Archive for November, 2006
Diagnosis Google Style
November 27, 2006
Lots of buzz on the British Medical Journal article on Googling for a diagnosis–use of Google as a diagnostic aid: internet based study. The study showed “Google searches revealed the correct diagnosis in 15 (58%).
The comments on the BMJ website related to this article are equally interesting: “Pubmedding is better than googling” and Google Medicine – proceed with caution and this quote: “Google’s accuracy of 58%, reported by Tang and Ng, is less than that achieved by older generation rules based Diagnosis Decision Support System [3] and will not engender widespread adoption.” In fact, would you be confident of this kind of percentage.
Perhaps a more realistic test would be to give two physican panels test cases and two different tools sets – a decision support tool like Micromedix and the other just Google and see how accurate they become.
At any rate, the article provokes more discussion and research.
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Trivergence
November 25, 2006
On Future HIT, I found a post about trivegence. Trivergence is a new concept defined by Accenture as the meeting of devices, controls and data. They argue that because architecture now supports multiple devices, that the integration of controls and data into devices now enables unique opportunities. While convergence refers to “the unification of voice, data and video on the network level”, “Trivergence is an architecture that brings a new organization to devices, networks and controls. The conceptual breakthrough is that if a device is on the network, its controls can be located somewhere other than on the device itself. As a result, devices that used to be stand-alone entities are now cogs within a much larger system—a system that enables new user experiences through the interaction of its components.”
What about trivergence in healthcare? Certainly as more devices in clinical settings become connected to networks, the implications can be huge. Perhaps the greatest implications will be in telemedicine.
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