It was an absolute blast with over 130 people here to help celebrate. We gave tours of our office and everyone’s comment was either “This looks like an ultra-mod hotel” or “It looks nothing like a doctor’s office.” That made me happy. We’ve done a good job outfitting the space. It’s a perfect mixture of the old and the new in it’s decor. And it’s only getting better.
The whole team from Quebec came down to help celebrate. People flew in from all over the US and Canada. My parents were here. Friends, family, the Organized Wisdom guys, ZocDoc, Vespa, Help I Need Help, The Barbarians!, all kinds of interested doctors I connected with online and had yet to meet in person. It was such a good time…
The Hello Health dream became very real last night.
Here is the other version of the Hello Health ad.
We encourage people to talk about us. We want you to communicate. We want you to be honest. The ad is an invitation to write how we are feeling today - good or bad, lovely or nasty. People are going to say what they want. The community is going to talk about us no matter what. They’re going to talk about how good we are as doctors or how they had a good or bad experience. It’s inevitable. The internet enables all of this. So let’s start talking. Companies (and doctors) that don’t embrace this fact are living in the pre-internet days. Hello Health are doctors that reside in your neighborhood and on the internet. Talk with and about us all you want.
Hello Health is launching this evening. However, we’ll be open for new patients in just a few days. The Barbarians created some amazing ads for us. Here’s one of them.
Hello Health is about a community - a community of people partnered with their doctors to keep us as healthy as possible.
I recently returned from Quebec City through Newark and was going through customs. I filled out my customs form and stepped up to the Customs Officer at the computer. He asked me what I do and I told him “I’m a physician.” He looked at me and said “Do you make house calls?” I told him I only make house calls. He said “I know you! I read a story about you a few months ago. I never forget faces.”
I said, “I’m sure glad you’re guarding this country — keep up the good work.”
“You too doc!”
Life is so damn lovely.
So the academic discussion is now being had regarding whether or not, reading on the internet is actual reading in the traditional form. Some say online reading is more engaging and beneficial and other’s say that To Kill a Mockingbird is better for the brain. I say it’s apples and oranges.
Steven Johnson wrote a book a few years back called Everything Bad is Good For You that highlights many of the same topics found in this Times article. From the Amazon Review:
“The heart of Johnson’s argument is something called the Sleeper Curve—a universe of popular entertainment that trends, intellectually speaking, ever upward, so that today’s pop-culture consumer has to do more “cognitive work”—making snap decisions and coming up with long-term strategies in role-playing video games, for example, or mastering new virtual environments on the Internet— than ever before. Johnson makes a compelling case that even today’s least nutritional TV junk food–the Joe Millionaires and Survivors so commonly derided as evidence of America’s cultural decline—is more complex and stimulating, in terms of plot complexity and the amount of external information viewers need to understand them, than the Love Boats and I Love Lucys that preceded it. When it comes to television, even (perhaps especially) crappy television, Johnson argues, “the content is less interesting than the cognitive work the show elicits from your mind.”
Makes sense to me. Steven is a pretty smart guy as well. He created the amazing outside.in site. I was lucky enough to catch him at the New York Public Library a few years back when he moderated a discussion between Larry Lessig and Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco). Both Larry and Jeff are two of my biggest heros. Larry is probably the most engaging intellectual property lawyer in the country and Wilco, well, is the best band in the world. The discussion was absolutely fascinating and can be found here on Wilco’s website.