New and Improved -- the Mather Physicians' Forum

Plans are underway, and the web-development elves are hard at work on a "Physicians-Only" website that will be more timely, interactive, and user-friendly than our current Mather Physician's Portal.  Some of the components that you and I have requested that we hope will make our new site the website of choice for Mather Physicians for finding out what's going on at Mather and among our medical colleagues include:

1. Forums - an area where we physicians can interact, sharing what's on our minds, asking those burning open-ended questions, and providing countless hours of witty repartee meant to enlighten, amuse, and inform ourselves and each other as only we can!
2. Groups - formed around particular interests (Medicare, managed care, politics, medical informatics) or by department; a location where groups can share information such as links, documents, photos, jokes.
3. Profiles - new office location?  better email address?  this part of the site will house contact information that we can input or revise at any time.
4. News and Resource Center - at first this will be administrative and other Mather-related info, likely curated by Mather's talented and willing medical staff office, or the "Physician Engagement Team," or fed by syndication from sources like Medscape, New England Journal of Medicine, or MSSNY.  Ultimately, I envision we may compile, cull, and contribute the most pertinent "news" ourselves, but I guess we'll see.  Maybe we can put some of our "Medical Staff Library" here.

So...what do you think?  Once built, I hope you understand, that you ARE the pilot group of users for this site.  The initial roll out is planned for medical staff leadership, the medical board, department and section leaders, and members of the physician advisory council for Eclipsys.  We will all be in charge of the fine tuning, template design, customization, and initial use and evaluation.

Don't worry, it will be fun!  Like "Facebook," but just for us.  Click on "Comments" below to let me know if you are on board with this.  Leave me any suggestions that I can bring to meetings with the website developers, and let me know if there is anything I haven't mentioned that you would like to see on our new site (like Linked-In or Twitter...whatever that is!).