the thousands of regular DMCB readers, here's one preview on the topic of communication and networking: the competition for 'eyeballs' (attention) in social media is won by a) content and b) nimbleness. The former is only partially defined by accuracy and the latter is only partially defined by timeliness. What is important, however, is that neither depend all that much on formal credentials. In it's travels around the blogmos and the twitterverse, the DMCB is running into 'netizens' who, with study, hard work, passion and some luck can turn out to be just as much of a player as many of us so-called university-trained experts. This has huge implications for the transmission of health information gleaned from advances in health care, especially for research journals, health educators and the disease management industry.

See you there!