The E-Patient becomes a patient February 13, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in e-patient, Health, Health 2.0, Healthcare, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Video, Web 2.0.2 comments
E-patient Dave deBronkart has been the most important and amazing voice of the e-patient movement for years now after surviving a kidney cancer years ago. When I asked him to comment on how medical students should become doctors who are aware of the e-patient movement, he sent me and my students this message.
He announced a few days ago that he has skin cancer again.
An odd consequence of speaking at medical conferences is that sometimes my face is displayed, real big, on monitors at the front of a room. That happened in November at the Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q) annual meeting in Washington.
At the end, Lisa Letourneau MD, MPH of Maine Quality Countsraced up, pointed to my jaw, and said “You should have that checked. I think it’s a basal cell.” (That’s the least serious type of skin cancer – see Wikipedia: “Basal-cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most common type of skin cancer. It rarely metastasizes or kills.”) A few days later I took the picture at left, and started watching.
And now here is the newest piece of the story, Dave approaches the issue from a different angle:
I’ve decided to explore my options by doing what companies do when they’re shopping for a solution: they write a Request for Proposals, and let vendors reply. But in this case what I published isn’t cast in stone – I invite discussion and suggestions. And, significantly, I start with the context: partnership; participatory medicine -
I cannot wait to see how the industry and the healthcare system respond to such innovative approach.
From Bionic Bodyshop to E-patient Bootcamp February 3, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in e-patient, Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.add a comment
Private hospitals in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, have adopted a tech-savvy way to remind patients of their next appointment. By sending out SMS reminders, outpatients were able to keep their scheduled hospital visits and reduce the number of nonattendance. This mobile method was especially helpful and effective for patients needing ongoing treatment, for example with dengue fever.
Advanced medical devices are the tools that enable humans and robots to merge, perhaps signaling the dawn of a technological singularity. How close are we now? Take a tour and shop around — we’ve been cramming more intricate engineering into our bodies than you might think.
Support for ‘Bald Barbie’ Campaign on Facebook January 24, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine, Health, Cancer, Web 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Health 2.0, e-patient, Facebook.add a comment
A Facebook campaign was launched a few weeks ago in order to urge Mattel to produce a bald version of its Barbie doll that will help children with cancer and others who have lost their hair due to illness cope with their conditions while playing. An excerpt from a recent article:
“We hope it gets the message out that being bald is beautiful and is no big deal. There’s no need to cover up,” she said.
Sypin’s own daughter is one of those children. The 12-year-old, named Kin Inich, lost her hair after chemotherapy.
Even though her daughter isn’t a huge Barbie fan, Sypin said she is excited about the idea.
“She said if they make one, she would totally get it,” Sypin said. “The first thing she said was if they make that doll, she would buy a bunch and take them to a children’s hospital and give them to children with cancer.”
Here is the Facebook page on which you can support this great idea!
Top 100 Sports Medicine Social Media Channels January 20, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in e-patient, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Sport, Web 2.0, Webicina.2 comments
Webicina’s new Sports Medicine and Social Media collection features relevant and quality social media resources from blogs and podcasts to community sites, Youtube and Twitter accounts focusing on this specialty.
Here is my top 10 social media selection for Sports Medicine:
- Dr. Howard J. Luks`s Blog (blog)
- About.com Sports Medicine (blog)
- Huffines Institute for Sports Medicine and Human Performance (podcast)
- British Journal of Sports Medicine (blog)
- National Academy of Sports Medicine (Twitter)
- American College of Sports Medicine (Facebook)
- Karim Khan (Twitter)
- Evidence Based Medicine Guidelines – Physical and Sports Medicine and Orthopaedics (Mobile app)
- National Academy of Sports Medicine (Youtube)
- ScienceDaily Images (image collection)
And PeRSSonalized Sports Medicine, the simplest, free, customizable, multi-lingual medical information aggregator will let you follow these resources easily in a personalized way.
Feel free to share any of these resources and let us know if you think others should be added.
Have you joined the Society for Participatory Medicine? January 19, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in e-patient, Health, Health 2.0, Web 2.0.1 comment so far
The motto of the Society for Participatory Medicine:
Participatory Medicine is a movement in which networked patients shift from being mere passengers to responsible drivers of their health, and in which providers encourage and value them as full partners.
You should definitely join the Society for many reasons:
Thank you for your interest in furthering the cause of participatory medicine. Membership is open to any individual or organization who desires to further the goals of the Society for Participatory Medicine. The Society is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) public charity, so membership fees are tax deductible as allowable by law.
Membership Dues should never be a barrier to anyone eager to join. You can nominate yourself or someone else to receive a partial or full scholarship. Only Individual Memberships and Innovator Organizations can join online. All other companies and organizations must fill out the application form and fax or mail it to us.
From E-patient Hackers to Health Games on Mobiles January 6, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in e-patient, Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Mobile, Video, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.4 comments
The study (in Danish) involved asking subjects to post a clinical scenario on their wall and ask their friends for a potential diagnosis. The setup for the paper by Dr. Lars Folkestad and others seems a little artificial, but if you consider that a certain amount of diseases are infectious or genetic in origin then a question to your social and/or family circles is likely to find someone who has had a similar episode and already been diagnosed.
The prestigious Mayo Clinic in the US will launch the pilot study early next year as part of an ambitious move towards an era of “proactive genomics” that puts modern genetics at the centre of patient care.
The trial reflects a growing trend in medicine to use genetic information to identify those patients who will benefit most from a drug and those who will respond better to an alternative.
Damon Brown found a kidney on Facebook after telling his story on a special page the Seattle dad created under the name, “Damon Kidney.” His friends and family forwarded the link to everyone they knew and on Jan. 3 a woman his wife has known for years, but not someone they consider a close family friend, will be giving him a kidney.
Not surprisingly, the survey of 1,000 adults found that younger people were more likely to use social media than older people for healthcare purposes. Overall, nearly a third of respondents, and 50 percent of those under the age of 35, had used social media for healthcare purposes, which can range from registering a complaint to looking up informational videos on YouTube.
12 Predictions in Healthcare, Technology and Innovation for 2012 December 31, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in e-patient, eHealth, Facebook, Health, Health 2.0, Healthcare, Hospital, Innovation, List, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Mobile, Pharma, Slideshow, Video, Web 2.0, Wikipedia.9 comments
Last year, I published a list of my predictions for 2011 in the areas of healthcare, innovation and technology. Now after a year, I checked these items and actually many of them proved to be right (year of tablets, Prezi.com skyrocketing, Siri leading the way for voice controlled apps, etc.), but now it’s time to come up with the predictions for 2012. Here are my 12 predictions, please feel free to add yours in the comment section.
1) Digital only class in social media for medical professionals and e-patients. Well, that’s quite an easy prediction, as I will launch the global form of my social media in medicine university course this February.
2) Social media policy everywhere. Now that we have an open access social media guide for and about pharma; it’s time for the FDA to come up with their own detailed instructions; also universities, healthcare institutions and medical practices, everyone must have its own as almost everyone is using social media intensively.
3) Augmented reality in radiology. Augmented reality has been a major issue for some time, but seeing the video below made it clear for me, this is where we are going to head in 2012. Doctors can see through patients.
4) Health-fitness gadgets will rock 2012. Myself, I’ve been using Striiv as a fitness motivation tool which also logs my data and visualizes my exercises making it easier for me to make plans and see how I’m doing. Other examples include Jawbone, but you can find even more if you follow the Quantified Self project.
5) Innovations in screen technologies. The form, material and functions of the screens we know now will change dramatically in 2012. Imagine paper screen, holographic screens or flexible screens on your wrist.
6) Internet TV and the operating room. The news sites are full of Apple TV and Google TV, so it’s obvious really innovative internet TVs will be launched in 2012 which brings up the idea of watching operations live on your TV at home. Just check OR-live.com.
7) Pharma will be using social media more intensively. I’m not saying all the pharma companies will have properly designed and managed social media presence, but many brands will use social media more intensively as we should be over now the so-called learing phase and they are getting braver by time.
8) More and more tablet-specific apps. I know the number of medicine/health-related mobile apps is growing rapidly, but now it’s time to turn to tablet-specific clinical apps that could be used in radiology, clinical trials or just for grand rounds.
9) Tablets in healthcare institutions. Whenever I talked to professors and colleagues about how I use my tablet in medicine and healthcare, in a few weeks, many of them had their own tablets and started using those apps. This is contagious. In 2012, a lot of hospitals, clinics and departments will hand out iPad or Galaxy Tabs to their employees in order to facilitate teamwork and make the work processes more efficient.
10) Wikipedia will have more medical featured articles, less medical errors. We recently published a paper describing how Wikipedia can be used for global public health promotion. After years of focus on creating new medical entries in Wikipedia, now we the editors focus on including proper references into medical articles. It is going to lead to a huge improvement in quality.
11) More health bloggers turn to microblogging due to lack of time. Although I believe my blog is still my major platform online even if Twitter is the fastest channel and Facebook is the most interactive. But I understand those health bloggers who leave their blogs and turn to Posterious, Tumblr or Twitter exclusively. It takes less time to post a message or entry therefore they will use these with a bigger chance.
12) Google+ health pages on the rise. I like Google+ and I think it could be used in medical communication successfully. As Google+ has only been letting companies or institutions have G+ pages, we are going to see a rise in their number soon. Even Ed Bennett who maintains a list of hospital social media accounts will include these as well.
Let’s finish my list with a great presentation about the trends in healthcare for 2012.
Top Medical Social Media Stories of 2011: Month by Month December 30, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Cancer, e-patient, Health, Health 2.0, Healthcare, List, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Pharma, Slideshow, twitter, Video, Web 2.0, Webicina, Wikipedia.5 comments
2011 was a very intense and exciting year regarding the developments and new insights of the relationship between medicine/healthcare and social media. Here are my favourite stories from 2011 selected and featured month by month.
January
I had the honour to be included in the Advisory Board of the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media; I wrote about how a Samsung Galaxy Tab changed totally my online activities, how Google Translate can be used in medicine and featured HealCam, a medical alternative of ChatRoulette.
February
Facebook diagnosis by surgeon saved a friend; there was a lively discussion whether pharma companies can edit Wikipedia entries about their own products, it turned out Wikipedia can be a key tool for global public health promotion; and Scienceroll won the Best Medical Technology/Informatics Blog category for the third time in a row in the Medgadget’s Weblog Awards.
March
The new semester of the Internet in Medicine social media university course was launched, pregnant women could text their due date for free weekly advice during pregnancy on Push, Baby Push; Webicina was featured by the Kairos Society on Wall Street, UCSF Medical Center installed a robotic pharmacy in order to remove medication errors from the system; and here is my video message for Stanford about the importance of digital literacy in medical education.
April
Jay Parkinson summarized his story of being the first online doc, the Webicina iPhone app won the 2011 Medical App Awards; Al Jazeera called me Dr. Twitter after I described how Twitter can be used for medical crowdsourcing, and in the fight against AIDS a time lapse video of a woman with HIV/AIDS was published.
May
Blogger announced own death after battle with cancer which shocked people, then a woman managed to find a kidney donor through Twitter, The Social Life of Health Information Pew Internet report was released, and top doctors described how a medical professional should start using social media.
June
I co-authored a medical textbook about medical communication in social media; Google Health was announced to be closed, a cancer patient who blogged about his hospital treatment was threatened with legal action by an NHS trust; Doctors 2.0 and You was the event of the year; and here are some disasters in social media and what we should learn from them.
July
ePatient Dave rocked TED; Mayo Clinic launched an online community in a perfect way, Pfizer’s Facebook page got hacked and they reacted badly, I listed the reasons why I like Google+ even in medicine; mobile apps got regulated by the FDA; and it turned out iPhones can be used for obtaining ECG.
August
I published a story about how Twitter can be used to predict epidemics; even waiting rooms can be redesigned to improve healthcare; I described why I’m happy that patients use the web; started managing the social media presence of a huge medical portal; I stated what you write only is forever; and pharma had hard days because of comments on Facebook.
September
Using hashtags is crucial in medical communication on Twitter; I talked about the future of health 2.0 in Europe; organized a virtual medical consultation in the virtual world on World Heart Day; this is how creativity can be used in healthcare; and I presented the best apps of a physician at the Doctors 2.0 and You conference.
October
Nobel winner died days before award announced; I shared a social media love story about a bone marrow donor; an app let us run figures on maps; Google+ was used for case presentations; and Mayo Clinic launched the Know Your Numbers campaign.
November
I published the 7 Features of the New Generation of Physicians; my open access success story; a summary about the Games for Health conference; hardcore campaigns about men’s health; and revealed why the most viewed medical video on Youtube got millions of hits.
December
Winners of the Webicina social media story contest were announced; WHO featured Webicina; the launch of a global medial social media course was announced; I described my time management tools and tips in medicine; the open access set of social media guidelines for and about pharma was published; and finally found the cutest story of 2011, parents got insulin-pump tattoos to support diabetic child.
I’m going to post my predictions for 2012 tomorrow and I hope you will stay with Scienceroll.com next year as well!
Cutest Story of 2011: Parents Get Insulin-Pump Tattoos To Support Diabetic Child December 28, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in e-patient, Fun, Medicine.3 comments
I was just making preparations for the top 2011 posts I’m planning to write in the upcoming days when I bumped into this cute story about a diabetic kid who felt ashamed to wear the insulin pump so his parents got insulin pump tattoos.
Some parents get tattoos of their child’s name, but Philippe Aumond and Camille Boivin went one better.
In a show of solidarity, they each have an image of an insulin pump tattooed on their abdomens, declaring that they are “forever linked” to their son Jacob.
“It is a great thing for him, and we were thrilled just to see his smile when he saw those pumps. It made our day, that’s for sure,” said Boivin, 36, from the family’s home in La Sarre, Que.
