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.
From 9 Tablet Tips to the 15 Most Wired Hospitals January 23, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine, Health, Web 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Health 2.0, Hospital, What's on the web?.add a comment
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.
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.
From DIY Diagnostic Tests to Mobile Health Competitions December 11, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Healthcare, Hospital, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, twitter, Video, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.3 comments
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.
News from Visualizing Pharma to the Kinect Effect November 8, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in e-patient, Genome, Health, Health 2.0, Healthcare, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Mobile, Video, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.add a comment
- Doctor heads to social media to find patients (video report)
People use their computer or phone to research places to eat, places to visit and things to buy. Sandy Hensley is part of a growing group of people finding medical needs there as well. ”I get all my other life recommendations on Twitter so I think it makes sense to me to make connections with people who you really want to trust like your health care providers on there.” Hensley said.
- This CPR training system gives feedback how you do chest compression:
The School of Medicine’s Office of Information Resources & Technology is launching this week a private, internal social-networking service, called CAP Network, that could dramatically alter communication among faculty, students, postdoctoral scholars and staff like the changes wrought on a much larger scale by Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Photo source: Bigstockphoto
Take a picture of your concern with your mobile camera. Send it as a MMS (Swedish SIM cards only) including relevant information as text in the MMS, or send your query via our iPhone app. We will respond as quickly as possible (within one day) with medical information.
From Information Therapy to Facebook for Pharma: News October 24, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Photography, Robotics, science, Video, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.add a comment
Scientists, artists, writers, and philosophers once flooded the cafés of Vienna and Paris. These days, you’ll likely still find these same types in the cafés, but instead of getting into heated political arguments or passionately espousing their artistic beliefs, they’re absorbed by their laptop screens. Don’t let the silence fool you, though. They may very well be engaging in comparable lively discussions and exchanges of ideas. They could just be doing that in a Google+ Hangout.
In an effort to address information inequality around the world, the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) will now be offering free subscriptions through the HINARI initiative to developing countries in South America, Asia and Africa.
Health 2.0 News from PhD Comics to Social Media Tips September 22, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Video, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.1 comment so far
WellPoint, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, and IBM have agreed to work together on a new method of bringing medical evidence to bear on diagnosis and treatment. The companies will use IBM’s Watson supercomputer to apply insights from the medical literature to clinical information about particular patients; the system will then recommend the most probable diagnosis and treatment options to physicians and nurses, linking them to the original studies.
- Social Media Tips for Physicians
As with most ethical issues, there is a lot of gray and nuance. But in general, I think you are safe writing about personal cases from your practice if you exercise a certain degree of reasonable restraint. Write about your experiences, not as a form of personal aggrandizement, but as an attempt to share, educate, and converse with laymen and other professionals about disease processes and treatment options in the open forum that is the Internets.
- Khresmoi aims to develop a multi-lingual multi-modal search and access system for biomedical information and documents.
From self-reported Patient Data to Mobile predictions September 2, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, science, Ted Talks, Video, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.1 comment so far
- TEDxOverlake – Dr. H. Jack West – Self-Educated Patients and The Future of Cancer Care
“Don’t believe those that say you can’t measure the return on investment (ROI) of digital and social media programs – if you can’t measure it you shouldn’t be doing it…”
He said some GPs already offer consultations via Skype and may interest many others. ‘Then I find myself thinking that’s the sort of thing that will appeal to some people. It would appeal to me,’ he said. He argued it would be much more convenient for patients and GPs.
The Internet was reported to be the second source of health information after physicians, due to its accessibility and “easiness” of use. The most commonly searched types of online health information are treatment/therapy (62% rated it as always or often), detailed (58%) and general (53%) disease descriptions, drug information (51%), side effects (51%) and scientific articles (50%).
Everyday we find PLoS ONE papers in the news. Whether it’s a science blogger in the United Kingdom, an online newspaper in China, or a national news channel in the United States, we see a lot of media coverage on our research articles. In an effort to better track the coverage these papers receive, we’ve begun a Media Tracking Project.
Online patient communities structured around quantitative outcome data have the potential to provide an observational environment to monitor such drug usage and its consequences. Here we describe an analysis of data reported on the website PatientsLikeMe by patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) who experimented with lithium carbonate treatment.
iPhone preventing ER visits and other stories this week August 24, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, science, Video, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.add a comment
As Facebook prepares to force pharma marketers to include comments on most pages, Google is actively courting the highly-regulated industry. Working directly with extremely risk-averse drug makers, the company developed a new YouTube feature for them that also can be applied for other marketers. For AstraZeneca’s Medimmune, the change was the difference between having a YouTube channel and scrapping the project all together.
In its April 2011 survey, Deloitte Center for Health Solutions found that 11% of US healthcare consumers use social networks to find or share health information and 8% use blogs. The respondents who use blogs and social networks for health purposes do so to comment about the healthcare system, to comment about doctors and hospitals and to share personal healthcare experiences with others.
- Anonymity in the Healthcare Professions
Epilogue: The patient was contacted by phone after reviewing this information. He as told he did not have to go to the Emergency Room. Instead, significant adjustments were made to his medication regimen over the phone. He was seen the next morning in our device clinic to reset the alarm that was triggered when his device exhausted all its therapies in one event. No further arrhythmias had transpired and discussions regarding alternate medical or ablative therapies are pending.
- Mediari is an app that empowers you to take better notes and communicate more effectively with physicians on healthcare needs for you and your loved ones. A patient-centered app designed to help you take notes on medical issues faced.
He said: ‘We may decide that we want to offer an entry to our services via the social media channel and under those circumstances, similar to the way that we have with our use of third party websites for access to our health and symptom checkers, we would make sure that we held patient information and any advice given in a confidential way, under appropriately signed off terms and conditions.’
Scientific Reports is committed to providing an efficient service for both authors and readers, and exists to facilitate the rapid peer review and publication of research. With the support of an external Editorial Board and a streamlined peer-review system, all papers are rapidly and fairly peer reviewed to ensure they are technically sound. An internal publishing team works with the board, and accepted authors, to ensure manuscripts are processed for publication as quickly as possible.
From Lady Gaga and Facebook to MD Celebs and Twitter August 1, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Fun, Pharma, science, Video, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.add a comment
- A great post about how to get Beyond Bullet Points in Medical Education
- Although the British Medical Association has recently warned against patient Facebook requests, here is a story about how Facebook saved a boy’s life
Slate has a dramatic story of how a mother’s Facebook network helped spot – rapidly – Kawasaki Disease, a rare auto-immune disease that the family’s doctors had initially missed. Her social network contains some medically knowledgeable people. (Do you have any docs, nurses, etc in your Facebook circle?) Note that friends’ availability is sometimes far greater than a doctor’s office.
- Interviews about Pharmaceutical communication in a multi-regulatory world
But what’s crazy is that number of Facebook page likes is strongly correlated with the total number of citations a journal has received (r = 0.78, p = 0.001)!
- Phil Baumann’s 140 Healthcare uses for Twitter slideshow:
- And the best blog entry of the week award goes to: Social Media and Pharmaceutical Self-Promotion; A Bad Cocktail or Public Health Service?
We want a radical rethink of what pharmaceutical companies should be doing as part of their social media strategies.
It’s not enough to blast posts and promos to your facebook page and call it social media.
It’s not enough to stream press releases and stock prices to your Twitter accounts.
It’s not enough to build another patient support community and then stifle the “conversation” with moderation.
It’s not enough to continue the PR-broadcast mentality and call it “social media”
