iPads for Heart Patients: Mayo Clinic Rocks Again April 14, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Healthcare, Hospital, Innovation, Medicine, Video.2 comments
A great initiative coming from Mayo Clinic again:
Being in the hospital after major surgery is no fun. On top of dealing with pain, patients have uncertainty. They also have to worry about getting all the information they need to support their recovery. That’s not always easy in the hospital; things happen quickly and doctors and hospital staff are often really busy. Doctors at Mayo Clinic may have a solution to this issue. They’re giving iPads to heart surgery patients to see if a new iPad app can make hospital stays easier and more satisfying.
Social Media in Primary Care: Interview March 29, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Healthcare, Interview, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0.5 comments
In my new series I ask medical professionals and e-patients about how they use social media presented through practical examples and suggestions (so far: a rheumatologist, a diabetes blogger, and a pediatrician answered my questions, each of them is proficient in using social media). Now please welcome Dr. Mike Sevilla, the social media guru of primary care. He launched the Dr. Anonymous Show years ago, an online radio show in which he invited me to be the guest and I woke up at 3 AM and talked with him about social media for an hour. He is the real voice of the primary care community and he kindly told me how he uses social media day by day.
- What social media channels do you use in your work and for what purposes? How do you keep yourself up-to-date and connected?
For me, I use twitter and facebook the most (meaning daily) in my work. I use twitter to find the hot topics of the day. I also use it to share links. I use facebook to keep connected with friends and family (not for clinical work). I don’t blog or podcast much as I’d like, but I utilize blogs and podcasts to state opinions and to connect with my social media audience.
- What do your patients think about social media? Do they use it?
My patients use social media a lot. I get asked every day about information that they learn on the internet. My patients share with me facebook pages to like and sometimes I get links from twitter. As I have said in blog posts and presentations in the past, I really believe that our patients will drive physicians to utilize social media.
- What social media sites do you think point towards the future of healthcare?
Even though Google Health is now offline, I really think that it was a service before its time. People will have a more of a interest in the near future of having their personal health record available to them and the next generation of Google Health type sites are coming soon.
Another site that is very interesting to me is Wolfram Alpha. This site will grow in presence and popularity because of the iPhone Siri service. Since Wolfram Alpha searches are more driven by data (as opposed to questionably bias algorthms of Google & Bing), I predict that people will use this search engine more in healthcare related searches.
- What do you think about the curated Family Medicine and Social Media selection on Webicina.com? For what reasons did you use it?
Webicina has done a great job of gathering the major Family Medicine social media resources out there including blogs, podcasts, news, and others. If someone wanted to quickly learn about what is out there for Family Medicine, I direct people to check out webicina’s curated selections first.
- Do you use the dynamic version (PeRSSonalized Family Medicine)?
I admit that I should really use this resource more to review the feeds that are most important to me. It’s great that it is multi-lingual and it has the most popular RSS Family Medicine journals here. Great job with this!
Eric Topol Talks at Google March 25, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Healthcare, Video, Web 2.0.2 comments
Dr. Eric Topol visits Google to talk about his book: The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care:
Until very recently, if you were to ask most doctors, they would tell you there were only two kinds of medicine: the quack kind, and the evidence-based kind. The former is baseless, and the latter based on the best information human effort could buy, with carefully controlled double-blind trials, hundreds of patients, and clear indicators of success.
The Social MEDia Course: Revolution in Medical Education NOW! March 22, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in e-patient, Education, Health, Health 2.0, Healthcare, Innovation, Medical education, Medical Search, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Prezi, twitter, Video, Web 2.0, Webicina.2 comments
Social media is changing how medicine is practiced and healthcare is delivered. Patients, doctors, communication or even time management, everything is changing, except one thing: medical education. We need a revolution!
When a UK physician wanted to visit Hungary every week just to attend my university course focusing on social media and medicine, I decided it’s time to make this course global.
Today, The Social MEDia Course goes live with 16 flash Prezis, exciting tests, badges and achievements. Enjoy and have fun while learning! Medical students, physicians and even patients, everyone is welcome to take the course which is, of course, for free.
Here is a video about the course (and also a Prezi).
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Social Media Engagement: What is the motivation? March 1, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Healthcare, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0.2 comments
Yesterday, I was invited to talk about social media and healthcare/medicine for a very diverse group of students (economics, marketing and political science) and they had great questions from different perspectives. Once they asked me how we could motivate doctors to be a bit more web-savvy.
First I told them I think doctors don’t have to become web-savvy, but they should know about internet-related issues as their patients will have more and more questions about this area.
Second, patients have a huge motivation behind using social media and internet itself. This motivation is the condition they have to cope with which means they need information and in many cases the easiest solution is to turn to the internet.
For doctors, the motivation is not that clear for everyone, but I’m pretty certain the growing number of e-patients will be the real motivation for them. When a GP has 40 patients a day and 30 of them have internet related questions, well, that will probably persuade them to at least know about this issues.
Then I just came across this article: Docs slow to engage patients with IT
A new study by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions indicates physicians are not using IT broadly to engage patients. No more than 20 percent of doctors are providing online scheduling or test results for their patients and just 6 percent are using social media to communicate with them, according to Deloitte.
And also: Giving technology tips to older doctors should be done delicately
Andrew Ritcheson, PhD, is a senior program manager and consulting psychologist for Dynamic Research Corp., a business consulting group that has provided support to both the Defense Dept. and the Dept of Veterans Affairs in implementing a range of health care initiatives. He said that although many physicians are open to receiving help from younger colleagues, there is a fine line between helping and insulting. There are ways to keep everyone’s focus on a goal of improved care, rather than worrying about if someone crossed that line, Ritcheson said. Everyone must know they can reach that goal as a team, with each member contributing his or her own strengths and acknowledging that each has something to learn from the other.
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.
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Sherpaa: A New Initiative in Healthcare February 7, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Healthcare, Innovation, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0.add a comment
You all know the story of Jay Parkinson, MD who launched the first online GP service years ago in New York. After it became a “franchise”, he left and started a new company, The Future Well. A few months ago, I met him at Stanford, asked about his new projects and he mentioned the Sherpaa idea. Well, here is the official launch and the concept of Sherpaa.
To me it seems that Sherpaa tries to help patients when there are easier solutions for a health-related problem compared to using the traditional healthcare system. They give a specific example, what happens when you cut your finger:
- You call your Guide
- We ask you to snap a photo of the cut and email it to us
- We look at it and it looks like something that can be handled outside the ER
- We give instructions on what to do in the meantime as we schedule a stitch up
- We call Dr. Sung (our plastic surgeon)
- You are free to meet Dr. Sung in his office in an hour
- You are on the road to recovery
—without sherpaa
Cost in ER: $4000
Time in ER: 8 hrs—with sherpaa
Cost in Dr. Sung’s office: $1000
Time with Dr. Sung: 30 min
I believe the idea is timely and the structure is well-designed knowing Jay’s enthusiasm and proficiency. The only concern is how the healthcare system will look at their machinery. What do you think?
Evidence Based Medicine in Social Media February 3, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Healthcare, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0.5 comments
Do you remember when Google Flu Trends was launched and we were all amazed by the great idea behind that? And do you remember when a study from the University of Washington came up concluding that Google Flu Trends is not as accurate as CDC’s national surveillance programs? So it is social media, it’s trendy and innovative but useless in medicine and healthcare.
Here is the over-shined iPad2 which everyone loves and would like to use at hospitals and clinical practices and we see an amazing number of apps designed for that. A new study now concluded that diagnostic imaging on iPads is twice as slow.
A study from the University of Maryland found that radiologists using iPad 2s to evaluate patients for tuberculosis (TB) took twice as long to make a diagnosis as they did when using a 27-inch LCD monitor. Still, the study of 200 negative and 40 positive TB cases that included five radiologists, found the two displays to yield no significant differences when it came to diagnostic decisions.
Whatever tool, device or service we use in medicine, we must stick to the evidence based approach.
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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.12 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!
