Blogging hospital CEO Nick Jacobs

From the Department of Better Late Than Never comes this podcast with Nick Jacobs, CEO of Windber Medical Center in Windber, Pa., who's well known in some circles for being perhaps the first hospital chief in the country to write his own blog.

Nick's Blog has been around since May 2005, and Jacobs also contributes to Hospital Impact and to the World Health Care Blog. Paul Levy at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston has been writing his blog since August 2006. (I've got them both beat, as my blog dates to May 2004. But I am not going to brag until I get the kind of traffic that HIStalk does. That blog, which I've heard referred to as the "National Enquirer of health IT," recently passed 1 million visitors. I'm still looking up at 30,000.)

Speaking of historical records, I've been sitting on this podcast since September, when Jacobs was in Chicago for the third Healthcare Blogging & Social Media Summit way back in September. I've got an even older recording in the podcast pipeline, and who knows when I'll get to that? I did write about Jacobs in Digital HealthCare & Productivity in early October, but now you can hear what he's all about.

Podcast details: Interview with Nick Jacobs, CEO of Windber (Pa.) Medical Center. MP3, mono, 64 kbps, 9 MB. Running time 19:34.

0:49 Genesis of the blog
2:02 How blogging helps a small hospital compete with larger hospitals
2:50 His message
3:45 Early blog posts and how he started taking more risks
4:50 Motivating employees via the blog
5:40 Keeping local mass media honest
6:40 The global reach of the Internet: “You can never be a prophet in your own home town.�
8:00 Why other hospital CEOs don’t blog
9:20 Being the first to take the plunge
10:00 Why healthcare is so slow to turn to IT
10:40 Windber’s cancer research for the military
11:30 National recognition and local indifference: “reverse urban snobbery�
12:30 Transparency in healthcare
13:45 Flaws in public reporting requirements
15:30 High tech at small hospitals
16:20 Using the Internet to build a reputation
17:30 Market challenges for a small hospital
18:04 The future and his passion for change in healthcare