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2010 on Scienceroll in Numbers and Posts December 30, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Scienceroll.
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In 2010, I had over 500 posts on Scienceroll, had almost 500,000 pageviews, over 1100 feed readers and won Medgadget’s Weblog Awards in the Best Medical Technology Blog category. I gave 64 presentations about social media and medicine in 8 countries and flew 26 times.  I managed to publish the first paper in my PhD and finished two semesters of the Internet in Medicine credit course. I became more active for professional reasons on Facebook, Twitter became my main channel for communication and fell in love with Androids.

Here are the summeries of what happened in medicine and healthcare in 2010 month by month:

January:

February:

March:

April:

May:

June:

July:

August:

September:

October:

November:

December:

Happy new year to You, Dear Readers and see you in 2011!

Health 2.0 News: From Genomic Crowdsourcing to IBM Predictions December 30, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Mobile, Video, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.
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If global health communication was characterized by anything in 2010, it was the rise of Twitter and other social media among non-profit organizations as a way of bypassing increasingly irrelevant traditional media and taking their messages directly to their target groups.

A recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics (there is a link to the paper at the bottom of the article) reviewed doctors’ current Facebook use and what this might imply in terms of the doctor/patient relationship.  The study is small (only 202 people) and only involved residents and fellows, thus limiting the conclusions that can be reached.  However, it provides a some insight into how physicians use social medial, and invites some useful questions and suggestions.

The current study looks at the possibility of optimizing personalized interventions per the genotype-phenotype profiles of individuals, and tests the hypothesis that simple interventions may be effective in reducing homocysteine in individuals with high baseline levels, particularly in the presence of a polymorphism in the MTHFR variant rs1801133.

Phylo – A Human Computing Framework for Comparative Genomics December 25, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Fun, Game, genetics, science, Web 2.0.
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Phylo - A Human Computing Framework for Comparative Genomics is an interactive game that lets you contribute to science. I’ve been playing with that for a while.

The Problem:

Genetic sequences are difficult to understand and so to decipher their structure, we need to compare them to detect any similar regions they may have. Similar regions may indicate important elements of our genetic code. We have several genomes to align and we call this the multiple alignment problem.

The Game:

We abstract the multiple alignment problem to a game where the goal will be to align words made by pieces of different color instead of letters representing the genetic code (A,C,G,T).

Health 2.0 News: From Mobile Search to Virtual Fluoroscopy December 22, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Facebook, Health 2.0, Medical Search, Medicine 2.0, Mobile, Video, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.
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A ProPublica investigation found that more than a dozen of the school’s doctors were paid speakers in apparent violation of its policy—two of them earning six figures since last year.

  • Word Lens instantly translates printed words from one language to another using the video camera on your iPhone.

Cancer 2.0 from Pew Internet Research December 22, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Cancer, Health 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0.
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Pew Internet Research published again a very interesting study focusing on cancer patients using the internet.

Findings related to the use of the internet for health information comes from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates between November 19 to December 20, 2008, among a national sample of 2,253 adults. A combination of landline and cellular random digit dial (RDD) samples was used to represent all adults who have access to either a landline or cellular telephone. Interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish. For results based on the national sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling and other random effects is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.  For results based on internet users (n=1,650), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.7 percentage points. For results based on adults living with chronic disease (n=917), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Findings related to Americans’ use of mobile technologies comes from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International between April 29 and May 30, 2010, among a sample of 2,252 adults, age 18 and older. Interviews were conducted in English. For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling and other random effects is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points. For results based internet users (n=1,756), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.

Internet in Medicine University Course: Semester is over December 21, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Medical education, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Medicine 2.0 Course, Web 2.0.
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I believe that this is still the first and only university accredited course in the world that focuses on social media and medicine for medical, dentistry, pharmacy and public health students. This semester is just over after 10 weeks, 20 slideshows and hundreds of questions from the students. They also filled in surveys before and after the course. I plan to publish the results in a peer-reviewed journal early next year.

Thank you for the participation and the comments, questions, I hope you (both in the course and through the blog) enjoyed the lectures. See you next February when the new semester will be launched.

The last week was dedicated to the future of web, semantic search and the survey results:

First part of the Prezi.com slideshow: Life after web 2.0

Take-home message: The story is just about to begin…

Second part of the slideshow: Summary of the last 10 weeks

  • 10 weeks – 20 slideshows
  • 2 slideshows each week
  • 2 major questions in each slideshow
  • Examples for all the tools and sites we have talked about. Many many examples.
  • This is the first university credit course of its kind in the world.

Take-home message: I hope I could help you on your way towards web 2.0…

Lectures this semester:

Newistic: Mining Social Media December 21, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Data, Health 2.0, Innovation, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0.
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I’ve recently come across Newistic as I was about to meet the co-founder, Horatiu Mocian, but we couldn’t make it. The service sounds intereting and timely to me.

Newistic offers a customizable web dashboard used for monitoring and analyzing social media for the pharma and healthcare industries. It enables persons or companies interested in the healthcare vertical to get a social media overview for any drug, disease, pharma company, or any other keyword. The features that set Newistic apart from other social media monitoring systems are:

  • Monitoring patient communities
  • Discovering diseases and symptoms that are associated with any search
  • The possibility of searching all or some of the brand names of a generic drug

To demonstrate its real power, here is a recent analysis they performed following a double blow that Roche’s Avastin cancer drug suffered, in the European and US markets, regarding its use for breast cancer. For example, here are the top symptoms and diseases related to Avastin in social media after news hit the media:

If you want to hear more details about the service, let me know and I will schedule an interview with the founders.

Speaking in the HQ of The British Medical Association December 21, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Conference.
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December was a really busy month as I was also invited to speak about physicians using social media succesfully in London and Manchester on the same day early December. In London, the meeting was held in the British Medical Association House on Tavistock Square. It was a real pleasure to look around and I had a chance to take some pictures (see below).

BMA House is a grade II listed building designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and was once home to Charles Dickens. We are perfectly situated between Kings Cross, St Pancras, Euston and Russell Square stations with excellent road links, accessibility to Heathrow via Paddington and with Europe via Eurostar.

BMJ everywhere

 

Original equipment from Edward Jenner

 

Current and past presidents of the BMA

 

 

A new (?) look for WHO December 21, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0.
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Andre Blackman reported that the World Health Organization has a new website design. While it looks better than the last one, there are very important issues that are missing.

  • Is there an RSS logo somewhere?
  • The massive social media presence of WHO is totally missing from the whole site.
  • The new center for health information is the internet, and to be honest, WHO hasn’t been able to deal with this in the past 10 years.

What do you think about the new design?

 

Heart Diseases: Social Media in a Curated Way December 20, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, PeRSSonalized Medicine, Web 2.0, Webicina.
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There are hundreds of quality blogs, news sites, medical journals, Twitter users or Youtube channels focusing on the different types of heart diseases, but Webicina selects the most relevant resources in social media in PeRSSonalized Heart diseases, the simplest medical information aggregator that is available in 17 languages.

You can also add custom Pubmed search boxes to your personalized journal.

Some reasons why PeRSSonalized Medicine is unique:

  • You can search in the database. It means you will find medical information only from a quality selected portion of the world wide web.
  • You can personalize any of the sections.
  • You can also receive the newest Pubmed articles focusing on your search term. Just insert your field of interest, a therapy, a condition, etc. and click Search. Then you can add the newly created box to your personalized medical “journal”.
  • It is a community-based project. Please let us know which quality resources should be added to the database.
  • It’s available in 17 languages.

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Here is a video tutorial about PeRSSonalized Medicine:

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