News: From Doctors on Wikipedia to Twitter Guides May 15, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine, Web 2.0, Medicine 2.0, What's on the web?, Mobile.add a comment
Every single person in the world has a health story. As a doctor, my job is to help people edit the story that your health is telling and to treat your story as unique to make you healthier. It’s our signature challenge to become more efficient and accurate editors as digital healthcare begins to scale worldwide, which can create 8 billion health stories.
According to recent research that has been shared with Wikimedia UK, use of Wikipedia for medical information is almost universal among a sample of doctors. Many of them praise its accuracy, but they are aware of its faults and that it needs to be read critically.
Good Medical Practice (2006) is our current core guidance for doctors. We review it every five years to make sure it is up to date and reflects what doctors and patients think are the important principles and values of good care. Good Medical Practice is supported by a range of shorter statements which explain some of the principles in Good Medical Practice in more detail. You can read all our current guidance on our website at www.gmc-uk.org/guidance
Through innovation and technology, California think tank Singularity University aims to push the frontiers of progress. But what happens when high-tech advances end up in the wrong hands? Economics correspondent Paul Solman raises some disturbing questions as part of his ongoing reporting series, Making Sen$e of financial news.
The difference stems from a fundamental difference in the construction of the networks. In Facebook, both parties must agree on the relationship. Once you have “friended” each other, you are on roughly equal footing. This mutual agreement to exchange information gives people a sense of privacy that Facebook is repeatedly jeopardizing as they lurch from dorm room experiment to world changing company.
News: From Tweetchats to Moore’s Law in Healthcare May 4, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.add a comment
A new report by PwC found consumers are increasingly turning to social media websites like Facebook and Twitter to find answers to their healthcare concerns, and that this frequently results in seeking out second opinions for previously diagnosed problems.
- Social Media in Healthcare infographics
Games could be the most important digital health tool of the 21st century and have a highly influential impact on the engagement pharmaceutical companies foster with health care professionals, patients and the public. Yet it is tempting for people to separate them from the ‘serious’ business of work, education and health.
A third of US social media users say it could change the way they think about their medicines, according to a new poll. The findings are part of a new survey which confirms the power of social networking to spread information about health, and influence consumers through authoritative sources and through peers and other online influencers.
Moore’s Law, which is more a rule of thumb than a law, originally applied to computer hardware and the notion that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The law has been used to describe the speed of advance in a wide range of technologies.
Twitcidents and Pros of being a Wikipedian April 18, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Web 2.0, What's on the web?.add a comment
Here are a few articles and news pieces I liked this week.
Of course, the entrepreneur (or startup company) is the doctor. As entrepreneurs, we solve pain. The best entrepreneurs solve a lot of pain for a lot of people. Often a customer doesn’t even realize the pain until being introduced to a product or company, but it’s pain nonetheless. Now, if entrepreneurs think of themselves as doctors, it’s easy to determine exactly how to solicit feedback from a customer.
Researchers from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have created Twitcident, a framework for filtering and analyzing tweets to crowdsource information about crises. For the past ten months the system has been in testing as a support program for the Dutch police and fire department.
Wikipedia editors are always searching for reliable sources. Unfortunately, that quest often leads to dead ends: out-of-print news articles, paywalled magazines, or books and journals locked in a company’s database. We’re happy to announce that the process just got a little easier with the donation of 1000 full-access, one-year accounts fromHighBeam Research to active Wikipedia editors.
Social media can be complex and cumbersome. However, if used effectively, healthcare providers can become more educated, and perhaps more compassionate clinicians. There are two ways in which I have been able to use Medicine 2.0 applications to gain clinical insight: tracking research and information generated by other health care professionals, and reading about the healthcare experience from the patient perspective.
From Watson to Wikis and Virtual Patients April 9, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Data, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Video, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.1 comment so far
Here are a few articles and news I particularly found interesting this week:
Haifa, Israel has developed a new clinical decision support tool that correlates a patients’ unique disease profile against various clinical guidelines and a wide range of previously acquired clinical data from a multitude of patients. The tool, called Clinical Genomics (Cli-G), is designed to provide clinicians with actionable results that outline how to address individual patients’ conditions.
Symcat is a versatile and also very powerful tech solution that combines aggregated data from patient health records with user symptoms and demographics to inform diagnoses.
His research has found that a wiki – a website developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content – can be an innovative new tool for developing individual asthma action plans.
- A medBoardis an online advisory board for pharmaceutical companies to easily get expert advice. Advice that helps develop better medicines and shape commercial strategy.
Researchers at the Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Modelling (INSIGNEO) in Sheffield are developing digital models of different parts of the human body that will ultimately build into a complete digital replica of a patient.
ER Advisor was created by an epidemiologist (Mike Hartmann, BSc, MPH) and a web developer who wanted to help ease the burden on hospitals. Too many people go to the ER when the medical attention they need can be provided elsewhere. We consulted with nurses, doctors and other epidemiologists to come up with an idea: get people to enter their symptoms online and we can suggest whether it is an emergency or not.
Like this:
From Pinterest and Septris to the Patient of the Future February 29, 2012
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Mobile, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.add a comment
Too many people are not going to see their doctors on a regular basis and they need to be educated on why that is a bad idea. No printed or interactive forum can replace a trained medical professional.
Like many “self-quanters,” Smarr wears a Fitbit to count his every step, a Zeo to track his sleep patterns, and a Polar WearLink that lets him regulate his maximum heart rate during exercise.
DS: What are you hoping to come away with from the conference?
TL: I do hope I can meet Berci in person and ask him how he has so much energy to tweet and write on his blog every single day
- PulsePoint: PulsePoint empowers individuals, within covered communities, the ability to provide life-saving assistance to victims of Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA). Application users who have indicated they are trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) are notified if someone nearby is having a cardiac emergency and may require CPR.
Ryan Jones, MD, an internist in the Dallas-Fort Worth area who is less than two years out of residency, realizes it could come off as showy if she stands over the shoulder of older colleagues, offering suggestions on how to become more tech savvy.
“I do definitely try to be very sweet about it,” she said. Her methods have proven successful as colleagues generally have welcomed the advice — just as she welcomes their unsolicited advice on ways to be a better internist.
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 Health, Health 2.0, Hospital, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0, 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.
Like this:
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 Medicine, Health, Web 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Health 2.0, Video, Healthcare, What's on the web?, Genome, e-patient, Mobile.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.
