3 Reasons Why Healthcare Professionals Cannot Afford To Give #hcsm a Miss

Practicing medicine is a very personal  experience. Patients don't go to hospitals to buy medicines but to access healthcare services. Healthcare professionals don't deliver a product, but a high quality personalized service.

Current hospital practices have resulted in patients in India classifying any contact with a hospital / Healthcare delivery institute as an anxiety-inducing activity. Hospitals (and doctors) who can overcome this 'communication issue' and engage patients in improving their health are considered better than others.

After Printing Press --> Telephone and Fax --> Internet, digital technologies are now positioned as the most powerful tool for 'Word of Mouth" marketing as well as medical communication campaigns. Social media is an underutilized but very very powerful tool for healthcare professionals. It seems to be another channel of communication ( like Fax and Telephone were once) destined to be rubbished and ridiculed before being accepted by all as a routine practice.
Here are three practical reasons Healthcare professionals need to use social media.

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Why Healthcare Professionals Need To Use Social Media

View more PowerPoint from Neelesh Bhandari

Web 2.0 services like Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, Linkedin and YouTube  are common starting blocks for most hospitals and healthcare service providers. If you are looking for a specialized Healthcare Social Media professional team comprising of doctors, coders and designers to handle your online ecosystem, send us an email at info@digmed.in.

Five Free And Simple Google Tools For Medical Practitioners

Google is the biggest influence on the web over the past 20 years of the internet. Their “Do No Evil” ‘philosophy’ has given us a whole stable of free and easy to use tools which can make any work easier and better. All of us use the Google Search Engine Homepage everyday! There is lots more a doctor can do with Google tools. Let’s take a look at Five Free And Simple Google Tools For Medical Practitioners.

1) Gmail

This is the most useful service ever by Google, barring Google Search. And you can have more of it! You can use Gmail to create 2 (or more) free accounts. So you can create one personal and another public email address for your medical practice. Eg: one can be dr.abc@gmail.com and another neuromumbai911@gmail.com. By going to settings, you can then set to import your other email account into your primary gmail account. You can enable ‘multiple inboxes’ via Labs subtab, allowing you to receive neatly segmented mails. Check this video.

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You can reply by your choice of account, enabling you to keep your personal and professional emails separated by different accounts, yet accessible and answerable from one single account.

Here’s a detailed screenshot enhanced post about this feature on Make Tech easier.

2) Google Alerts

If there are certain terms you want to follow on Google and receive any new mentions directly to your email inbox, create a Google Alert. Fill in the term you need to follow, like ‘Cardiology India news’ or ‘neelesh bhandari’ and set the frequency/type of alerts required. Stay updated via email.

3) Google Maps

Maps and Places allow you to mark your professional locations and timings on a map. Link this marked map within all your emails. Henceforth all patients you email will see how to reach you easily via a map, with additional info about consultation hours that you might want to share.

4) Google Scholar

You don’t need to always go to Pubmed for all your medical searches. Head to Google Scholar and do any advanced search (author, type, publication year and lots more filters). You will get More Results. You will search more medical databases. Try it.

5) Youtube Channel

Online videos are the most important medical info resource. But you don’t need to create videos to run a medical educational channel for your patients. Just create a channel by free login and start marking as favorite the best medical education videos you think might help your patients. Set channel settings to demonstrate your video favorites. Thus, you have a full blown video channel. Zero cost!

We are planning another post on 5 Advanced And Free Google tools For Medical Practitioners. If you want to read that soon, Share This.

If you need help with any of the above 5 tools, comment below.

(cross-posted on Technology For Doctors )

Learning tools and search engine ranking for Medicos

Recently read the Latest edition of Journal of Health informatics in developing countries. Specifically, Search engines : a study of nine search engines in four categories by Dallas Knight (Health Informatics Programme University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand). This study’s objective was to determine how search engines within different categories compare, and to look at features and trends of search engines that are commonly used for queries by both health consumers and professionals.

The query terms used for this study are

• Ulcerative colitis
• Benign positional vertigo
• Pleomorphic rhabdomyosarcoma
• “online tool” for help with depression
• exercise after bowel cancer operation

Evaluation of the first ten sites for each scenario in each search engine included relevance, usefulness, usability of sites, and quality of health information evaluation.

Search engines within the general category (Google, SearchYahoo!) performed best overall. Meta search engines (Dogpile, Jux2) also performed well with vertical search engines (Healia, Kosmix, Healthline) next. Health portals (Revolution Health, WebMD) produced relevant useful results for common terms, but not for unusual query terms.

Other important medical education and learning tools the study talks about include

• Custom built Search engines ( eg Google, Rollyo and EureksterSwiki )
• Blog sites, wikis and podcasts
• social bookmarking with Del.icio.us and Digg.com
• RSS site feeds read by aggregators or emails
• Yahoo Pipes! for channelizing information

The few services and tools it missed include,

• Zotero firefox extension and Evernote web clipper - for online research notes
  
• Ning for community building
• Youtube(eg.youtube.com/medicaleducation) and Medicalvideos.us for videos.
• Twitter for sharing updates
• Docstoc and Scribd for document search
• Freemind for brain mapping

I think i shall now close this list or i shall be spending hours trying to compile a complete list. Anyways, most of the useful tools for medical education and learning have been mentioned here. If you can think of any more study tools or services, kindly add them in the comments.

Read the complete study Here

Related articles by Zemanta

• Yahoo Pipes (toolsforjournalists.blogspot.com)
• Dogpile Search Engine: Lighting A Fire Under Your Keyword Research (marketersdaily.com)
• Scienceroll Medical Search: Preview the results! (scienceroll.com)
• Three Points about Medical Informatics in India. (neeleshbhandari.blogspot.com)

Learning tools and search engine ranking for Medicos

Recently read the Latest edition of Journal of Health informatics in developing countries. Specifically, Search engines : a study of nine search engines in four categories by Dallas Knight (Health Informatics Programme University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand). This study’s objective was to determine how search engines within different categories compare, and to look at features and trends of search engines that are commonly used for queries by both health consumers and professionals.

The query terms used for this study are

• Ulcerative colitis
• Benign positional vertigo
• Pleomorphic rhabdomyosarcoma
• “online tool” for help with depression
• exercise after bowel cancer operation

Evaluation of the first ten sites for each scenario in each search engine included relevance, usefulness, usability of sites, and quality of health information evaluation.

Search engines within the general category (Google, SearchYahoo!) performed best overall. Meta search engines (Dogpile, Jux2) also performed well with vertical search engines (Healia, Kosmix, Healthline) next. Health portals (Revolution Health, WebMD) produced relevant useful results for common terms, but not for unusual query terms.

Other important medical education and learning tools the study talks about include

• Custom built Search engines ( eg Google, Rollyo and EureksterSwiki )
• Blog sites, wikis and podcasts
• social bookmarking with Del.icio.us and Digg.com
• RSS site feeds read by aggregators or emails
• Yahoo Pipes! for channelizing information

The few services and tools it missed include,

• Zotero firefox extension and Evernote web clipper - for online research notes
• Ning for community building
• Youtube(eg.youtube.com/medicaleducation) and Medicalvideos.us for videos.
• Twitter for sharing updates
• Docstoc and Scribd for document search
• Freemind for brain mapping

I think i shall now close this list or i shall be spending hours trying to compile a complete list. Anyways, most of the useful tools for medical education and learning have been mentioned here. If you can think of any more study tools or services, kindly add them in the comments.

Read the complete study Here

Related articles by Zemanta

• Yahoo Pipes (toolsforjournalists.blogspot.com)
• Dogpile Search Engine: Lighting A Fire Under Your Keyword Research (marketersdaily.com)
• Scienceroll Medical Search: Preview the results! (scienceroll.com)
• Three Points about Medical Informatics in India. (neeleshbhandari.blogspot.com)

Learning tools and search engine ranking for Medicos

Recently read the Latest edition of Journal of Health informatics in developing countries. Specifically, Search engines : a study of nine search engines in four categories by Dallas Knight (Health Informatics Programme University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand). This study’s objective was to determine how search engines within different categories compare, and to look at features and trends of search engines that are commonly used for queries by both health consumers and professionals.

The query terms used for this study are

• Ulcerative colitis
• Benign positional vertigo
• Pleomorphic rhabdomyosarcoma
• “online tool” for help with depression
• exercise after bowel cancer operation

Evaluation of the first ten sites for each scenario in each search engine included relevance, usefulness, usability of sites, and quality of health information evaluation.

Search engines within the general category (Google, SearchYahoo!) performed best overall. Meta search engines (Dogpile, Jux2) also performed well with vertical search engines (Healia, Kosmix, Healthline) next. Health portals (Revolution Health, WebMD) produced relevant useful results for common terms, but not for unusual query terms.

Other important medical education and learning tools the study talks about include

• Custom built Search engines (eg Google, Rollyo and EureksterSwiki )
• Blog sites, wikis and podcasts
• social bookmarking with Del.icio.us and Digg.com
• RSS site feeds read by aggregators or emails
• Yahoo Pipes! for channelizing information

The few services and tools it missed include,

• Zotero firefox extension and Evernote web clipper - for online research notes
  
• Ning for community building
• Youtube(eg.youtube.com/medicaleducation) and Medicalvideos.us for videos.
• Twitter for sharing updates
• Docstoc and Scribd for document search
• Freemind for brain mapping

I think i shall now close this list or i shall be spending hours trying to compile a complete list. Anyways, most of the useful tools for medical education and learning have been mentioned here. If you can think of any more study tools or services, kindly add them in the comments.

Read the complete study Here

Related articles-

• Yahoo Pipes (toolsforjournalists.blogspot.com)
• Dogpile Search Engine: Lighting A Fire Under Your Keyword Research (marketersdaily.com)
• Scienceroll Medical Search: Preview the results! (scienceroll.com)
• Three Points about Medical Informatics in India. (neeleshbhandari.blogspot.com)