Mayo Clinic is launching several new podcasts today. They aren’t our first foray into podcasting; we’ve been podcasting our daily Mayo Clinic Medical Edge radio program for nearly two years (since September, 2005, back before there was such a thing as a video iPod.) This has been a popular program, and in January of this year we started the Mayo Clinic Medical Edge video podcast, which is based on a weekly news insert we provide for local television stations in the United States and Canada.
The new podcasts are different, in that they are produced especially for people with interest in a particular topic, condition or disease. What’s more, they’re not limited by the mass audience appeal necessary for broadcast news. They feature in-depth discussions with Mayo Clinic physicians and scientists, and instead of 60-second packages for radio or 90 seconds for television, the podcasts can be as long as the conversation needs to be.
So, for example, the first episode of the Mayo Clinic Heart Podcast, featuring Dr. Thoralf Sundt, a Mayo Clinic cardiac surgeon, talking about off-pump bypass surgery, runs 18:30. The Cancer Podcast segment on Inflammatory Breast Cancer is 15:10, and the Bones & Muscles podcast, featuring Dr. Richard Berger discussing a painful wrist injury, the UT Split Tear, and how to diagnose and repair it, is 37:14.
That’s the beauty of podcasting; it doesn’t have to fit a particular time slot, and doesn’t need to appeal to the lowest common denominator, so people with a particular interest can get a lot of deep and meaningful information. And they can listen where and when they want, either on their computer or on an iPod or other mp3 player.
Among the other new podcasts are:
- Men’s Health Podcast
- Women’s Health Podcast
- Children’s Health Podcast, and
- For those who want to receive all of the podcasts, they can sign up for the All-Audio Podcast.
For more information on how to sign up to receive these podcasts, go to this page. You will need some kind of “podcatching” software, either iTunes or something similar. But you can learn more about podcasting here in Wikipedia. The podcasts are also listed in many of the major podcast directories, including PodcastAlley, Podcastingnews and others.
I make no pretense of objectivity when it comes to these podcasts; this is a project our New Media team at Mayo Clinic has been working on for several months; I’m not a neutral reviewer. So I would appreciate your feedback. Please let us know what you think of these new podcasts, anything you see we could improve and what topics you would like to see covered in the future.
Update: Mayo Clinic’s news release announcing the podcasts is here.
Technorati: Mayo Clinic, Podcasts, Heart, Cancer, Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Children’s Health, Medical Edge, Heart Disease
