AAN annual meeting blog promotion ideas accepted

From AAN Annual Meeting website referenced in text

If you are not a neurologist, you probably weren't aware that the American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting is this next week in New Orleans, LA.  The meeting brings to together neurologists from around the globe to learn from and connect with colleagues.  A major portion of the meeting for myself is devoted to attending medical education sessions and meetings with other neurology educators.  There will be a full day meeting of clerkships and residency directors as well as a half-day session on education topics and a poster and platform presentations.

As I go to the meeting, I'd like to be able to not only learn some things from the meeting, but also do some shameless self-promotion for my blog.  As my blog is fairly newly established, I don't really feel like it is at a stage where I could have made a poster or abstract about its relative worth to the community of educators.  As such, I may have missed an obvious outlet for creating interest and awareness in my blog.  I was wondering if others who have blogs could comment on creative ways to let people at meetings like this know that your blog exists while being relatively subtle.  I'm thinking the strategy of going to the open mic and asking a question about an unrelated presentation that ends with the statement, "...I'm very interested in this as I'd like to include it in my medical education blog found on neuronerd.com."  Are there ways of spreading blog love at meetings?  Thanks for the advice.

Virtual hospitals - The future of medical simulation?

I was flipping through Facebook the other day, and saw a video posted by a friend.  It was over 17 minutes long which is eternal in the world of Facebook videos, but I thought I'd give it a try as it looked interesting.  It ended showing people from 'The Gadget Show' making a simulator which not too long ago would have been pure fantasy.  They built a tent with 360 video output capability that also has a 360 degree treadmill to allow you to move in the virtual world by walking as you would in real life.  They also hooked up an X-Box Kinnect sensor to pick up other body movements.  They through in a few other cool add-ons, and they ended up with a truly immersive environment for a first person shooter game.  You can watch the video here.

I got to thinking that this technology is now available, and could be used in medical school to train physicians.  It's not yet at the level of being a holodeck, but it is closer than we've ever been before.  I could envision a program where there is an ambulatory office building, and the student has their own clinic to run where simulated patients come in be interviewed.  The physical examination is done through use of gestures mimicking what the real PE would be, or it could be coupled with a simulation manikin to elicit the physical findings.  Then the student has to go back to a virtual staffing room, and dictate the encounter, and order testing.  They then move on to the next patient.  If you had enough of these built (assuming in the future this type of technology gets cheaper), you could envision having a 'continuity clinic' set up completely in a simulator.  This might include seeing some of your regular patients back as they come through the emergency room for acute conditions or even going to the OR.  It could be as complex as there is time and money to create the scenarios.

I often thought in residency that it would be interesting to have an immersive simulated hospital where you could spend at least some of your time as a medical student or as a junior resident.  There you could have freedom to make some truly independent decisions and see what happens.  I think the advantages to something like this are obvious and are akin to the flight simulators that pilots use to train.  It will never replace time spent on the wards with skilled clinicians giving supervision and feedback.  I don't think the technology is there for a completely realistic medical simulation.  But it is getting closer.