This is not the first time a hospital attempts to stream surgeries live on the web. This one is intended primarily for medical professionals for educational purposes.
In a unique outreach effort, Children’s Urology Department will show “Robotic vs. Open Surgery” in this worldwide broadcast intended for pediatric urologists and pediatric surgeons. Two surgeries – one a traditional, open operation and the other performed using the da Vinci robot – will be broadcast to demonstrate the latest techniques for correcting neurogenic urinary incontinence for children with spina bifida and related conditions. Both surgeries will feature bladder neck reconstructions along with appendicovesicostomies – using the appendix to create a channel leading from the bladder to the outside of the body.
I thought it was a good idea to tweet live during an open heart surgery as people can get additional information about the procedure, but I have doubts about this story now. A hospital used Instagram to upload pictures of an open heart surgery of a child. Why Instagram? What’s the problem with a simple camera?
The doctors sewed a Gore-Tex graft onto her heart, according to an article in the Orlando Sentinel. A lifelong patient of the hospital, Stone has a heart defect where her heart has only one chamber, instead of two.
Through streaming live her surgery, the hospital wanted to highlight its heart center and give people a behind-the-scenes look at its operating room, Schmidt says.
Along with a member of his digital team, Schmidt posted updates with pictures every ten minutes onTwitter and, once an hour on Facebook. He manually posted photos to the hospital’s blog, creating a live time line of the surgery. In eight hours, including prep time, the four-hour surgery, and wrap up, Schmidt took 46 photos.
One positive aspect though:
Schmidt says at least six families commented that they now feel more assured about their children’s upcoming heart surgeries after watching it.
Lucien Engelen and his team have been doing a great job focusing on the social media use of European hospitals (see their recent JMIR paper). Here is the next step:
The next step was to share social media usage by individual hospitals on a map, combined with the great work that Ed Bennet (@edbennet) did in the United States. Looking for a nice way to present this, Silja (@whydotpharma) showed us her idea to do just that.
So here it is : The first Worldwide Hospital Social Media Monitor. You can easily embed this map into your own website or blog, and we look forward receiving your feedback (Please use @hospitalseu).
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.
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association accents the limits of web-based health management tools that are currently available.
Health Populi’s Hot Points: I’ve studied the “Healthcare’s Most Wired” Health Providers from Hospitals & Health Networks and the Thomson Reuters Top 100 Hospitals for many years. It strikes me in 2012 that with meaningful use and patient engagement on the front-burner for providers adopting EHRs that a useful metric for these studies could be patient engagement.
The number of pedestrians injured or killed while wearing headphones has tripled in the last six years: 16 oblivious PMP users were offed in 2004, the number rising to 47 for last year.
Hugo Campos challenged himself to eat only vegan meals throughout last December and took pictures of everything he ate or drank from an almond to a cup of coffee.
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.
In a letter published in the Journal of Emergencies, Trauma, and Shock, physicians in Scotland described the use of a webcam, Skype, and an iPhone 4 to connect a provider in Calgary to an expert over 200 miles away in Aberdeen for assistance in performing a pulmonary ultrasound.
The idea behind most diagnostic tests is simple: Identify a telltale chemical and look for it in a blood sample. The PSA test for prostate cancer is the best-known cancer diagnostic, but diagnostics exist for other cancers too — ovarian and colorectal to name a few. And while the tests are not infallible, they can help find hard-to-detect, early stage cancers and monitor treatment.
Dave deBronkart, “e-Patient Dave,” was diagnosed with stage IV kidney cancer in 2007. The median survival time for his condition was 24 weeks. Thanks to the help of an online network for patients with his disease, he quickly learned about treatment options and found support for his recovery. The treatment was successful, and now e-Patient Dave is cancer-free and has found a higher calling: empowering patients to have access to the best health care possible — by connecting with resources online.
eyeforpharma believes that the pharma industry must pay more attention to patient needs across the board, and that teen cancer patients are a great place to start. To this end, the organization is hosting its first annual Mobile Health Competition. The competition aims to highlight new and exciting mobile apps that help teen cancer patients better manage their conditions and improve their lives.
You cannot afford to take a “wait-and-see” approach or you may soon find yourself trying to catch up with competitors. Even if you do not currently have an active social media presence, your employees and customers are already using social media. Start now, start small and measure progress. Take precautions: develop a policy to govern your employees’ use of social media. Also use social media to monitor, enhance and protect your brand/reputation.
Yesterday, Mayo Clinic, the real rockstar health institution of social media launched another fantastic social campaign in which they aim at raising awareness of the importance of blood pressure, lipid levels and body mass index in preventing heart diseases. They started with a funny video and also created a website and a challenge for this. A perfect design, management and execution for a social campaign from a hospital (!).
The “Know Your Numbers” music video will help people around the world understand the importance of knowing their numbers for blood pressure, lipids and body mass index to help prevent heart disease.
As part of the campaign, viewers can use a free application on Mayo Clinic‟s Facebook page that will help them calculate their risk of a heart attack and learn how to prevent one. Visit the Facebook app here.
Video viewers also have the opportunity to enter a contest to earn points by helping spread the word about heart attack risk factors. Visit the site here.
We knew we wanted diverse perspectives and backgrounds on the board, and we felt crowdsourcing and using social media tools to aid the search would help us get the broadest input in candidate recruitment and identifying those diverse perspectives.
The response was overwhelming, with more than 120 candidates nominated or applying for what we had planned to be a dozen positions. With so many good candidates, the selection process for new members was difficult.
My favourite emergency medicine blog, Life in The Fast Lane, shared videos about an emergency department and an intensive care unit in South Africa. My friends, this is not House, MD, this is real life.
