Social Media To Be The Commonest Source Of Continuing Medical Education

Social Media is the commonest use of Internet. Everyone uses the internet to access their emails and Facebook accounts. A Google search engine is the gateway to all information for most of us. These platitudes of an everyday normal life also apply to physicians.

Communication technology has made things easy for doctors. Keeping up-to-date with medical advances has become an easy part of everyday life and not restricted to events like conferences or receiving prints of journal publications. Recent publications have highlighted the importance of social media in continuing medical education. In a recent large study, 70% of doctors were found to have accessed new medical content via social media every month.

Social media integrated medical content platforms like India Cardiology 2.0 and India Rheumatology 2.0 make it easier to read, share and discuss the latest studies and articles within the niche. Such platforms let readers (which in most cases are doctors) recommend and easily share the relevant study on their Facebook wall. Reader recommendations on the website are used to list the most visible studies. On such social media integrated medical content platforms, Readers can choose to stay updated via email (enewsletter) or via Facebook page or Twitter. So, for example, on liking India Cardiology 2.0 Facebook page the latest news and articles in Cardiology shall be visible to readers on their Facebook wall stream. Readers can also use common social media platforms including LinkedIn and Google plus to recommend the article to his/her own friend circle with pertinent comments.

Similarly, following @incardiology on Twitter will let a reader receive all new updates in his/her twitter stream/wall. Such platforms make finding and sharing relevant items so much simpler for medical professionals.

Social media and emails are well ingrained into our daily lives. Its time doctors make professional uses of such tools too.

Freeing Medical Data: Video

Technology has enabled us to collect vast amounts of medical data from myriad sources. But most of this data is locked in silos and unavailable for use by researchers. Performing a medical or genomic experiment on a human requires informed consent and careful boundaries around privacy. But what if the data that results, once scrubbed of identifying marks, was released into the wild?

At WeConsent.us, John Wilbanks thinks through the ethical and procedural steps to create an open, massive, mine-able database of data about health and genomics from many sources.

Indian Medical Association Plans Programs to Make Members Tech Savvy

The potential of improving Healthcare quality by proper use of technology is immense.Recent advances in information technology offer clinicians valuable new tools to support the medical management of patients. HIT has the potential to enable a dramatic transformation in the delivery of health care, making it safer, more effective, and more efficient.

The national unit of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) has decided to make its two lakh members across the country, especially senior medical practitioners, more tech savvy. The National vice-president of IMA, Dr Devendra Shirole says,“Short contact programs of four days will be organized at all local branches of the IMA. Doctors will be trained on how to use information technology for the betterment of medical profession and patents’ data collection.” He said the doctors will be also trained on using e-books in their daily practice.

The IMA will launch this project initially in Maharashtra and the inauguration will take place in Mumbai. Groups, formed for research purposes, will use information technology to study diseases and viruses.To undertake this vast project, talks are on with software companies to provide trainings and technical support, as well as help IMA build web pages for the same.

Also See:

• Costs and Benefits of Health Information Technology
• Technoclinics- Upcoming scenario in India

NHS Inform- Personalized Health Information Site for Decision Makers

The NHS Information Center is England's central, authoritative source of health and social care information for front line decision makers.
Our aim is to revolutionize the use of information to improve decision making, deliver better care and realize  increased productivity.
Find out more about us, our work and our objectives.

Check it out for all sorts of data and information, like:

• Ambulances - How many ambulances in any particular district...
• Cancer Screening - Prevalence rates..
• Immunization - Statistics and more..
• Health care workforce - How many are there?
• Contraception, and lots more...

Health wisdom , not just information

I am always on the look out for web services delivering knowledge services in the field of health. I run a non-profit organization, RAKSHA, for exactly this purpose and seek new ways of achieving democratization of knowledge in health.

Organized wisdom is a well thought out web service. This interview with the team at Organized wisdom clearly spells out their views and visions for this knowledge service. The talk with their Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Howard Krein and Esther Dyson , one of the investors was very interesting.




The service claims to be " a free service that provides patients with easy access to the best information available in easy to navigate Wisdomcards, helps patients to prepare for their appointments and helps streamline some to the conversations that must take place."
So, I decided to explore this service logged in as a patient searching for information about my imaginary headache. The first thing i noticed was the cleanliness of the welcome page. Simple, no unnecessary multimedia ( as is VERY often the case with medical information sites) and therefore, fast navigation between pages.

The fonts were friendly, the letters bold and easily legible. It didn't intimidate me, as a patient, with its vastness of information. There was a large search box in a major location with built in prompts via a drop down menu. So far so good.

What really won me over was the neatly laid out information. Not too deep on the first page, just plain English medical speak for an average person.There were links to more scholarly items, but everything i could possibly want to know as a patient was easily available within 2 degrees of separation. There were links to support forums, foundations and drug information ( again in plain English).There were chat rooms, message boards, personal blogs, every useful service i can think of today. They were also initiating a" LIVE chat with a doctor" service, which is now in a beta phase.

All in all, I really liked this service and i am sure something like this will soon be up and running in India, preferably in the Hindi language.
Amen.

Health wisdom , not just information

I am always on the look out for web services delivering knowledge services in the field of health. I run a non-profit organization, RAKSHA, for exactly this purpose and seek new ways of achieving democratization of knowledge in health.

Organized wisdom is a well thought out web service. This interview with the team at Organized wisdom clearly spells out their views and visions for this knowledge service. The talk with their Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Howard Krein and Esther Dyson , one of the investors was very interesting.




The service claims to be " a free service that provides patients with easy access to the best information available in easy to navigate Wisdomcards, helps patients to prepare for their appointments and helps streamline some to the conversations that must take place."
So, I decided to explore this service logged in as a patient searching for information about my imaginary headache. The first thing i noticed was the cleanliness of the welcome page. Simple, no unnecessary multimedia ( as is VERY often the case with medical information sites) and therefore, fast navigation between pages.

The fonts were friendly, the letters bold and easily legible. It didn't intimidate me, as a patient, with its vastness of information. There was a large search box in a major location with built in prompts via a drop down menu. So far so good.

What really won me over was the neatly laid out information. Not too deep on the first page, just plain English medical speak for an average person.There were links to more scholarly items, but everything i could possibly want to know as a patient was easily available within 2 degrees of separation. There were links to support forums, foundations and drug information ( again in plain English).There were chat rooms, message boards, personal blogs, every useful service i can think of today. They were also initiating a" LIVE chat with a doctor" service, which is now in a beta phase.

All in all, I really liked this service and i am sure something like this will soon be up and running in India, preferably in the Hindi language.
Amen.

--Data for Doctors--

E-Health Insider :: From data to information to transformation

Information is power. Everywhere.
Information is made up of chunks of data put together into a meaningful structure.

As health care professionals, we produce lots of data everyday when we treat our patients. It includes the patient"s past habits, family history, past diseases, current symptoms, response to certain drugs, reactions to drugs......and on and on.

We need to be able to collect and collate all this data so as to help us in making better decisions in the future. The currently followed practise commonly is -- we treat all the patients according to what we were taught in medical school--.

But illness and disease don't remain static. They evolve everyday. They follow the path of least resistance. Whenever a disease finds a path not blocked by doctors, it pursues rapidly down that path.And we doctors are left guarding only the fixed doorways that we were taught of in Medical school ( or even later, via medical journals)

The only way to stay in the game is to continuously monitor the evolution of the disease by real-time/continuous data gathering and monitoring. This helps us spot very early trends in disease evolution and "block" those paths and escape routes for all diseases.

This article here provides some very good examples and methods of data capturing for clinicians. I hope all doctors in India soon realize the importance of data gathering and analysis in their day-to-day practice.

Read more.

Evolution of Information and its current forms.

I always like videos like this one. :)