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.
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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”
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From Digital Canes to E-Patients and the Unknown Killer Infographics July 12, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in e-patient, Health 2.0, Healthcare, Infographics, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Video, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.2 comments
Patients tended to disclose certain conditions:
Cancer: 40%
Diabetes: 16%
Chronic Fatigue: 10%
Arthritis: 7%
Asthma: 5%
AIDS: 5%
Epilepsy: 2%
Heart Disease: 2%
Alzheimer’s: 1%
Medicine and Social Media: News from this Week June 15, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.3 comments
The 12-page report states that a “carefully planned and professionally executed participation in social media by physicians is appropriate, and can be an effective method to connect with colleagues, advance professional expertise, educate patients, and enhance the public profile and reputation of our profession.”
While there are several excellent guidelines and policies on this topic, there isn’t a whole lot of practical advice, so here are my tips to help you avoid privacy violations (I hope this is the beginning of a conversation that will encourage more doctors to participate in social media).
A stern warning regarding social media usage has been delivered to the medical community in April with news of Dr. Alexandra Thran’s reprimanding by Rhode Island’s state medical board. Dr. Thran had already been fired last year from Westerly Hospital in Rhode Island for the posting of confidential patient information online. Although the patient’s name was not included, the board filing stated that enough information was included that enabled others to identify the patient. The action by the state board signifies that a doctor may not just lose a job for a social media transgression but, in a severe case, her livelihood.
The Weekly Best of Health 2.0 and Medicine 2.0 June 9, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.add a comment
- Sickweather Analyzes Social Data to Map Illness Outbreaks: They track the signs of sickness via social networks and generate maps so that people can determine who and where to avoid.
New mums are four times more likely to stop breastfeeding after eight weeks, than mothers who have received text message support, according to a world first study by Queensland University of Technology (QUT).
Emergency workers at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton scrambled into action when a 56-year-old woman was taken into the accident and emergency unit showing symptoms that she was having a stroke. The on-call stroke consultant was at home and would have had to travel to the Royal Sussex to assess the patient – potentially wasting vital minutes before any action could be taken. Instead she logged onto the hospital’s pioneering Telemedicine system remotely.
The U.S. published more than 1.14 million scientific articles about biology and medicine between 2005 and 2009, publishing 250,000 papers (29% of the worldwide total) in 2009 alone. That’s more than quadruple the number of publications produced by China or the United Kingdom.
From iPatients to The Five Steps of Social Media Grieving May 24, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.2 comments
That’s when Bloom, who isn’t exactly the most tech-savvy guy out there, suggested Facebook. Sidlauskas loved the idea, so he uploaded photos of each species. And in less than 24 hours, their network of friends – many of whom hold PhDs in ichthyology and are “diehard fish-heads” – had identified almost every specimen. With 5,000 identifications in hand, the team was able to deliver their results to the government and return home on schedule.
- Four stages of getting Twitter
By now most of us are familiar with the “five stages of grief” identified by psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. I suspect that as modern marketers struggle with the “death” of outdated marketing strategies, the same five stages can be applied to their reluctance to embrace the new medium of social media.
Health 2.0 News: From Pharma to Health Games May 12, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Pharma, twitter, Video, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.1 comment so far
Among FDA’s TOP three “normal” surveillance activities was “complaints submitted by industry competitors.” In fact, Gray said “we have found that industry competitors tend to be some of the best sources of information about potentially false and misleading advertising.”
Digital Pharma caught Bayer posting a Tweet – via its @BayerUKIreland Twitter account – that seems to violate new social media guidelines published by the UK’s Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA), which oversees the self-regulatory code of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI).
