We announced last week that The Medical Care Blog has reached its 5-year milestone. As part of the editorial team, I’m excited to pause briefly and reflect on some great blog posts about healthcare that I think deserve to have been more widely read.
Contributions from our authors have helped us reach more than 80,000 unique reads over the past 5 years. Most of our posts reach hundreds of readers and many reach thousands. This includes our all-time most widely read post by Alexa Ortiz and Catherine Gupta. More than 4,500 people have read their post on social media in healthcare since 2017. It’s still popular every week.
I’m equally proud, however, of the many posts that were rigorous, engaging, and innovative, and yet didn’t manage to garner the same attention. Maybe it was a bizarre political tweet that stole online attention, or perhaps a celebrity who broke the internet that week. Or maybe these posts just had the bad luck to be published during an academic vacation or finals week!
These great posts flew under the radar
In honor of our 5-year anniversary, I’m sharing my top 5 favorite overlooked posts that deserve to be more widely read. These are the posts with roughly 100 reads or fewer, yet are interesting or helpful and deserve to have been read more widely.
Anecdotal evidence has long suggested that female physicians are different from males in terms of their approach to patients and how patients respond. My own research had lightly explored these issues. A novel article in Medical Care found that all things being equal, female family physicians delivered more preventive care and got better outcomes than males. I found it groundbreaking and inspiring, with complex implications for practice and policy. I thought my post would definitely be a hit. Few of you agreed.
The answer is because it’s expensive. But it goes much deeper, and Dr. Huhn wrote a detailed explanation of changes in Medicaid that may do even further damage. He highlighted work requirements, for example, that don’t have exemptions for people in substance abuse treatment programs. There is also no way to address the opioid crisis while simultaneously reducing the number of people on Medicaid. He makes these points in a balanced, data-driven way. People give a lot of lip service to the opioid crisis; readers of this post will learn that this post was not that.
- Primary Care is a Team Sport by Audrey Provenzano
What a great title! So good, in fact, the Lancet published a similarly titled (but different piece) two years before. Dr. Provenzano conveyed an important message: that physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants deliver similar quality of care. She wrote about her own training as a physician, the need to “let go of parts of our work” to be a team, and how to divide the labor in primary care.
In 2018, Congress and President Trump passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that slashed funding for the Prevention and Public Health Fund. To wrap my brain around this, I had to remind myself what this fund was for, what it had accomplished, how it was created, and how the loss affects public health. This post by Dr. Ortiz was my go-to source for answers. Read this, and remind yourself of just how important this critical funding source is for public health.
- Could Pokemon Go be Your New Activity Tracker? by Alexa Ortiz
This mobile game was all the rage in 2016. You may not have played it, which might explain why this post slipped through in-boxes. Ms. Ortiz offered an engaging reflection on the ability of a mobile game to get people moving. If people are too quick to give up on activity trackers like Fitbits, perhaps games could help? She had a point. Nearly 3 years later, I still see people gather around the frozen yogurt shop outside my office to chase Pokemon together. Perhaps flicking a screen isn’t exactly the form of exercise we need. But getting people outdoors, walking a bit, and socializing certainly can’t hurt.
Looking ahead to our 6th year
As we begin our 6th year of blogging, I’ll keep my eye out for similarly overlooked great blog posts about healthcare that deserve to be widely read. Hopefully, taking a second look at these posts is useful and fun. If this flops, perhaps I’ll just blame it on the Y2K bug.
Gregory Stevens