Top 10 Most Competitive Specialties of 2011

It has been said that one way to really measure a specialty's competitiveness is to compare the specialties by the percent of medical students who did not match into the said specialty.  As this will give an idea which specialties are the most highly sought after.  If this is a good way to measure competitiveness, then it is really easy to compare specialties.  In the NRMP's Results and Data: 2011 Main Residency Match Table 14, we can easily compare them.  

Most Competitive Specialties 

(in order of competitiveness - unmatch percent)

1. Plastic Surgery (24.6%)

2. Orthopaedic Surgery (20.6%)

3. General Surgery (14.9%)

4. Dermatology (14.8%)

5. Radiation Oncology (14.1%)

6. Neurological Surgery (11.8%)

6. Otolaryngology (11.8%)

8. Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (8.2%)

9. Emergency Medicine (7.3%)

10. Obstetrics and Gynecology (5.5%)

For comparison sake, here are some other specialties unmatch percentages...

- Anesthesiology (2.8%)

- Family Practice (2.4%)

- Internal Medicine (2.7%)

- Neurology (2.3%)

- Pathology (3.4%)

- Pediatrics (2.5%)

- Psychiatry (3.7%)

- Radiology (2.1%)

Email – Legal Disclaimers

Ever seen a legal disclaimer at the bottom of someone's email?

It may say something like...

Confidentiality Notice: This e-mail message, including any attachments,
is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain
privileged and confidential information. Any unauthorized review, use,
disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended
recipient, please contact the sender by reply e-mail and destroy
all copies of the original message.

But this is just one such example. Do these legal disclaimers do anything? Should you add one to your emails?

Well, I used to think so. However, they may be completely worthless. According to The Economist, these legal email disclaimers are nothing but an annoyance, and hold absolutely no legal obligation.

So, if you were considering adding one of these disclaimers or currently use one, then you might as well scrap the whole idea.

References:
http://lifehacker.com/#!5790930/disclaimers-in-email-signatures-are-not-just-annoying-but-legally-meaningless
http://www.economist.com/node/18529895

Reminder About GPS Photo Settings

Unprofessionalism, Confidentiality, Freedom of Speech

Where does the professional line end, and the personal begin?  As our lives become more accessible online, the line between our work and our lives have started to blur. Here is an example of a case where the legal lines are beginning to form.

In March of 2009 a nursing student by the name of Nina Yoder was expelled from University of Louisville School of Nursing for violating the honor code and crossing the lines of patient confidentiality.  In Yoder's personal time she kept a personal blog on MySpace.  On this blog she posted vulgar and distasteful comments about her nursing clinical experiences.  Once the school of nursing found out about these comments, Yoder was called into the dean's office and expelled.  Yoder felt this was crossing the line, and tried to appeal the dean's decision but her appeal was not heard.

So, Yoder filled a suit against the University of Louisville on the grounds of violating her First and Fourteenth Amendment rights to free speech and due process.

In August of 2009, the case was tried in court. The judge ruled that Yoder had not actually violated the Honor Code as written, and did not touch on the constitutional issues. The court found that the patient could not be identified from the information in the blog . The court also found that the presentation in the blog, though “generally distasteful and, in parts, objectively offensive” was not unprofessional, but entirely “non-professional.” It did not purport to represent the nursing school and was not an interaction with patients or families, being entirely outside the scope of her nursing training and obligations.

Yoder was reinstated as a nursing student at the University of Louisville.

See Video Here

References::

1. Baker, Lee. "Judge overturns expulsion of student for online posting" First Amendment Coalition. August 12, 2009.
2. Holland & Hart Healthcare Law Blog. "'Vulgar' Myspace bloging nursing student ordered reinstated by federal court." August 25, 2009.
3. WLKY.com. "Nursing Student Sues UofL Over Blog-Related Dismissal" March 13, 2009.
4. Morris, Aaron. "Nursing Student Dismissed Over Blog Posts" Internet Defamation Blog. March 14, 2009.
5. Fischman, Josh. "Expelled for Her Online Comments, Former Nursing Student Sues University" The Chronicle of Higher Education. March 13, 2009.

The World Is Obsessed With Facebook

by Alex Trimpe

The World Is Obsessed With Facebook from Alex Trimpe on Vimeo.

DaVinci Robot Paper Airplanes

Social Medicine

You've heard of social media. What about social medicine?

That's when health professionals blog and tweet and text, not only to each other -- but to their patients. Some even go as far as making friends on Facebook, though there's much debate among health pros about where professional should stop at personal when it comes to social networking with patients.

We pull it all together - the pros and the cons. Give it a listen....and then send us viral by Facebooking and tweeting about it!

Via:: CBC Radio - White Coat Black Art

How To Improve Your Online Persona

Everyone knows that your presence online is an extension of yourself.  However, many students often forget.

Paul TenHaken, President of Click Rain, recently came to the Sanford School of Medicine and gave a great talk about social networking and healthcare marketing.  The lecture was great, but it did leave our audience with a few questions.  Mr. TenHaken's background is in marketing and graphic design.  So, he nailed the marketing and social networking awareness piece of the talk, but his medical student audience wanted a bit more information about how healthcare is dealing with these social networking issues.



I believe the students were particularly concerned with the patient privacy issues, patient education, legal issues, the effect on the doctor-patient relationship, as well as the physician marketing.  These issues and concerns are the impetus of this blog.

Dr. Matt Bien, a Scholarship Pathways director, emailed me after the lecture and asked if I'd be willing to expand on a question asked at the end of Mr. TenHaken's lecture.  The question was "What are two-to-three things can I do right now to better my online image?"  This is a great question, and I will answer that by borrowing some of Mr. TenHaken's answer as well as adding some of my own.

1. Google Yourself.
   Google, Bing, and Yahoo yourself (or StartPage).  This will give you a good idea how you stand.  Are you the first name that pops up?  What can people find out about you?  Try to be your own cyber-stalker and see if you can dig up some dirt.  But don't just use your first name and last name, consider using that in combination with your home town, or even usernames you've used (ie: cutiepie2002).  I think you'll be surprised with what you find.
2. Use the strictest privacy settings on Facebook.
   Better yet, just clean up your whole profile.  The truth is, a lot of us have profiles with drunk weekend pictures and other stuff we don't want our professional acquaintances to see.   So, at the very minimum restrict all of your information to only your friends.  While you're at it, go through your friend list.  Do you really know all 846 of those people?  I think you can un-friend some of them, believe me they won't notice.  Un-tag yourself from photos, clean up your wall, watch your language, and pay really close attention to what you "Like" and your "Favorites."  These things will pop up on your profile to the world, even on the strictest privacy settings that Facebook allows.  For proof, log off of Facebook and look up some of your friends.  You can totally tell what they are into, even if they don't have a public profile.
3. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it.
   This old cliche, is totally true, especially on the internet.  Watch your language and who you bad mouth on the internet.  You never know who is watching (especially out of those 846 people on Facebook, and only 15 of them are people you actually talk to).   Also, try not to post everything that you're doing, every second of the day.
   "I just got out of bed"
   "I'm making toast, mmm toast."
   "Can't wait to get back to WOW."
   First, people will start to get annoyed by these messages.  Then, they will start to ignore your messages all together.  Also, if you get in the habit of doing that, you may slip up.  For example "Called in sick today so I could go fishing" and the boss reads it.
4. Improve your online marketing.
   You can do this lots of ways.  First, you can start your own website. Make it professional and make it about yourself or one of your hobbies.  Or you could start a blog, using the same topics. Even something easy like registering for Flavors.me account to aggregate your online persona can go a long way.

I hope some of these tips are useful to you professionals out there.  While they may seem like common sense, it's amazing how much dirt you can still find online about people.  Stay tuned for more posts.

A New Beginning

Welcome to Web Savvy Med Student at Blogspot.  My name is Shawn Vuong and I am a medical student at the Sanford School of Medicine.  Some of you may know me from my previous blog "Medically Mind Numbing" where I reflected on my journey through medical school.  Thanks to that blog, I've learned so much about social networking, social media, doctor-patient relationships, patient education, physician marketing, and patient privacy.  Here I hope to share some of the things I've learned about social networking in the greater context of healthcare and healthcare workers.  If you're interested, then I hope you follow me on Twitter, Facebook (if you're my friend), or RSS feed.