I read quite a lot of RSS feeds on health informatics and technology. I’m now sharing the best of these blogs here:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/11938547368938207263

The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft have purchased Medstory, the medical search engine for healthcare consumers:

Microsoft’s drive into the health care market is just getting under way, but the company signaled on Monday that one important ingredient in its plan will be a specialized search engine tailored to deliver useful medical information to consumers.

Microsoft is buying Medstory Inc., a small start-up in Foster City, Calif. Its search software applies artificial intelligence techniques to medical and health information in medical journals, government documents and on the Internet.

The Medstory purchase, said Peter Neupert, vice president for health strategy at Microsoft, was a first step in a broader company strategy to assemble technologies that will “improve the consumer experience in health care.”

Source

There’s quite a bit of buzz about the new Motion C5 Tablet PC. Here’s the video I posted on Doctors’ Gadgets.com a few days ago:

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MDVIP is the national network of physicians who practice preventive and personalized healthcare, not just the detection and treatment of disease as in most traditional primary care practices. With prevention as the cornerstone of its program, MDVIP has proven that its carefully chosen affiliated physicians provide exceptional care and achieve exceptional outcomes. These outcomes include lower hospitalization rates. MDVIP currently serves more than 45,000 patients through a growing network of more than 139 affiliated physicians located in 16 states and Washington, D.C. (Alabama, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Virginia). MDVIP’s unique and personalized healthcare model attracted the attention of consumer giant Procter & Gamble, who purchased a stake in the company in January 2007.

MDVIP employs a very rigorous selection process utilizing proprietary, predictive analytics and regression analysis to identify physicians who qualify for participation in the MDVIP program. MDVIP then provides physicians with the support needed to transition their practice to the MDVIP model, which limits the practice to 600 patients, and then assists affiliated physicians in offering state-of-the-art healthcare that focuses on wellness. In a practice of this size, physicians have the time to provide prevention, early detection, and treatment for all their patients, addressing all stages of healthcare. This level of care is not possible in a traditional primary care practice of 2,500 patients.

Visit the website at www.mdvip.com for more information.

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Larry Page, the co-founder of Google was talking to a group of scientists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and mentioned that they were working on developing true Artificial Intelligence. “It’s not as far off as people think” according to Page. He also noted that human DNA represents about 600MB of data (when compressed) and that the brain’s algorithms weren’t all that complicated and could be approximated with enough computing power.

Source: News.com

Web 2.0 was coined as a cool name for a conference about the state of the internet back in 2004. Kind of a play on the fact that software is released in ‘versions’ (1.1, 1.4, 1.2.3.1.2, etc, etc) whereas the web is clearly evolving and branching in a way that defies this kind of classification.

Web 2.0 draws an arbitrary line that says the current state of the web is significantly different now from how it was a few years ago.

There’s been a lot of talk about what Web 2.0 really means and what it doesn’t (here’s the official line from Tim O’Reilly who coined the term).

Here’s an anthropological take on Web 2.0:

Learn about heart anatomy and physiology through the power of song…

More medical videos.

This online app could be use for students creating their own learning projects or for staff to create course notes and resources for their students.

Revolution Health is a new startup from Steve Case, former CEO of America Online and chairman of AOL Time Warner.

The website is an amalgamation of several startups purchased by Case and aims to offer an information portal about healthcare with medical tools and a database of doctors and clinics which users can rate.

Visiting the site, the main emphasis seems to be on the ability to rate your own physician. It also offers users blogs, forums and other ways of posting their opinions about health problems and health delivery.

The site has information from several insitutions including the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and Harvard.

The site is only just launched so the effects of the social networking and user generated content has not kicked in yet. It will be interesting to see whether the site provides professional evidenced based advice on health issues or just ends up being a repository of anecdotal evidence generated from it’s users.

I’ve just been updating Doctors’ Gadgets.com. The site has news and discussion about PDAs, EMR and other gadgets that doctors use.

It’s also the host to the video tutorials that accompany the RSM Press book, “The Doctors’ PDA and Smartphone Handbook“.