We stayed up at Lake Wanaka this week. Had a great time snowboarding up at Cardrona and Coronet Peak ski-fields. The drive up to Cardrona is a little hairy as the road is not tar sealed and climbs pretty steeply up the mountainside.
Archive for July, 2006
Lake Wanaka
Sunday, July 30th, 2006Medical Wikis
Sunday, July 23rd, 2006Since Wikipedia has risen to public attention, there have been quite a few medical wiki’s set up. What’s a wiki? Well according to Wikipedia:
”A wiki is a type of website that allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit and change most available content, sometimes without the need for registration.”
Check out these medical wikis:
Ask Dr Wiki - Free source of X-rays, ECGs, etc.
GANFYD (Get a Note From Your Doctor) - set up by a bunch of docs from the Doctors.net.uk discussion forums. You have to be a doctor to write information on this wiki.
Flu Wiki - Aims to help local communities prepare for a possible influenza pandemic.
Clinifowiki - This is a clinical informatics wiki with information on Electronic Medical Records and hospital IT systems.
Wellness Wiki - The aim of this wiki is to “help clarify the complex problems plaguing the U.S. healthcare system and develop sustainable ways to improve the health and well-being of all people”.
If you would like to start your own medical wiki, it’s fairly straight-forward: You could try out a free wiki service like wikispaces or roll your sleeves up and install mediawiki on your own website.
If you don’t want to set up your own wiki, why not contribute to wikipedia’s various health sections (anyone can contribute) or if you are doc, add some info to GANFYD.
Anti-RFID
Sunday, July 23rd, 2006
RFID tags are getting more common in hospitals for tracking patients. This is, of course, a good thing. We really don’t want to lose patients and using RFID tags to track them seems like a sensible use of technology to me.
RFID tags raise some interesting issues regarding personal privacy though. RFID tags in clothes could be used to track your where-abouts and RFID tags in the things you buy can be used to track your spending behaviour.
In response to these concerns Vrije University in Amsterdam is developing an RFID blocking device to stop RFID searches and alert the user.
More on this story at Personal Tech Pipeline
Judging Smartphone and Pocket PC Mag Best Software Awards
Saturday, July 22nd, 2006
I’m helping judge the Smartphone and Pocket PC Mag Awards this year. I’m really looking forward to trying out all the latest programmes.
I’ll update you with the results when they are released…
MEDNET 2006
Saturday, July 22nd, 2006
I’ll be attending and running two tutorials (PDAs and eLearning) at MEDNET 2006 in Toronto Canada in October. If anyone is going and would like to meet up let me know.
Windows Mobile Forum becomes Win Mob Forum
Saturday, July 22nd, 2006Windows Mobile Forum.com has changed over to WinMobForum.com. WinMobForum is the place to discuss everything about Windows Mobile Smartphones and Pocket PCs.
Open Access Publishing
Tuesday, July 4th, 2006To those who are not familiar with the term, Open Access refers to journals who give readers the ability to access journal articles for free without needing to pay the usual journal subscription.
There has been a debate recently about the economics involved in Open Access publishing that has raised some interesting questions about how this evolution of medical publising is going to play out. The most pertinent question should probably be ‘Who Pays?’.
The latest debate was sparked by an article in the journal, Nature entitle, ‘Open-access journal hits rocky times’. Luckily for readers of this blog post, Nature publishes it’s news stories online in full so you can read it here. The piece describes how the Open Access journal publisher and advocate for the Open Access movement, PLoS, is relying on philanthropic donations to stay afloat.
PLoS does not charge a subscription fee to readers but rather charges authors $1500 (soon to become $2500) to publish.
Reaction to the story on Nature’s Newsblog has been largely critical, with Paul Peters from Hindawi Publishing (an Open Access journal publisher), stating that it’s open access journal collection has already achieved profitability.
It seems to me that Open Access publishing has many potential benefits, not just for the scientific community but also by bringing in those who would not normally consult the scientific literature. It is imperitive that Open Access journals are able to afford the same careful checks and balances that traditional publishers apply to articles they publish. If they are struggling financially, mistakes may be made and the evidence base we rely on in medicine may be tarnished. It will be interesting to follow this story to see how PLoS manages to balance its books and produce sustainable, high quality publications without charging subscription fees.
By publishing on the web, Open Access journals can reach potentially very large audiences. Not just the scientific community, but people who would normally never open a scientific journal. Perhaps those researching a new diagnosis they have been given by their doctor, or even just interested web-surfers. This brings new costs but also new revenue opportunities through advertising to this wider audience.
Google Health
Tuesday, July 4th, 2006Google Health is a new service from the leading search engine, Google. The service integrates with the normal search engine interface and is triggered by users entering health related queries.
When a users searches for medical information, a number of options become available at the top of the Seach Engine Results Page (SERP). These seem to be variable depending on how the results have been classified but include such options as ‘For Professionals’,'For Patients’, ‘Treatment’, ‘Symptoms’, ‘Tests and Diagnosis’, ‘Risk Factors’, ‘From Medical Establishment’ and ‘Alternative Medicine’.
Google Health is a product of the new Google Co-op system. According to Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, Google Co-op is the most exciting product launch of the year. Google Co-op allows external companies and individuals to help classify and refine Google’s SERPs. For certain subjects, such as Google Health, the SERPs will automatically contain the classifications defined by the Co-op. For other subjects, users are able to ’subscribe’ to Co-op members classification schemes (you can subscibe to NMM’s profile here).
Co-op contributors to Google Health include the National Library of Medicine, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Health on the Net, Harvard Medical School, Mayo Clinic and others. See the full list here. The list also includes Enoch Choi as an individual contributor. Enoch has outlined some of the details on how he contributes sites on his weblog.
According to ZDNet, Google Health is under the leadership of Adam Bosworth, former VP of Engineering at BEA Systems.
Testing out Google Health is fairly straightforward, simply enter a health related query at www.google.com and click on the links at the top. Feel free to post a comment here with your opinions on the relevancy of the Google Health SERPs.
Welcome to the New NMM blog!
Monday, July 3rd, 2006Hi folks, this is the new NMM blog to keep you up to date with all the goings on at New Media Medicine.
Stay tuned!
Chris