Medicine (particularly obstetrics) is just as much an exercise in communication as it is about surgery. This website is my effort to bring some of the advantages of twenty-first century communication to my patients. It is entirely my own. It is not regulated or subsidized by any organization or hospital. There were two things I wanted. The first was to be able to exchange texts with my patients while protecting my phone from spam. The second was to provide a place for them to start when they look to the web for medical information.
Face it, text messages are a much better way to communicate many types of information than the phone. They are fast, concise, and they don't intrude the way a ringing phone does. And you don't deal with those cursed menus. But if you don't keep your number private, it gets overwhelmed with spam, ads and political stuff. The phone I carry with me is for my family and emergencies, but I still wish I could give out the number. What I did instead was to buy a couple of numbers just for my patients. Then I did the computer coding to make these numbers respond (pretty much) the same way a cell phone does. Because we are on each other's contact list there is no spam. And because they go to a computer rather than a phone, I can take the time to sit down and answer them rather than deal with them on the fly.
I'm also hoping that this is a way to keep in touch when my clinic schedule gets interrupted by emergencies and deliveries. I feel like texting is much more suited to juggling a schedule than trying to call several people several times each. Time will tell if I am right, but I appreciate how frustrating it must be to always worry that the appointment you have waited weeks for will be canceled at the last minute. I sure hope this helps.
The second purpose of these web efforts is to provide a starting point for when my patients want information. I google my symptoms just like everybody else. I went to childbirth classes because the whole idea of labor was scary to me too. And when I google something outside my area of expertise I get frustrated by the same blizzard of bad information every other googler encounters. So, once the basic framework of the website is in place, I'm committed to collecting the best information I can. I have some contacts who are much more expert in health education than I, so that should help. The plan is to have more clickable links to lead people to quality online information and less pamphlets full of what I think. Stay tuned.
To use the text messaging service, you will need to register here or Anybody can look at the informational content. The software involved is here. Both content and software are available under the MIT license.Thanks go out to our hosts at Vultr and Twilio who provide the leases on the server and phone services we use respectively.