Gosh, who would have thought launching a new website, and then relaunching it with a new design and a ton more new features, and then tying up all the loose ends (fixing bugs, etc) could be so time-consuming?! Sorry I’ve been so remiss with posting here. I’m doing my best this week to get back into my routine of writing here.

I was very surprised to read this Boston Globe story about one of the latest bloggers to join the Boston blogosphere. No, not a 20 or 30-something year old. A hospital CEO. No, not the CEO of some small community hospital. The head of Beth Israel Deaconness, Paul Levy.

And he’s not blogging about what he had for breakfast (although one recent post did include some jokes). He’s writing about real issues. What got the Globe’s attention were his posts about the rates at which patients at his hospital got infections from a specific procedure (check out the Feb 16, Jan 23 and Dec 17 posts).

Other Boston teaching hospitals don’t publish this info and say that it’s not fair to compare this kind of data from one hospital to the next. So what Levy is doing—challenging other hospitals to disclose—is controversial. People have reacted generally quite favorably though. His post about this Globe article drew quite a few responses.

What’s most interesting to me is the forum he’s chosen to do this in: a blog. Most people of his generation, and certainly in his line of work, are not the blogging types…they may not even know what they are. People judge the quality of data by the forum in which they are communicated in (ie a blog vs the New England Journal of Medicine) and I really doubt if his peers take blogs all that seriously. So we’ll see if this maverick hospital CEO-blogger can continue to publicize the inner workings of his hospital on his blog, and whether his bosses might tell him to keep his blog focused on just harmless jokes.