TGIF, friends! Here’s our Friday Festival of Fun for e-patients and health policy wonks far and near.

Keeping family medicine alive – at a truck stop: Rob Marsh MD of Raphine, Virginia, was named Country Doctor of the Year in 2014. Where does he practice? At a truck stop. What was his gig before country-doctor? The US Army’s Delta Force. “Virginia doctor tries truck-stop medicine to keep family practice alive”

#GMDD (“Gimme my DaM data”), Irish edition: It seems that patients everywhere are struggling to figure out the data-access issue. Our friends in Ireland are having the same conversation that we’re having here in the US. From the Irish Times: “Medical Matters: Charting progress: who owns patients’ medical notes?”

Kindness training in medical school: A core driver of transforming medicine, and the healthcare delivery system, is medical school. The Wing of Zock blog, published by the Association of American Medical Colleges, is a great source for insights on transformation in academic medicine. Kindness training in medical school? Why … YES. “Kindness Beyond Curriculum”

Patient Portal ideas: One of the blogs that’s chock full of discussion about all things health IT is HITECHAnswers – here’s a short post with some ideas for patient portal. Which in our experience have yet to be delivered in truly meaningful ways, to patients or clinical teams. “Searching for Creative Patient Portal Solutions”

Change at the FDA: FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg is moving on. She’s faced many challenges well – compounding pharmacy safety, Ebola.  Here’s hoping her successor will also bring a special focus on tech, because tech is the biggest enabler patients have had since the internet itself. NYTimes: “FDA Commissioner Dr Margaret Hamburg to Step Down”

Doctor By Day, Comedian By Night: For your Friday funny-bone, here’s a doctor who’s become a movie star. Usually, it’s an actor playing a doctor who becomes a movie star. Ken Jeong started as an internist with an off-hours comedy habit. You might know him from his breakout performance in “The Hangover.” Here’s his “my big break” story from NPR: “Doctor By Day, Comedian By Night“