Back from Kos 2011

I am back from the 6th MEMC at Kos 2011, what a great opportunity to meet enthuastic emergency physicians from all around the world! Although not the gigantic size of ACEP the quality was in no way inferior. I couldn't believe my eyes when sat listening to the history of emergency medicine and suddenly Joe Lex was up and speaking, THE Joe Lex! Being a little frontally inhibited I went up to thank him for his freeemergencytalks but he was in an instant surrounded by a crowd so I had no chance to explain him how i thought he was the Osler of our times by bringing all these wonderful lectures online and for free... next time Joe!

I gave a 20 minute talk "IT for emergency physicians", my first one on an international conference and was thrilled with the positive responses I got afterwards despite a little nervous first talk. I even got invitations to further talks so it will be interesting to see where all this leads to. It was extremely difficult to pack this broad topic into such a short presentation, so much was left out or slimmed while practising, leaving only a short introduction and a few examples of IT tools in work. For those of you who are here from the lecture I would like to tip you to try first to read through the "primary resources" from the top of the page, it contains all the links you were expecting in my talk and even more. Then there are a few of the topics in more detail dispersed through the blog archive and in the coming weeks I will be writing about practical use of Google Docs and e-laerning so stay tuned.

As promised, here are my slides and notes right from Google docs, I am planning to make an audio/speaker version of this in the near future so stay tuned. Unfortunately, as I head questions from the audience afterwards, I had to cut out my personal disclosure concerning Google so here it is:

"In the next session I will be talking a lot about Google, a corporation which has in only 10 years come to stand on the shoulders of the giants. I have no affiliations with Google but it is but honest to tell you that there are alternatives to Google’s applications like Microsoft's Live tools. I have tried some of these but Google’s simplicity and yet enormous capabilites of storing and retrieving my hundreds of megabytes of data has kept me there for years. As I often say to my friends, “Google is so much more than just Gmail”.

As I also explained in the talk, to survive the information tsunami requires simplicity - the multiple of websites available out there are too many to hold account on with different logins and ULRs. By using them correctly, the plethora of Google applications suffice most of my needs and there is only a single URL and login I have to remember. As for backup & security issues of having all your data in one place (also was asked about this) - there now is a tool, Google Takeout, which allows you to grab all your data from every single Google app to your computer, it will definitely help you sleep better. So actually - having everything in one place is a plus rather than drawback.

By the way, if you're new to Google Docs and want to try it out, here is a very short introduction to this powerful tool.


If you wan't to contact me you can use dabbi2000(at)gmail.com, you can also follow my Twitter account on https://twitter.com/#!/ZonOfThor