A Look at Social Media in Health Care — Two Years Later – iHealthbeat post
May 21, 2012
Last week I had a follow up post on iHealthbeat on Social Media in Healthcare to one that I posted two years ago. Some of my predictions were correct but who could predict the explosion of healthcare apps. There were so many other trends I could have cited including the study of healthcare social media in European hospitals.
Coincidentally, I attended the Cleveland Clinic Patient Experience Empathy and Innovation Summit on Sunday. One track in the afternoon was devoted to social media with a good mix of speakers covering the latest trends in healthcare and beyond. Check out the Twitter stream here
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Video Introducing eResearch
May 9, 2012
Having written a chapter on eResearch for a book on Health Informatics, I decided to make a video which will be used by the editor, Bob Hoyt, in an eBook edition to come out soon. Both the video and the chapter emphasize the progress that has been made in informatics tools to support every phase of clinical research.
Share this:Usability in Healthcare
May 1, 2012
UX has always been one of my favorite topics. So often ignored in application development, usability is key to the success of any website or app. Fortunately, there is a Usability Professionals Association dedicated to the concept. A recent presentation at the Northeast Ohio Chapter focused on the evaluation of the usability of the Cleveland Clinic website. This comprehensive review lead to the development of standards for the website based on user input.
Check out the presentation by Kaitlan Chu:
Favorite Quotes from TEDx Maastricht
April 10, 2012
Last week I was fortunate to attend TEDx Maastricht in person for the second year in a row. There were several great talks, all inspiring and some surprising. The beginning and end represented innovations in care of very different types. Beginning with a demonstration of FaceTalk, a live demo of an interdisciplinary consultation between 3 physicians on 3 continents sharing CT scans and more in real time. The final presentation of a video of interviews with young adult cancer survivors even facing death with courage. Patients were certainly invited and had an impact on the overall tone of the conference. One example was Clarissa Silva who said about her recovery from mental illness, “Courage is being afraid but doing it anyway.”
A big hit was Paul Levy who talked about healthcare and soccer (football). One choice quote is advice to a girl from the team of 11 year olds he coaches: “Think about what you are going to with the ball before it arrives.” This certainly applies to future thinking in the dynamic health care environment. Check out his book, Goal Play. Then there was Paul Grundy from IBM made the comparison of physicians as the master builders of European cathedrals, trying keeping everything in their head as knowledge explodes. This leads to his conclusion of Smarter healthcare by smarter use of data.
Much anticipated was Roni Zieger, formerly of Google Health presented on Embrace the Patient Story. He talked about his own experience with a medical problem but then discussed how patients can become experts in their own care and therefore experts with others. His collaboration with Lucien Engelen, MyHealthStory, was a beginning down his new path. Now he is planning with Gilles Frydman of ACOR a new venture called Impatient Health, because they and many patients are impatient to participate fully in not only helping others as Patient Experts but also as active participants in research.
A great surprise was the introduction to the documentary “The Waiting Room.” Afterwards I had the opportunity to view the film – it is a heart-wrenching view of the real struggles of the uninsured in the US using the emergency room for primary care. I hope with the producers that the film will have a role in the health care reform debate.
Thanks to Lucien Engelen and Corine Jansen of the Radboud Reshape and Innovation Center for making this event possible. Looking forward to The Future of Health 2013.
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At American Medical informatics Association Clinical Research Informatics Association
March 21, 2012
This Conference in San Francisco about all thiNgs research. It looks like some great content on secondary use, omics in EHRs, big data, platforms and ontologies. Heady stuff. This is the third year for this conference and it is combined with translational bioinformatics. The 350 participants represent a strong support for this speciality.
Can this group help to transform healthcare?
http://www.amia.org/jointsummits2012/cri-schedule
Share this:Thoughts on Sentiment Analysis in Health Care
March 6, 2012
There is increasing interest in Sentiment Analysis of social media. The brief messaging systems like Twitter and Facebook allow for picking out words and phrases using algorithms to find positive or negative sentiment. There are an increasing number of tools to do sentiment analysis and market research firms willing to do it. Using a simple tool like TwitterSentiment can get quick results but are they meaningful for healthcare? For instance, looking at “Mayo Clinic”, the results are rated as negative but examining the tweets show a mix of statements and some rated negative (78%) have to do with waiting for someone in surgery or concern about illness rather than care or quality. But using their twitter handle @MayoClinic shows 90% positive. Similar results are seen with Cleveland Clinic and Hopkins Medicine. Perhaps tools with a license fee are more sophisticated and show clearer results. An market research firms may take more time to tweet algorithms to sort out positives and negatives.
But hospital reputation is not the only use of sentiment analysis in health care social media. What are sentiments about diseases and conditions? In a brief check, cancer was more positive than cancer. But some comments are mixed, “thanks love! My roommate got diagnosed with cancer” is rated positive. My conclusion, sentiment analysis in healthcare requires fine tuning – what is good news, what is bad, what is neutral? The temporary pain of treatment can be a real downer but the results a real high. I will be interested to see more written on this in the future. Some research has begun, such as, this article on cancer survivorship.
Share this:Electronic Medical Records: From Clinical Decision Support to Precision Medicine
February 24, 2012
This is a presentation I gave to the Dutch delegation to HIMSS. It reflects much of my current thinking about current and future trends in health IT.
Book Review – Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
February 15, 2012
A colleague loaned me this bookrecently and I found it an easy read with some good concepts. Surprisingly, it is not just about online connectedness but broader concepts of connectedness in life including everything from bucket brigades to sexually transmitted diseases. The theory includes key terms, such as, contagion, connection, homophilia (the tendency to associate with people who resemble ourselves). The contagion concept is particularly significant as it relates to health because of recent research showing that obesity is “contagious” in the sense that if your friends are obese, you are likely to be. It made me think of the app ShapeUpandGo and other wellness apps that encourage the use of teams and competitions/games to encourage connectedness on the path to wellness.
One of the more engaging chapters is on being Hyperconnected with a major example from World of Warcraft and how new features of the game had unexpected consequences that soon careened out of control. This is the unpredictability of the online world were rules are yet to written.
In addition to the book, the website has the usually videos and links to reviews but also a book club guide and a section called Touchgraph which includes some of the network diagrams which are in the book and slide sets relating concepts presented in the book.
The book reminds me of Clay Shirky’s work, Here Comes Everybody and The Wealth of Networks although not in the depth of that work.
In healthcare, we do need to understand how connectedness affects health. The book only covers this with a few of the many case studies. Perhaps another author will take up the task of expanding on this concept and suggest how connectedness can promote health and prevent or delay disease. Also, the concept of connectedness through social media needs more study in terms of how it can impact copying with chronic and live threatening disease. The connectedness of healthcare providers can have a significant impact on promoting best practices, patient safety and research. More on this in future posts.
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Algorithms in Medicine
February 14, 2012
Algorithms have a growing place in medicine. There are at least two kinds of algorithms – practice guidelines and predictive.
Practice guideline or best practice algorithms may emerge out of practice-based research or consensus panels which recommend specific practices to improve care. One example relates to algorithms in intensive care. Cleveland Clinic has excellent examples on their medical education website which include everything from weaning to acid-based disorders. Some may criticize this as “cookbook medicine.” But with the complexity of care, especially intensive care, these kind of algorithms should be welcome. How these can be integrated into clinical decision support in electronic medical records is yet to be fully realized.
Predictive models, on the other hand, use patient-specific data to determine future risk of disease or risk. Predictive models are usually based upon large data sets and in recent years that means EMR data. A couple of examples:
- Predicting 6-Year Mortality Risk in Patients With Type 2 Diabetesby one of my colleagues
- Development and Validation of a Predictive Algorithm to Identify Adult Asthmatics from Medical Services and Pharmacy Claims Databases
- http://prostatecancerinfolink.net/tips-tools/kattan-nomograms/ by another colleague
- nomograms.org
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How Europe is Growing Health Apps
February 13, 2012
My post on HealthWorksCollective last week. I am sure there are many more apps being built in the EU but wanted to call attention to a few I am familiar with.
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Health and medical apps are growing at an incredible pace in the US. But what about Europe? Are there equally creative ideas going on across the pond? Fortunately, there are plenty of examples.
One hot spot is Nijmegen, Netherlands at the Radboud Reshape and Innovation Centerat UMC St. Radboud University Medical Center. Under the leadership of Lucien Engelen, the center has already produced 4 apps. First is AEDS4.US which enables the user to find the nearest defibrillator devices at a moment’s notice using this iPhone/Android app which integrates maps and location services. It has over 50,000 downloads but is still most heavily used in the Netherlands. Anyone with a smartphone can add AEDs to the app. Second is AYA4 – community for young cancer patients. Third is aniPad app to enable communication between patients, families and the healthcare team. Fourth is Hospital Visitor Planning to coordinate visitors coming the hospital. The newest app is REshape HealthTalk which enables translation during healthcare visits for non-native speakers. The ReShape Center also sponsorsTEDxMaastricht which will take place April 2, 2012.
In Belgium, there is a growing number of startups and a startup incubator specifically for health. HealthStartUp“organises events in Europe that bring together entrepreneurs, healthcare professionals, policy makers and investors.” Like many of us, HealthStartUp seeks to empower patients and improve the quality, efficiency and accessibility of healthcare. Check out their interview with miMedication which not only describes their product but also discusses being an entrepreneur. miMedication is a niche PHR product in English developed by Mitchell Silva, who is an epatient in his own right.
From Spain, there is a new app called Doctoralia, a service to find, rate and contact medical services in 14 countries. In addition to the website search by country there is an iPhone app in the App Store. The combination of international search, rating and actual scheduling information makes the service unique.
Also from Spain we have Medical Exchange Medting which includes collaboration platforms and medical viewers. It is a comprehensive tool set which enables elearning, social networking for physicians and medical students. The Medting Media Manager enables the management of medical images including DICOM and pathology standards. Medviewer is a lightweight version of the image viewer which can be imbedded into websites and web applications for continuing medical education, etc. The products can be used for free and the primary business model is licensing for enterprise use for which they also provide customization and services. While not yet a mobile app, it will display on the iPad.
From Hungary there is Webicina founded by Bertalan Mesko, MD, is a curated social media resource tool in multiple languages. The solution has two paths: one for the medical professional which is cataloged by medical specialties from anesthesia to transplantation. The path for the “Empowered Patient” goes to specific diagnoses from pregnancy to psoriasis.This is also available as an mobile app in the iPhone Store and Android version. Webicina also has a tool called PeRSSonalized Medicine with an emphasis on curated RSS feeds for medical resources including major medical journals, blog and news. It enables the busy health professional to scan multiple articles for relevance to their practice at a glace and drill down on topics of interest. Again, this too is in multiple languages and curated by real people, not algorithms. Dr. Mesko who goes by @Berci on Twitter is a popular speaker internationally and continues his medical research while maintaining this service. Webicina has recently partnered with Basil Strategies of Paris, France and sponsor of the Doctors 2.0 Conference there.
There are a growing number of annual conferences on Web 2.0 in healthcare in Europe.
- TEDxMaastricht in the Netherlands in April is in the true TED tradition with fast paced presentations but a focus on innovation in health care. The program includes speakers from throughout Europe but also the US. The program includes patients and their dynamic stories of survival as well medical professionals focused on patient-centered care.
- Doctors 2.0 and You in Paris in May billed as “an international healthcare social media and web 2.0 conference,” is sponsored by Basil Strategies which is now in partnership with Webicina. The conference has a strong emphasis on mobile apps as well as social media and patient and professional communities. A contest for startups rounds out the program. Check out the videos from last year.
- Salud 2.0 meets in Bilbao, Spain in July. It includes international and Spanish presenters on topics from Health 2.0 administration and clinical practice. Last year’s presentations are online throughSlideShare. Preliminary information on this year’s program is available.
- Last year was also the first Health 2.0 Europe in Berlin sponsored by the US Health 2.0 conference group of Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya. It included their usual format of individual speakers on the latest apps and interviews with entrepreneurs and quick paced demos.
Bottom line, Europe is alive with activity – building apps, experimenting with social media in healthcare and a growing number of conferences to show it off. This small sampling should give you a taste of some exciting developments worth keeping tabs on.
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