It’s 2 years today since we (an editorial ‘we’, that is) produced this blog’s inaugural post, with no more than a vague idea of what it might be or become. Plenty has happened in the online health economics scene since then.
There’s been an increase in the reach of health economics blogging. Admittedly, Sheffield’s HEDS blog beat us by a couple of months, the OHE had their news feed going almost a year prior, and The Incidental Economist has been going a long time. But we’ve also seen a few new blogs popping up from the likes of Martin Gaynor, and some folk from Barcelona. Hopefully there are more to come.
But the place where health economists have really begun to thrive is on Twitter. Organisations such as HERC, OHE, YHEC and CHE, along with some other acronyms, have all signed-up since our first tweet almost 2 years ago. We’ve also been joined by the likes of Profs Cam Donaldson, Adam Wagstaff, Paul Kind, Andrew Street, James Raftery and more, along with everyone’s favourite mailing list. A number of people now maintain lists of health economics Twitter accounts, such as ours. If you haven’t signed-up yet, you should.
So far we’ve got 50 blog posts and hosted 5 #HEJC Twitter discussions. In the last 12 months our top 5 countries in terms of page views were the UK, USA, Australia, Canada and Latvia(!). The most popular link on our site is this. We’ve had just short of 16,000 hits since we started, but we’re still finding our feet.
You may have noticed a sharp drop in the frequency of posts on this site in our second year. This will soon be remedied as I (we?) intend to write more. Nevertheless, I encourage you to contribute something to the blog. You can submit something you’ve written or get in touch if you’d like to discuss it first. And of course, the Health Economics Twitter Journal Club will continue, though with some changes that are soon to be announced.
So, do keep reading and let us know if you have any suggestions for things we might do in the future.
Congratulations! Definitely would like to contribute more, just got to get this dastardly phd work out of the way. Anyway, end of term, no more teaching, plenty of time to mull over the important issues.