Posts Tagged ‘Medicine 2.0’
Medicine 2.0 Congress
August 20, 2008
The Medicine 2.0 Congress is only two weeks away. I decided to attend Medicine 2.0 instead of Health 2.0 because my job has changed from a consumer focus to medical informatics. The agenda for the Toronto meeting is extensive and very international. It will include papers on consumer topics but also medical education and research. I hope to connect with fellow bloggers from around the world. Let me know if you plan to attend. I have set up a profile on the conference social networking site, so feel free to join in.
Maybe next year I’ll be in a position to submit an abstract.
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Medical Wikis – A Review
August 12, 2008
On a seemingly unusual place, Linux Insider, there is a good review of medical wikis. The intro gives a status of medical wikis:
“With the rapid pace of development in medical technology, some doctors have turned to the Web to supplement textbooks and journals and created medical wikis. Naturally, wikis aren’t to be regarded as the final word on any medical topic; rather, they’re facilitators of discussion and starting-off points for more research.”
They review everything from Fluwiki to AskDrWiki with some choice quotes from Kenny Civello, MD, one of the founders of AskDrWiki.com. Also cited is WikiSurgery by “a London-based physician who is also the editor of the International Journal of Surgery.” A detailed discussion of the article approve process for this wiki is examined. There is also a previous article on “The Human Genome Goes Wiki.”
Wikis will continue to penetrate medicine and provide a valuable and easily editable tool for collaborative medical knowledge sharing.
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More Social Networking for Physicians
July 19, 2008
Ozmosis appears to be the latest in a growing number of social networks for physicians. The main features are being able to build a network through others, posting cases and Ozmarks, a kind of del.icio.us for physicians. The registration does require confirmation that the new user is a physician, similar to Within3.com. Science Roll has a good review with a follow up after the founders contacted him. Some of the comments compare Ozmosis with Sermo, the much larger network.
Peerclip is another option with a strong emphasis on social bookmarks.
At some point these Health 2.0 sites with sort out in the market.
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Medical Imaging Site
July 16, 2008
MDPIXX is a website specializing in medical images – xrays, CAT scans, photos, and pathology slides – with several additional features. With most images, you can use a zoom tool to focus in on an area. There are also featured cases with discussions. The home page has one similarity to YouTube – a fading in and out of recent images. The site claims over 12,000 images and includes an atlas as well. There is the opportunity to comment on any image. They have also developed a Yahoo Widget but not one for Google yet.
Overall, it has great potential as a teaching and collaboration tool.
Two suggestions for futher enhancements – the site is multilingual which reflects its international scope but no tool for translating the cases or comments in another language. There is not guarentee that the images are posted by physicians but to sign up, you need to attest to that. The terms and conditions should be more obvious prior to signup especially for patient privacy provisions.
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Medicine 2.0 Conference in September
March 9, 2008
The call for abstracts for Medicine 2.0 Conference in Toronto is now open. Conference abstracts are due May 2.
The conference includes a broad range of themes including everything from PHRs to new avenues for research and collaboration to Web 3.0 – semantic web applications. Organized by Gunther Eysenbach and the Journal of Medical Internet Research. This unique conference is limited to 200 attendees. What distinguishes this conference from Health 2.0 is that this effort focuses on web 2.0 in the practice of medicine and medical research while Health 2.0 is more consumer focused. See the map of Medicine 2.0.
Is this preliferation of conferences around Web 2.0 in health care the best approach to using these tools to enhance health care or should they be integrated into mainline conferences? Since we are early in the adoption cycle of these technologies in health care, these kind of meetings can help build a base for developing the trend. There may come a point where these will gain respect in mainline health IT.
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Call for Papers – Web 2.0 and Web 3.0
January 17, 2008
Recently I came across two calls for papers. The first from the Journal of Medical Internet Research for a special issue on Medicine 2.0 with the lofty title, “How social networking and Web 2.0 technologies revolutionize health care, wellness, clinical medicine and biomedical research.” Some examples they are looking for include:
- Collaborative Filtering and recommender technologies
- Consumer empowerment
- Personal health records and Web 2.0
- New models of academic / scholarly publishing and peer review, e.g. what is the role of blogs and wikis?
- New models of e-learning.
Second is a Web 3.0 conference, “ 2008 International Conference on Semantic Web and Web Services.” This is sponsored by a European/International group, HoIP (Healthcare over the Internet Protocol). More about this group in a future post. This conference will include topics such as:
- Semantic interoperability
- Machine learning approaches for semantic web
- Semantic web for e-Business and e-Learning
- Trust networks on semantic web
- Database technologies for semantic web
- Semantic knowledge portals
- Semantic web mining
Both opportunities reflect the growth interest in Web 2.0 and the Semantic web in health care. Everyone is encouraged to participate – isn’t that what Web 2-3 are all about?
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Update on AskDrWiki
January 9, 2008
After beginning in some controversy, AskDrWiki.com, one of the first wikis on the internet used as a medical reference is getting a good review. Started by cardiology fellows at the Cleveland Clinic, the wiki has grown to have 19 specialty areas, 400 credentialed users and 1000 articles. Not to mention 65,000 unique visitors. This report in the local Cleveland paper notes the editorial policy and board is now posted which has calmed some of the initial criticism. Congratulations to Kevin Civello and Brian Jefferson for their persistence in making this tool a reality.
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Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival is now up
January 7, 2008
The blog carnival includes a broad range of contributors. This issue has my 2008 predictions and citations of Medicine 2.0 in various blogs and web announcements including Mike Leavitt and JAMA.
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Physician Internet Use – 39% Email Patients
December 18, 2007
In a survey by Jupiter Research reported by iHealthbeat, the range of Internet usage is reported with some changes since one year ago. 89% this year vs 75% the previous year reported using the Internet for researching clinical information. While this doesn’t imply diagnosis via Google, it does show a continued growth toward the physician not using the Internet as the exception. Reading journals and communication with colleagues also showed increases – could this imply the future of the medical journal and hope for physician social networking, as in Sermo and Within3?
Finally, patient-oriented activities, while not scoring as high, had respectable increases – 69% searching for patient education materials and 39% (almost double in one year) emailing patients, we hope securely.
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Continuing Medical Education Through Video
December 5, 2007
There is a Spanish-language website, LiveMedWeb.tv serving Central and South America which is providing innovative CME using video interviews with medical experts. These short clips (longer than the typical YouTube) provide quick information to a large, otherwise untapped group of physicians. They also provide webinars through the site which are longer. The site is the product of LiveMed, a company from Mexico City which also provides live broadcasts of CME events.
Is there anyone in the US doing this?
