John Sharp is an IT Manager for a major medical center in Northeast Ohio. Areas of expertise include: ehealth, personal health records, Web 2.0 technologies, social media and project management. He is active in the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society and the American Medical Informatics Association. The opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author.
Posts Tagged ‘consumer health information’
Medpedia adds Clinical Trials
February 3, 2010
Medpedia continues to add vetted health information. In addition to health topics in a Wikipedia style, they had added news and RSS feed from blogs (including this one). Now they have developed integration with ClinicalTrials.gov. The unique approach they are promoting is linking from articles to related clinical trials. I tried this for myself and was able to find that it worked particularly well for some terms like “diabetes.” Also, the search function has good features and the advanced search, called “Clinical” includes Study Type (Interventional,
Medpedia, despite its growth, has some gaps. For instance, if you look for articles by the alpha index, like leukemia, you find none, but do a search and dozens of very specific articles appear (hairy cell leukemia). Overall the number of articles, organization and layout of Medpedia continues to improve. Try out the Clinical Trials search for yourself and see what you think.
The Empowered (and Imperiled) Health Care Consumer in the Age of Internet Medicine
January 29, 2008
This new report by Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, raises a strong alarm for consumers and health care websites on the lack of attention to detail by consumers. The report labels these consumers “Insta-Americans” with short attention spans and poor attention to the source of the medical information they are reading.
In one sense, the web has encouraged quick scanning of information which may be fine if you are scanning on eBay or a social networking site. But when it comes to life and death or even health and wellness, different rules should apply.
The 34 page report details four specific case studies of mis-information: Crestor, Avandia, teen suicide and SSRIs and autism and vaccines. The bottom line is that through websites promoting drugs, anti-phamacuetical activist, class-action or litigation sites and spam blogs, misinformation gains a hold which is difficult to counter.
The conclusion is worth noting: “This practice of ?do-it-yourself online medical diagnosis can help arm patients and healthcare consumers with valuable research. But if this research is gathered in a vacuum, without the benefit of input from a credible physician, or certification of the information from an official organization….”
This valuable report needs to produce consumer education beyond “buyer beware” to “buyer, read more carefully.”
