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Jun 6

Social Media in Medicine: Semester is Over

The 10th semester of my Social Media in Medicine university course (Semmelweis Medical School) is over and I thought I would publish a few take-home messages.

  1. It’s equally challenging to persuade young medical students to use social media for professional purposes as to teach older physicians about the use of technology.
  2. “If you want to teach me, you first have to reach me.” That is my motto, therefore as all the students this semester were on Facebook, I published challenge questions for bonus points every day on the Facebook page of the course. Students loved that and the winner didn’t have to take the exam.
  3. I bring them the newest medical technologies such as AliveCor.
  4. The course will be launched again in English and Hungarian this September.
  5. We are working on another course, Disruptive Technologies in Medicine! Details soon!
  6. This is still the world’s only comprehensive university course about social media.
  7. 6 students also received the certification for finishing the online course.
  8. A manuscript presenting the results of the surveys students filled in was submitted to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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Jun 5

Going to Paris Again: Doctors 2.0 And You!

It’s a great pleasure to attend the best medical social media conference of the year again. Doctors 2.0 And You will be full of rockstars of this field. Just like the last two years, I will be a keynote speaker and this time the title of my talk will be “From Doctor to Futurist” telling my own story and showing some great examples of how digital technologies can be implemented into everyday healthcare.

On the first day, I’ll also give a presentation about Webicina.com. See you in Paris!

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Jun 4

1 Comment

The Quantified Self Movement Is Leading to an Era of Ultimate Self-Tracking

I’ve been a huge fan of the Quantified Self movement for many years, I’ve been logging my sleep, my activities, scores of physical and mental well-being for 15 years every single day. When I recently saw an article about a neuroscientist who is getting a brain scan twice every week for a year to see how neural networks behave over time, I knew we are getting into a new phase in this area.

Every day, he tracks his mood and mental state, what he ate, and how much time he spent outdoors. Twice a week, he gets his brain scanned in an MRI machine. And once a week, he has his blood drawn so that it can be analyzed for hormones and gene activity levels. Poldrack plans to gather a year’s worth of brain and body data to answer an unexplored question in the neuroscience community: how do brain networks behave and change over a year?

Moreover, according to mobile health and wellness sensor reports, in 2017, 515 million sensors for wearable, implantable or mobile health and fitness devices will be shipped globally, up from 107 million in 2012!

ON-World

 

We can expect that in a few years’ time, patients will be able to measure everything about themselves from blood count and blood glucose content to ECG and even genomics data. Are medical professionals, payers and pharmaceutical companies ready for such a world?

Of course, not, but I’m trying to prepare them offline and online.

Jun 4

Crowdsourcing a Diagnosis With a Scientific Video

László Rosta, PhD published a video in which he tries to find an explanation for the disease of a young boy by offering the video for crowdsourcing. He sent me this particular question:

Do you have any therapeutic ideas which might be curative for inoperable osteosarcoma of the pelvis with pulmonary metastases? Radiotherapy (72 Gy) and chemotherapy (EURAMOS-1 protocol) did not help.

I see more and more attempts at crowdsourcing which is not surprising as the increased use of social media platforms opened the way for communicating with like-minded people worldwide in no time. If you can share the video with oncologists you know, please do so.

Jun 1

Patients who helped with medical choices had higher bills: Let’s Analyze This!

As a huge fan and supporter of e-patients who want to use digital technologies and the information they find online in their health management, I don’t like news articles speaking against them without explanations and data.

The healthcare social media community has been discussing a study that concluded patients who wanted to participate in medical decision making had higher bills. It might predict that e-patients will have higher bills as well. Let’s take a look at it:

Analyzing the data, the researchers found that nearly all — 96.3% — wanted to receive information about their illnesses and treatment options, but that only 28.9% said they had a strong preference for making their own decisions about their care.

Those patients had longer hospital stays, by about a quarter of a day on average, than patients who preferred let their doctors take the lead. They also had greater hospital costs ($865 more, on average.)  By and large, people who were more likely to participate in medical decisions were better educated, and more likely to have private insurance coverage, than the rest of the patients who were surveyed.

You see? It says patients who had a strong preference for making their own decisions about their care. E-patients are partners with their doctors, not making medical decisions themselves alone. That’s the difference.

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May 31

1 Comment

Building an Electric Car Fueled by Social Media

I always say in my presentations that if we could use the creativity we see in other fields of social media but in medicine and healthcare, we would have amazing years ahead of us. One example, here is a group, MindDrive, that works on a car fueled by social media activities.

MINDDRIVE’S mission is to inspire students to learn, expand their vision of the future, and to have a positive impact on urban workforce development. The program is funded through the national sponsorships of Bridgestone, Hertz Corporation, SONIC®, America’s Drive-In®, American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), VML, and KCP&L as well as through local foundations and individual contributors.

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May 31

Rank Medication Based On Google Trends

Google Trends lets users see the top lists of search queries in a new way in different topics such as medications.

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