The Irene Perstein Award is awarded each year by the School of Medicine to an outstanding newly recruited junior woman clinician scientist. The recipient of the 2012 award is Dr. Maria Raven, Assistant Clinical Professor, who joined the Department of Emergency Medicine as a faculty researcher in July 2011. She is currently the PI on a research project funded by the Emergency Medicine Foundation to study emergency department payment policies and is participating in an effort funded by the Corporation for Supportive Housing and led by San Francisco Housing and Urban Health and the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation to provide supportive housing for high cost SFHP members who are homeless. In September 2012, Dr. Raven was awarded funding from AHRQ in collaboration with Stanford, the lead applicant, to define indicators of community-level health (e.g., access to care, health education, behaviors, disease burden) using the ED as a window to the health of a community.
Education now transcends the classic concept of classroom-based teaching with the advent of web-based technologies, such as blogs (“web logs”). Although blogs initially started as personal journals in the 1990’s, they have become an increasingly popular tool in medical education.
In 2009, I was one of the first bloggers in academic emergency medicine (EM) who adopted the platform as a means to reach and teach medical students, residents, and practicing emergency physicians worldwide. It initially began as a means for me to catalog my reflections about lessons learned in EM. By word of mouth, it has evolved and grown far beyond my expectations. The experience has been inspiring, uplifting, and career affirming as a medical educator. Never before have I been able to teach, collaborate, and learn on such a global scale.
As of October 29, 2012, the website has had 400,000 visits from over 10,000 cities from 6 continents. Recently, there have been 600-1,100 visits per day. The website features three weekly “columns”: Compiled Twitter pearls of the week on Mondays, Tricks of the Trade in EM on Tuesdays, “Paucis Verbis” (“in a few words”, in Latin) clinical pocket cards on Fridays). Intermittently, posts will feature issues relevant to medical education, issues in academic EM, and social media technologies.
The blog has recently named one of Barton’s Best Physician Blogs in October 2012 (http://www.bartonassociates.com/2012/10/02/bartons-best-physician-blogs-2/), along with some of my blogger idols. I’m humbled, honored, and hope to continue my efforts in this growing blog world.
