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Greetings from Long Beach, CA January 19, 2009

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in About me, Conference, Medicine 2.0, Medicine Meets Virtual Reality, Web 2.0.
3 comments

Just like a year ago, now I’m attending the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 17 conference and I’m quite happy to be here again. Long Beach is warm enough after the central-european winter.  This year, I got the honor to be in the organizing committee and I’ve been conducting interviews with famous presenters for the MMVR17 blog.

In the next 4 days, I will blog and tweet live about what’s happening in the leading conference focusing on medical technology and simulations.

mmvr17

On Wednesday, I will talk about how practicing medicine will change in the web 2.0 era and will do a workshop about the medical islands of Second Life.

Follow Scienceroll or my Twitter account for more.

And let me know if you are around and would like to meet.

Twitter: Live Surgery, Sugarstats and 100 ways for hospitals January 19, 2009

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in eHealth, Health, Health 2.0, Healthcare, Hospital, List, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, twitter, Web 2.0.
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17 comments

There are too many interesting news and posts focusing on the potential benefits of Twitter in healthcare so I thought I would share these with you in a compilation.

  • The first live-tweeted surgery (Global Neighbourhoods): Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit performed the first live-tweeted surgery. Can you imagine how useful it can be in the future in medical education? (And the monitor on the image proves only Tweetdeck could make it possible.)

twitter-surgery

Photo courtesy of Henry Ford Health Services

sugarstats

Twitter users now carry on conversations (called “tweets”) with each other, share information learned at conferences and CME events, and query peers about professional concerns. Physician bloggers Ves Dimov, M.D., of Clinical Cases and Images (http://clinicalcases.blogspot.com/) and Kevin Pho, M.D., of Kevin, M.D. (www.kevinmd.com) use Twitter to communicate information rapidly without writing a traditional blog post. Others use Twitter to rapidly share information gathered at conferences that colleagues are unable to attend.

To sum it up, Twitter is extremely useful these days and it will be even more popular in the future. When we are talking about online reputation, we will not refer to blogs, but Twitter accounts. Join the discussions there.

Update: As Bob Coffield pointed out on Twitter, it wasn’t the first live surgery “broadcasted” via Twitter.

Gene Genie #42 at Genetic Future January 19, 2009

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Blog Carnival, Gene Genie, genetics.
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The  42nd edition is up at Genetic Future. A great compilation of articles and blogposts about human genetics and personalized medicine. Thank you, Daniel MacArthur, for hosting Gene Genie.

Gene Genie is the blog carnival of genes and gene-related diseases. Our plan is to cover the whole genome before 2082 (it means 14-15 genes every two weeks). We accept articles on the news of genomics and clinical genetics. The news and articles of personalized genetics are also included. Check out Gene Genie for more about this unique field of medicine.

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Many thanks to Ricardo Vidal for the logo!

Don’t forget to submit your articles via e-mail (berci.mesko at gmail.com).

Let me know if you would like to host an edition.

Here are all the issues of Gene genie:

Hospitals and Social Networks January 19, 2009

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Hospital, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0.
2 comments

Ed Bennett created a more than useful list of hospitals that are involved in the social media movement. Facebook groups, Youtube channels and Twitter accounts. A must-bookmark list.

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Pharmatopia: Pharmacology in Second Life January 15, 2009

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Education, Second Life, Virtuality, Web 2.0.
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I’m a fan of the educational places of Second Life and Pharmatopia is one of the best examples how this virtual world could be used successfully in education. Robbo from BitingTheDust told me about the Pharmatopia project and asked the organizers to give me a guest account for a few days.

A key initiative is the development of an interactive virtual tabletting research and development laboratory, available online through Second Life, which gives students the opportunity to complete a range of activities that are available 24/7. Developed by the faculty, this new virtual teaching model is a shared practice model involving ten leading pharmacy schools from around the world.

Monash has purchased a closed-access island (not available to the public) in Second Life, a virtual world,  available to staff and students at participating universities.  The island has been christened ‘Pharmatopia’, and as the name suggests, aims to develop a pharmacy education ‘oasis’.  The cost of the island is low and access for students is free.

Dr. Ian Larson describes what the project is about:

And screenshots I made:

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Further reading:

Wikipedia Roll: Visualizing the data of Wikipedia January 14, 2009

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Web 2.0, Wikipedia.
4 comments

Wikipedia Roll is a site that tries to help us how to organize the incredible amount of information published on Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia.

Wikipedia-roll is a global and dynamic version of articles from Wikipedia.

Quickly, we access to a global vision of a subject through the definition and items of the article in Wikipedia.

Then by serendipity, from a link to an other, we discover a lot of things.

I gave it a try with genetics and it really helped me organize the numerous entries focusing on this field.

wikipedia-roll

Further reading:

Twitter and Medical Education: Slideshow January 14, 2009

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Education, twitter, Web 2.0.
Tags: ,
3 comments

Dr. Shock posted a more than interesting slideshow about the educational implications of Twitter created by Befitt who has already published other similar slideshows.

Further reading:

Five ways Wikipedia beats newspapers January 11, 2009

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0, Wikipedia.
15 comments

Joe D at Cotch.net inspired by Bora Zivkovic came up with a nice list of 5 reasons why Wikipedia can be better than newspapers.

1. Wikipedia avoids weasel words. It attributes statements to their sources, rather than to “some people say”. Can you imagine a newspaper surviving five minutes with such a policy?

2. When somebody hoaxes Wikipedia, the article quickly gets investigated and deleted within three weeks (and yet this case is held up as an example of Wikipedia’s unreliability). When somebody hoaxes the mainstream media, they carry on credulously reprinting the press releases five years later.

3. Wikipedia has a policy against plagiarising newspapers. Judging from the amount of times I’ve blurted “hey — I wrote that!”, while reading The Metro on the tube*, the reverse policy doesn’t apply.

4. You can correct mistakes in Wikipedia. You cannot correct mistakes in the Daily Telegraph, even if you were the subject expert quoted in the item.

5. Wikipedia is not about to go bankrupt.

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As an administrator in the English Wikipedia, all I can say is let’s go and edit a medical entry you think you know more than a few lines about. These links may help you where to start:

Further reading:

Second Life Health News: 2009 Predictions and the Map January 11, 2009

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Education, Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Second Life, Virtuality, Web 2.0.
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secondlife_map

  • Do you remember my post focusing on the NHS London project in Second Life? Now here are 2 other articles on the subject.

NHS in virtual reality: second sight and  Virtual hospitals – the NHS’s future.

2009 Predictions in Personalized Genetics January 11, 2009

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Genetic testing, genetics, Genome, Personalized medicine.
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5 comments

Hsien-Hsien Lei shared her 2009 predictions about personalized genetics with us and that’s where I would like to leave a few comments.

1. 23andMe will begin selling their tests on drugstore shelves.

I think they would be sued soon.

2. President Barack Obama will be offered genome sequencing.

He cannot and mustn’t accept it.

3. Apple will launch iSEQ – instant DNA testing and analysis in a handheld device.

I don’t think Apple will ever enter this market.

4. The first 10 participants in the Personal Genome Project will band together to be called Fantastic Ten. Each will reveal secret superpowers that are embedded in their DNA.

That is a possibility. But if they think wisely, they will never do something like that.

5. The U.S. government passes laws to obtain DNA from all its citizens which it says will help protect the innocent and punish criminals.

It was only possible in Iceland and will never be possible in the US.

What I think about 2009 is that Navigenics will rule the market even if its service is more expensive than the kit of 23andMe.

navigenics

Further reading:

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