I am grateful to the readers of patrickWeb for years of visits to the blog and providing excellent feedback to me. I especially appreicate hearing about a typo or bad link or something that improves the site for everyone. As you may have detected, I have developed a strong interest in healthcare.  The interest in healthcare is not new — there are currently 54 posts in patrickWeb that are healthcare related. The involvement on the board and committees of Western Connecticut Healthcare has intensified the interest. I am also working on a doctorate in health administration.

About six months ago I learned about Dr. Eric Lutker, a retired psychologist who is my neighbor in Florida. Eric developed a learning institute at the club we belong to where he invites various resident speakers to make a presentation. I was one of his invited speakers and on election day last month I gave a talk about, guess what, the Future of the Internet. Much of my view about the future of the Internet correlates strongly with the future of healthcare, and my talks have gravitated toward the intersection of information technology and clinical technology. The Q&A session after the talk was 75% healthcare related, and afterward Eric suggested we start a blog on the subject. Hence, the Health Discussions Forum (healthdiscussion.net) was born. Our goal is simple. We plan to post short healthcare related stories about things we read or opinions and reflections we may have. We have opened up the commenting feature of the blog to allow others to comment on what we write or on the comments other readers have written. We are not sure where it will lead but hopefully, it will be the beginning of a dialog on the important issues and innovations emerging in a very important part of all of our lives.

Now for the true confessions part of this posting. Most readers of patrickWeb visit the blog with Google Reader or other blog readers but there are approximately 300 readers who subscribe via email, receiving the entire post by email whenever a new story is created. I outsource this service through a provider called Feedblitz. In my enthusiasm for the new healthcare blog, I configured Feedblitz to send Health Discussion Forum postings to the patrickWeb subscribers. Less than 5% have unsubscribed so I hope that is because the posts were appreciated or at least tolerated. If you are a subscriber and prefer not to get the healthcare posts, you can unsubscribe at the bottom of one of the emails or if you prefer, just let me know and I will take care of it for you. I apologize to anyone that feels they got opted in unknowingly. If you are not a subscriber to the Health Discussions Forum (healthdiscussions.net) and want to give it a try, feel free to subscribe using the form below.

Note July 4, 2013: The Health Discussions Forum is no longer in service.