There are 3 major issues in medical blogging.

• Credibility
• Anonymity
• Quality

Anonymity, the problem of credibility and the lack of quality always lead to concerns and the patient cannot decide which medical blog is accurate enough to read it. That is why there are tools to ensure quality and credibility.

Honcode

Quality medical bloggers apply to become a member of Health On the Net Foundation which is the leading organization promoting and guiding the deployment of useful and reliable online medical and health information. Created in 1995, HONcode is a non-profit, non-governmental organization, accredited to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. The Health on the Net Foudnation stands behind medical bloggers that have been accredited. This way it guarantees that patients and readers get real value, bloggers use their real names and e-mail addresses and never give medical advice.




If a blog is accredited by Honcode, this icon can be placed on its page.

The rules of all the Honcode accredited medical blogs:

1. Authoritative: Indicate the qualifications of the authors


2. Complementarity: Information should support, not replace, the doctor-patient relationship


3. Privacy: Respect the privacy and confidentiality of personal data submitted to the site by the visitor


4. Attribution: Cite the source(s) of published information, date and medical and health pages


5. Justifiability: Site must back up claims relating to benefits and performance


6. Transparency: Accessible presentation, accurate email contact


7. Financial disclosure: Identify funding sources


8. Advertising policy: Clearly distinguish advertising from editorial content

With these tools and communities, it becomes easier to provide quality and medically accurate content.

You can apply for the certification here. That's how you can get your blog accredited by the Heath on the Net Foundation

They have a plugin that you can install on your Firefox or Internet Explorer so whenever you are on a website it will let you know whether that site is accredited by HONcode or not.

HIPAA

When a physician writes about case studies or case presentations, he must comply with the HIPAA rules , and should not express opinion that may embarass his employer or the patient. These identifiers tell you what not to mention when writing about a patient's medical case.

List of 18 Identifiers:

1. Names;


2. All geographical subdivisions smaller than a State, including street address, city, county, precinct, zip code, and their equivalent geocodes, except for the initial three digits of a zip code, if according to the current publicly available data from the Bureau of the Census: (1) The geographic unit formed by combining all zip codes with the same three initial digits contains more than 20,000 people; and (2) The initial three digits of a zip code for all such geographic units containing 20,000 or fewer people is changed to 000.


3. All elements of dates (except year) for dates directly related to an individual, including birth date, admission date, discharge date, date of death; and all ages over 89 and all elements of dates (including year) indicative of such age, except that such ages and elements may be aggregated into a single category of age 90 or older;


4. Phone numbers;


5. Fax numbers;


6. Electronic mail addresses;


7. Social Security numbers;


8. Medical record numbers;


9. Health plan beneficiary numbers;


10. Account numbers;


11. Certificate/license numbers;


12. Vehicle identifiers and serial numbers, including license plate numbers;


13. Device identifiers and serial numbers;


14. Web Universal Resource Locators (URLs);


15. Internet Protocol (IP) address numbers;


16. Biometric identifiers, including finger and voice prints;


17. Full face photographic images and any comparable images;


18. Any other unique identifying number, characteristic, or code (note this does not mean the unique code assigned by the investigator to code the data)

An instructing lesson

Dr. Flea was a famous and anonymous medical blogger who was a pediatrician in real life and got sued by a patient. Though, he kept on writing about the law suit, had ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the plaintiff's lawyer; and revealed the defense strategy. But the lawyer realized this blogger must be the doctor in the law suit. The next day, the case was settled.

After one year, Dr. Flea, now using his real name, Robert Lindeman, gave an interview to the New York Personal Injury Law Blog and had one piece of advice for new medical bloggers: do not blog anonymously!

According to the Boston.com article:

The case is a startling illustration of how blogging, already implicated in destroying friendships and ruining job prospects, could interfere in other important arenas. Lawyers in Massachusetts and elsewhere, some of whom downloaded Flea's observations and posted them on their websites, said the case has also prompted them to warn clients that blogs can come back to haunt them.

The Healthcare Blogger Code of Ethics is a group of respected bloggers, qualified physicians who review all the new medical bloggers and help them provide quality and reliable content. It was designed in response to problems experienced by medical bloggers. The goal of this code is

• to give the readers of a medical blogger a clear idea of the standards by which the blog is maintained;


• and to give bloggers (especially anonymous ones) a clear set of guidelines they can show employers or patients.

Here you can find the whole code. If you would like to join the group, send an e-mail to the administrator (healthcare.bloggers at gmail.com).



Follow these rules while writing your posts and you will definitely not get in trouble.

Some bloggers love to decorate posts with nice photos and images, others publish only texts, it's up to you whether to post media content as well or not. Here are some tips how you can easily find images for your posts.

Photos for free:

• FreeDigitalPhotos.net


• A list of free photo sites.

For credits:

• StockXpert


• iStockPhoto

A comprehensive list from either Presentation Zen and Masternewmedia.

To find videos you need to illustrate your posts with, try these sites and search engines:

• Youtube
• Google Video Search
• Yahoo Video Search
• An extended list of medical/scientific video sites on Scienceroll

But if you are interested only in medicine-related videos, here are some examples:

Videojug: hosts one of the world’s largest, most all-encompassing libraries of factual content online.



IcYou: A site dedicated to making it simple for anyone to find, upload, watch and share healthcare videos worldwide.



eMedTV: The site’s impressive library of original health educations videos is combined with eMedTV’s growing collection of more than 16,000 easy-to-understand print articles covering more than 2,000 health topics.



The Doctor’s Channel: it allows doctors to upload short video clips in 35 different specialties.



MedicalVideos.us: A great collection of medical educational videos.



JoVE: an online research journal employing visualization to increase reproducibility and transparency in biological sciences (and now it is indexed by Pubmed).