1 Day Left to Win the iPad2 or Trip to Paris with Your Social Media Story! November 29, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine.2 comments
Webicina.com has recently launched a challenge in which stories from patients and medical professionals about how social media helped them are invited and there are grand prizes (Lenovo Thinkcentre, iPad2 and Amazon Kindle Fire, among others). A special prize goes to someone who can tell his/her story at the Doctors 2.0 and You conference in Paris with registration fee and accommodation covered. Please see the details for more. It’s simple:
- You write your story on any social media platform
- You send it to info@webicina.com
- The list of winners is published on the 12th of December!
More and more stories are being submitted, even people are submitting other people’s stories which is really remarkable! But only 1 day left before the deadline, so don’t forget to submit YOUR story! The deadline is Wednesday midnight EST.
We are looking forward to reading, hearing or watching your story.
Mobile Health Slideshow and Infographics November 28, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Mobile, Slideshow, Web 2.0.2 comments
Since around 2009, it has been quite clear that mobile phones would not only change the way we check healthcare information online, but the way we do anything online so relevant statistics and analyses are crucial in order to be able to analyze the situation and draw useful conclusions. I’ve recently come across a great presentation focusing on mobile health by Daniel Hooker, health librarian.
And Andrew Spong shared an infographics by Manhattan Research that presents the state of mobile health. 85% of people use social media for health-related reasons on mobiles. Click on the image for larger version.
The Case for Personalized Medicine: Interview with Edward Abrahams of PMC November 25, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Genome, Interview, Personalized medicine.1 comment so far
The third edition of The Case for Personalized Medicine (PDF) was released a week ago and I had a chance to do an interview with Edward Abrahams, Ph.D. of the Personalized Medicine Coalition. The new edition is a primer that highlights the progress in the field of personalized medicine for policymakers, researchers, and business leaders.
- How many prominent examples of personalized medicine might we have next year?
It’s impossible for us to know how many prominent examples of personalized medicine products will be available a year from now, but we project that the rapid acceleration in the number of new products coming onto the market will continue. When we published the first edition of The Case for Personalized Medicine in 2006 – there were only 13 available products; when we published the second edition in 2009, there were 37 products available, and now, in 2011, there are 72.
- Sometimes lecturers use two numbers: 7 billion and 3 billion referring to the mass sequencing of everyone’s DNA in the world. When could it happen, what is your estimation?
We understand there to be 3 billion SNPs.
- It seems now from gene expression profiling we are moving towards RNA sequencing and next generation sequencing. What do you think is the next trend in research?
Both research and clinical care will benefit as the cost of whole genome sequencing declines at a rate dramatically more quickly than Moore’s Law would predict inching towards the $1,000 mark. The $1,000 price point is critical because it will make whole genome sequencing comparable in cost to existing medical tests thereby opening up new opportunities for researchers to understand the genetic underpinnings of wellness and disease and providing clinicians with a valuable tool for assessing patient health.
- It is often written by economists that while personalized medicine costs more, it is more cost-efficient. How can we find the balance between having a well designed personalized medicine concept in healthcare and checking everyone’s samples for random biomarkers?
This is a good question. Evidence is needed to show the clinical and economic utility of anything that becomes part of the standard of care. But personalized medicine will be most successful where it makes health care more efficient by enabling the matching of treatment to patient to maximize therapeutic benefits and reduce adverse events, not where it imposes a new one-size-fits-all guideline on physicians to test the entire population for a random biomarker.
- What are the goals and planned activities of the Personalized Medicine Coalition for the next few years?
The Personalized Medicine Coalition is an education and advocacy organization comprising more than 200 member institutions. In keeping with our educational mission, we will plan conferences and develop new documents along the lines of The Case for Personalized Medicine to educate policymakers, business leaders, and others needing to understand personalized medicine and the opportunities it offers to improve patient care while making the health care system more efficient. We will also work with our members to understand and remove barriers to personalized medicine by advocating for changes to health care policy in the United States and around the world.
Only 1 Week Left to Win the iPad2 or Trip to Paris with Your Social Media Story! November 23, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine.3 comments
Webicina.com has recently launched a challenge in which stories from patients and medical professionals about how social media helped them are invited and there are grand prizes (Lenovo Thinkcentre, iPad2 and Amazon Kindle Fire, among others). A special prize goes to someone who can tell his/her story at the Doctors 2.0 and You conference in Paris with registration fee and accommodation covered. Please see the details for more.
More and more stories are being submitted, even people are submitting other people’s stories which is really remarkable! But only 1 week left before the deadline, so don’t forget to submit YOUR story!
We are looking forward to reading, hearing or watching your story.
7 Features of the New Generation of Physicians November 21, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, List, Medical education, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0.19 comments
For the last 4 years, I’ve been teaching medical and public health students about the use of social media and generally digital technologies in medicine and healthcare and I got a good picture of what kind of medical professionals they would become soon. They represent the new generation of physicians.
Here are my points and observations:
- They are technophile. I remember the time when there was no internet, I remember the first website I first saw online. They were born into the technology and internet-based world. For them, websites, Facebook, Twitter and blogs represent the basics. They love gadgets and devices.
- They are fast. They use smartphones, read news online, follow blogs and know what RSS is, they are familiar with multi-tasking. They are much faster than the previous generations therefore they need different tools and solutions in their work.
- But they use the technology for non-professional purposes. Even if they know a lot about social media, they use it like everyone else outside medicine. As long as they don’t have professional motivation regarding the use of social media, they keep on using it for personal reasons. We must help them find the way to use the web in an optimal and efficient way.
- They like balance. They don’t want to become “Gods’ for the patients even if they are trained like that and hate hierarchy. They soon realized common hierarchies are missing in the online world and what matters is the quality of work you do (just see Wikipedia). They need informed patients and want to work with e-patients. They are not afraid of them as they see such patients day by day in the circles of their families, friends and relatives. For them, the concept of being an empowered and enabled patient is absolutely not new.
- They live on the internet. They not only accept the dominance of the online world in almost all processess and activities, but it’s so natural for them. They have been doing banking, messaging, reading, studying and even shopping online in their entire life. It’s obvious they want to use the internet when practicing medicine and they don’t really understand why they cannot use it right now in many areas of medicine.
- They are mobile. They don’t feel they should stay in one place and they are not afraid of moving to new places or even countries. They are also mobile because of their smartphones through which they are connected all the time to those who are important to them and to the information they need.
- They are the future. And as it strikes me, they don’t even know it (fortunately). They just want to use the online word in medicine and healthcare as well.
I’m trying to help them become better doctors who can meet the specific needs of e-patients, the new generation of patients. In this long process, I will make my course totally online this January. So then any students, medical professionals or e-patients could take and finish my course and know more about the medical segments of social media and the entire world wide web.
More details later!
Participatory healthcare: A parody? November 20, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Fun, Healthcare, Video, Web 2.0.1 comment so far
Lucien Engelen just published a video that presents participatory healthcare from a different apsect.
Scienceroll.com is 5 years old! November 19, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Scienceroll.11 comments
Today my blog, Scienceroll.com, is 5 years old! I’m very happy and satisfied I didn’t stop blogging even when I had many exams, several parallel projects, hard periods in my life or even New Year’s Eve, it didn’t matter as I always kept on blogging. Once I described my 3 rules for blogging: 1) commitment, 2) openness and 3) consistency, I try to live up to all of these.
Blogging became a part of my everyday routine and now plays a major role in my professional life. I launched it in 2006 as a medical student and now I write the entries every day as a physician and researcher running Webicina.com as well. I’ve received many speaker invitations and I’ve made a lot of new contacts just because I have Scienceroll.com.
A few numbers on this long journey:
- I have been blogging for 1829 days.
- I wrote 2427 blog posts.
- Received 10,699 comments.
- WordPress has filtered 991,225 spam comments.
- Had over 2,2 million visitors.
Photo source: Bigstockphoto.com
I know there are bloggers who left blogging for microblogging or other platforms, but I still believe that my online CV and my main platform on the web is this blog and plan to keep on blogging for a long long time.
Thank you very much for reading Scienceroll.com day by day, I hope you stay with me for many more years!
Share Your Social Media Story in Health or Medicine and WIN! November 18, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Web 2.0, Webicina.add a comment
Webicina.com has recently launched a challenge in which stories from patients and medical professionals about how social media helped them are invited and there are grand prizes (Lenovo Thinkcentre, iPad2 and Amazon Kindle Fire, among others). A special prize goes to someone who can tell his/her story at the Doctors 2.0 and You conference in Paris with registration fee and accommodation covered. Please see the details for more.
Several stories have been submitted, but we just recognized a new trend: people are submitting other people’s stories which is really remarkable! So we decided to accept stories that are submitted by others as well. Of course, the stories will compete for the prizes, not the submitters.
Share your story and win! We are looking forward to reading, hearing or watching your story.
Social Media in Medical Education November 18, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medical education, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Video, Web 2.0.4 comments
Social Media in Medical Education is a topic that is very close to my heart. I launched the world’s first and still only university accredited course for medical, dentistry and public health students abut social media and medicine and will have a major announcement soon regarding this course.
Now I would like to mention a blog entry on Life in the Fast Lane:
Social media (the internet) is a game changer. In medicine we are able to connect with colleagues, discuss medical literature, share evaluative thoughts, ponder hypotheses and join in collaborative thinking. We already engage in these activities in the physical world, and now can extend the conversation globally through these new digital technologies.
