Medical podcasting is seeing an explosion of growth. I am deligently working on releasing my next list of medical podcasts and it has become a huge list. In the interest of space, time, and maintenance I might have to stop writing little blurbs describing the podcasts. I hate doing that because I think it gives a little more indepth information that you can't get from podcast aggregator. I am investigating methods of organziation and maintainence.

Here is another example of podcasts for patient education, Patients use iPods to get information on surgery which was brought to my attention by Chris B. IHSLA President and MedRef-L.Indianapolis-based Clarian Health Partners is providing iPods to bariatric patients as part of its ongoing efforts in education. The pilot program is called "HealthPod," and if successful Clarian plans to use iPod technology to support patients going through cancer, transplant and women’s health programs.

Patients using HealthPod can review audio and video clips about the bariatric program, the procedure, pre-operative preparation, and post operation follow-up. The first iPod was dispatched July 11. "Patients who participate in the HealthPod program get ready access to patient testimonials, surgeons answering frequently asked questions, a virtual tour of the facilities and specifics about their surgical procedure. They also get access to diet and grocery shopping tips, recipes, exercise routines, motivational messages and, after it’s all said and done, an iPod that is theirs to keep."

Clarian invested about $120,000 in a studio, video equipment, IT infrastructure development, program maintenance and distribution of the iPods ($299 ea.) The health system does get a 10 percent corporate discount on the iPods. Clarian spent about $8,000 on the iPods and set aside $30,000 more for program expansion.
There are quite a few hospital systems and organizations creating some really cool patient education podcast programs. This is the first that I have heard of where the patient gets to keep the iPod.

It is cool things like this that we as librarians need to really start keeping track. Whether you have an online list of podcasts or you have found a good way of integrating them into your ILS or catalog, we need to start getting a handle on the podcast information that is out there. It is one thing to have a podcast about the library, but is that where we need to be focused? There is already some awesome content out there that people need to be aware of, shouldn't we as librarians be finding them, organzing them, and guiding users to them?

Below are some other patient education podcasts you might be interested in looking at. Some are general information patient education podcast produced by organizations like the American Heart Association, while others are more specific towards a type of disease or surgery like Cancer Cast and CVMD.org.

• American Heart Association Podcasts http://aha.onthescene.com/xml/aha_podcast.xml
• Arizona Cancer Center’s Cancer and Healthcare Update
  http://azcc.arizona.edu/healthcast/healthcare_update.xml
• Blood CancerCAST http://www.leukemia.org/all_page?item_id=395450
• Cancer Cast http://cancercast.com/
• Cancer News in Context http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/cancer/
• CVMD.org (public section on left hand side) http://www.cvmd.org/index.php
• Healthcast http://www.drrubin.com/
• Health Edge http://www.clevelandclinic.org/healthedge/
• ohns Hopkins Medical Podcasts http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/mediaII/Podcasts.html
• OU Health Matters http://feeds.feedburner.com/OUMedicalCenter-HealthMatters
• Sound Medicine http://soundmedicine.iu.edu/index.php4

If anybody has any others the would like to suggest, please feel free to email me or comment.