Beyond Healthcare IT's #HIT100: Industry Thought Leadership Off-Twitter

Every summer, the week of July 4th, the healthcare IT Twitterverse participates in a crowdsourcing nomination process to produce a Top 100 influencers list. Both the list, itself, and the coordinated hashtag-driven "election" effort are great resources for finding industry thought leaders, policy wonks, technophiles, and executives to follow (or put on a Twitter list of your own). Fun, and educational!

Of course, the list has received criticism. As any list should. The data geek in me would love to do further analysis on contributing factors for inclusion and ranking in the list - how prolific are each of the handles, how consistently do they tweet, how much content is original versus amplification (or "retweeting"), what is the ratio of followers to nominations, what is the ratio of list membership to nominations, etc. (Mental note: add "meta-analysis of #HIT100 list" to projects.) But, when I discuss this list with my colleagues, one concern resonated enough for me to want to write about it:

What about all the healthcare IT thought leadership happening OFF Twitter?

Wait, what? There are information sources that don't tweet? (Or, don't tweet in ways that trigger the latest in newsfeed display algorithms, which determines what content is seen often by those who nominate the #HIT100.)

Mind blown. (No, not really. Although I do love the brevity of tweets.)

Of course there are critical community leaders whose primary form of information dissemination isn't a platform as ephemeral and pithy as Twitter. And I've got a few of them that are my regular go-tos. Grab yourself an RSS feed from and/or bookmark any of these sites that are new to you, and prepare to be amazed at all the brilliant (sometimes brutal) truthiness that's available:

• John Halamka's blog, "Life as a Healthcare CIO"
• ProPublica (particularly healthcare journalist Charles Ornstein)
• HISTalk (news to rumors to interviews and opines)
• Health Affairs (excellent blog section with diverse contributors)
• Society for Participatory Medicine Blog (at e-patients.net)
• Disruptive Women in Healthcare
• HIT Consultant (owner and contributor Fred Pennic has brilliant insights)
• HITECH Answers
• Tincture Health (broad health and healthcare focus)
• The Healthcare Blog
• KQED Future of You and State of Health blogs
• Healthcare IT News blog (HIMSS-owned media)
• America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP)'s blog
• HealthIT.gov (blog, resources, events, challenge announcements - all here)

If you're feeling particularly intrepid, here are a few individual contributors whose work enhances my knowledge tremendously. I have Google alerts set up for their bylines and/or interviews mentioning them:

• Fred Trotter (blog here)
• Dr. Farzad Mostashari
• Dr. Peter Elias (personal site here, guest blogs frequently elsewhere)
• Margo Edmunds
• Dr. Adrian Gropper
• Kenneth Mandl
• Joshua C Mandel (of SMARTHealthIT, not Ohio government)
• Robin Farmanfarmaian (website here with links to publications)
• Esther Dyson
• Dr. Danny Sands (website here, guest blogs and speaks consistently)
• Jeff Cribbs (Gartner blog here, but Jeff also appears elsewhere)
• Alexandra Drane (check out her TEDMED talks!)
• Jitin Asnaani
• Jan Oldenburg (website here with links to publications, including book)
• Dr. Doug Fridsma (AMIA blog here, interviews and blogs regularly)
• Lucia Savage
• Dan Haley
• Andy Oram
• Dr. Nick van Terheyden
• Steve Ambrose (LinkedIn posts here, guest blogs regularly)

Clearly, there are a wealth of sites and resources available (including entire networks of healthcare-related content, such as the FierceHealthcare properties). These are simply the top of my personal list.

What/who are your go-to information resources for healthcare and health IT?