OrganizedWisdom Health Blog

Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival

Greetings! It is my pleasure to present the latest edition of the Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival.

What's a blog carnival? It's a quick way to keep up to date on the "blogosphere" around a particular subject -- in this case, Medicine 2.0, the intersection of health care and the social Web. We had a deluge of submissions and I've tried to pick the best ones.

One of the most interesting Health 2.0 events of late is the Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting icon program, meant to identify thoughtful analysis of peer-reviewed research. I'm all for anything that makes it easier to find high-quality content online, and will be interested to see how this program plays out.

Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya, the folks who brought you the Health 2.0 conference last month, are doing it again, with another conference planned for San Diego in March.

Berci Mesko of Scienceroll, founder of this blog carnival, argues for the reliability of Wikipedia and Citizendum in a post that attracted some controversy and discussion elsewhere in the blogosphere.

 

The National Library of Medicine/NIH's new style guide includes a section on citing blogs and other information found on the Internet. Joshua Schwimmer, M.D., best known for his Kidney Notes blog, was surprised to be included as an example, and writes about the ensuing debate at Tech Medicine.

Mo at Neurophilosophy offers an interesting look at a brain-computer interface for Second Life that lets the user move an avatar without moving a muscle.

Philips has announced a device called the Cliniscape, meant to be a portable IT solution for physicians and other health care providers. It's bigger than an iPhone and smaller than a laptop. Full press release from DoctorsGadgets.

John Halamka, Chief Information Officer and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, joins the ranks of bloggers at Life as a Healthcare CIO. Right now he's writing about efforts to run greener data centers. Thanks to Bob  Coffield at the Health Care Law Blog for the tip.

Social networking sites are everywhere -- it seems like every day I get another e-mail inviting me to the latest community for chihuahua-owning editors who love Renaissance music, or whatever. Disaboom.com stands out a bit from the pack -- it's aimed at people with functional limitations, and recently acquired Lovebyrd, a dating site for singles living with disabilities. Medical director is Dr. Glen House (not THAT Dr. House!), a spinal-cord injury specialist who gets some of his knowledge from his own experience as a C7 quadriplegic. Tip of the hat to JC Jones of Healthline Connects on this one.

BioMed's medical image search has relaunched, reports the Pimm -- Partial Immortalization blog.

Bioinformatics Zen offers Three stories about science and the Web. They all have happy endings.

Clinical Cases has a helpful list of medical podcasts from the BBC.

Fathom, a marketing company, has produced a list of the six best Web 2.0 health tools. I am naturally
biased toward #4, our very own OrganizedWisdom, but we're in very good company here.

How many times have you heard that Google is planning a health product? eHealth notes that the official rollout of Google Health -- a personal medical records system meant to rival Microsoft's new offering -- will be released early in 2008.

Deirdre Bonnycastle presents Active Learning - Creating Meaningful Artifacts posted at Medical Education Blog. Good overview of Web 2.0 tools and their uses in med-ed.

Carnegie-Mellon's listing of the 100 Most Informative Blogs included a couple in the medical field. GruntDoc picks them out for you.

Zagat, known for its restaurant reviews, is moving into the doctor-review space with a guide specifically focused on physicians in Blue Cross and Blue Shield's WellPoint network. Jane Sarasohn-Kahn of Health Populi notes that it won't tell you what consumers really want to know -- cost and outcome.

Jimmy Atkinson mentions social networking tools like Vimo and RateMDs in a post on How to Research a Doctor's Credentials  at Medical Tourism Guide.

Toni Brayer, M.D., of EverythingHealth was either pleased or disappointed not to find herself listed on RateMD, but had a good time looking up her colleagues and agrees that patients' experiences are going to be more and more important to understanding the quality of medical care.

One of the struggles every would-be medical student faces is writing a personal statement to go with medical-school applications. Victor Castilla of Web 2.0 and Medicine gathers up some resources to help with this sometimes daunting task.

That concludes this edition.  Submit your blog article to the next edition of <b>medicine 2.0</b> using our
carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: medicine 2.0, blog carnival

Look for Medicine 2.0 blog carnival tomorrow

I've been overwhelmed by the number and quality of posts submitted for this edition! I'll post it tomorrow as soon as I can. Thanks for your patience!

The 6 Best Free Web 2.0 Healthcare Tools and Sites

Check out Fathom SEO’s latest guide called The Best Free Web 2.0 Healthcare Tools and Sites.

Download Guide Here

Watch Paul Richlovsky's Video Interview about the report here.

We were pleased to be included along with Revolution Health, PatientsLikeMe, SugarStats, DailyStrength and VIMO.

The State of Search: 7 of 10 Americans Experience "Search Engine Fatigue"

There's some great new data to support what we've been saying for two years now: Search has become a vast wasteland of clutter, noise, spam, and information.

A new research report conduted by Kelton Research, examines "The State of Search" and describes “search engine fatigue." People are actually giving up on searching because they can't find what they are looking for.

Here are some of the key findings:

-72.3 percent of Americans experience “search engine fatigue” (either “always,” “usually,” or “sometimes”) when researching a topic on the Internet.

--65.4 percent of Americans say they’ve spent two or more hours in a single sitting searching for specific information on search engines.

--More than three out of four (75.1 percent) of those who experience search engine fatigue report getting up and physically leaving their computer without the information they were seeking – either “always,” “usually” or “sometimes.”

One of the more interesting findings that seems to confirm the need for human-guided search:

When asked to name their #1 complaint about the process, 25 percent cited a deluge of results, 24 percent cited a predominance of commercial (paid) listings, 18.8 percent blamed the search engine’s inability to understand their keywords (forcing them to try again), and 18.6 percent were most frustrated by disorganized/random results.

Here's the press release that reflects some of the data and report's primary findings.

Finding the best medical Web sites

The American College of Physicians published a useful article this month in ACP Hospitalist listing some of the most useful health Web sites that patients and medical professionals are now using to get health information.

Jessica Berthold's article, Smart surfing: Finding the best medical Websites, points out that "patients aren't the only ones doing the Web surfing. A 2006 article in Postgraduate Medical Journal found that 71% of health care professionals use the Internet regularly for medical or professional updating, and 63% recommend Web sites to patients. The issue for many physicians is not whether to use medical Web sites, but how to find the best ones."

We were happy to be included in the list of useful sites featured on the list patients are using including:

• WebMD Health  is an interactive site with information on more than 90 disease and lifestyle topics, and more than 140 message boards.

• Daily Strength  has support groups for people with more than 500 medical conditions.

• EverydayHEALTH is a general medical news site, with health calculators, polls and discussion boards.

• The HealthCentral Network  is a clearinghouse of community-focused Web sites sorted by specific conditions (e.g., MyDiabetesCentral.com, MyHeartCentral.com).

• OrganizedWisdom  selects and organizes user-generated health content from the Web.

• Revolution Health is a comprehensive, interactive site with articles, discussion boards, disease information and more than 125 consumer-friendly health tools.

We've put our own list together of useful resources our health guides use to find great health resources to create WisdomCards.  We are constantly adding to this list so feel free to send us suggestions.

OrganizedWisdom Is Hiring - Join The Movement To Organize The World's Best Health Information

We've been really busy since we launched the new OrganizedWisdom.com unveiling the first human-powered, doctor-guided search service for health.

We couldn't be more thrilled with the feedback we're getting and the momentum that is building around the movement to organize the world's best health information. 

We re-launched at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Fransisco in September kicking off several weeks of speaking gigs, media interviews, and meetings with partners.  We've also been hard at work creating WisdomCards on over 300 health topics, training new guides and working with our editors and physician reviewers to build a service designed to help a lot of people. 

The energy surrounding what we are building together is palpable.  And we've got a lot more work to do. Which is why we are now ready to start growing our team...so please tell your friends, your family, and anyone you think is ready to join a fun and energetic team. 

We're Hiring!
If you want to get involved early with what we are building at OrganizedWisdom, send us your resume.  If you are the best in your field, if you are entrepreneurial, if you care deeply about helping people, if you want to find ways to improve health care, then we want to meet you.

We're building a team of world-class entrepreneurs, health care professionals, editors, physician reviewers and technologists.  We're looking to work with fun, energetic and passionate people who believe in our mission as much as we do.

We're based in New York City, but we are building a virtual company so many positions can work from anywhere you can log in to the Internet.

We'll be posting more detailed job descriptions, but here's a quick list of the talent we are looking for.  If this sounds like you or someone you know please contact us with your resume:

• Editors, content developers and medical writers.
• Web researchers, Wikipedians, and librarians 
• Part-time Guides who want to create WisdomCards - Apply Here
• Physicians who want to join our physician review team - Apply Here
• Developers who specialize in MediaWiki
• Have you worked for or participated on Wikipedia, ChaCha, About.com, Mahalo, the DMOZ project? We want to meet you!

Selecting the facts is an important part of the process. Finding them shouldn't be.

Seth Godin published an interesting blog post yesterday called The Wikipedia Gap.

I don't know about you, but when I hire someone, or go to the doctor or the architect or an engineer, I could care less about how good they are at memorizing or looking up facts. I want them to be great at synthesizing ideas, the faster and more insightfully, the better.

Until just recently, law students had to learn a painstaking process to look up cases by hand. No longer. The academy realized that teaching students to be great at Lexis was a smart idea.

Best line:

Selecting the facts is an important part of the process. Finding them shouldn't be.

Carnival time! Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival, that is

The pace of change in the Health 2.0 world is so fast that it can be hard to keep up! That's why there's the Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival. Every two weeks, a host blog produces a roundup of recent posts about new technology, new uses for technology, and new ways of making people's health and lives better.

On Oct. 28, it'll be our turn! If you've seen (or perhaps written) a great post on health 2.0 issues recently, use the submission form to let us know about it.

The most recent edition went up yesterday at Highlight Health, and it's a great one. Host Walter Jessen does an excellent job sorting through an eventful half-month. If you've been looking for an easy way to keep up, just scan his piece for an update on a constantly-changing field.

New Pew Study Shows Patients Turn to Internet for Health Information; Now Can We Get Docs to Do The Same?

Those with chronic conditions are more likely than other e-patients to report that their online searches affected treatment decisions, their interactions with their doctors, their ability to cope with their condition, and their dieting and fitness regimen, according to Susannah Fox's just released report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project titled: E-patients With a Disability or Chronic Disease.

NPR aired an excellent story yesterday that highlights this important data and gives insight into how people (and their families) with chronic conditions are using the Internet to help with health issues.

The piece indicates that "the Internet is changing not just the way patients get medical information, but the way they interact with doctors, their families, and even with strangers."

Coming back from the 6th Annual Information Therapy Conference this week, this is clearly a significant issue.  New technologies and changing behavior for how people are getting health information means there is an opportunity to fix one of the biggest challenges facing the patient doctor relationship: patients are going to the Web for health info, and physicians are actually telling their patients NOT to go to the Web. 

One of the big health care challenges today is that many physicians do not have a trusted and unbiased online resource they can prescribe to their patients to guide them to the very best health information.  But we know that more people start online to find health information than ask their doctor.  The reality is patients are going online (and they will continue to do so) and physicians know that the current clutter online may do more harm than good so they are not sending patients to places like Google (where most people start their health searches). 

There is clearly a disconnect here which is one of the reasons why we are working hard to build the first doctor-guided search service so physicians will have a credible option to recommend patients too. From our perspective, the Web is broken for health until it is organized in a way that physicians will recommend it as a credible, helpful resource to patients, friends and family.  There are already great content sites and health portals like WebMD, RevolutionHealth and Health Central.  There are great content providers like Healthwise, A.D.A.M. and The Mayo Clinic. The problem is, people are being connected to the right information, at the right time.  And with 40-50% of the health information online now resulting from user-generated content, there is a lot more going on than evidence-based information and encyclopedia articles on health. In fact, it's one big mess of spam, clutter, UGC, and duplicative content.

The NPR story highlights the experience of Terry Wilson who was diagnosed with kidney cancer in July.  "He went straight to his computer. There was so much information out there that, at first, he felt overwhelmed.                         

"It was sort of scary at first," he says, "because there was no way to put it in perspective. There was no person I could talk to, to say: What's good information? And I didn't look that much, because my wife was afraid I was getting too upset over... what I was reading, that I would feel like I was doomed. And so she tried to keep me away from it as much as she could at first."

There are many great companies now working to solve this problem so that we can make the Web less scary for patients and physicians.  Together we can put this information in perspective, filter out the junk and guide people to great resources.

>> If you believe in the need to fix this problem the way we do and want to help out, please check out our Guide program.  We are recruiting nurses, physicians, patient experts, members from health foundations, stay at home parents, college students and anyone who cares about helping organize the world's health information to help others. 

Information Therapy Movement Taking Off

I'm in Park City, Utah participating in the 6th Annual Information Therapy Conference, hosted by the Josh Seidman and the Center for Information Therapy.  It's a great event so far and I'm looking forward to speaking about Health 2.0 trends and presenting OrganizedWisdom along with RevolutionHealth and DailyStrength on a panel hosted by Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya.

It's clear that the iX movement is evolving and is moving beyond the education phase to becoming a full-blown "movement".  Six years into the great work and education from the thought leaders attending over the years, there's no doubt the information providers, media companies, hospitals, physicians, nurses, marketers, etc. all get the value in prescribing information to patients as a solution to improving people's health, and solving some of today's biggest health challenges. 

It makes sense that just like prescribing medications to patients, one of the most essential solutions to improving patient care and people's health is to prescribe the right information, to the right patient, at the right time.

Making sure patients get quality information is perhaps the most essential solution the healthcare universe can implement when you consider that more people are now searching online for health information than seeing their doctor and that 80% of patient care today continues to be self-care.  That is, most people today continue to self-diagnose and self-treat (links to the powerpoints where I got these stats will soon be available on the iX Alliance Web site).

Attending this year are not only some of the country's largest hospitals and health providers, but also a new crop of Health 2.0 innovators as well as major media companies like the NYTimes which continues to make amazing innovations to The Gray Lady's health section under the leadership of Sarah Greene.

The energy is palpable and it is exciting to see such a great group of thinkers, entrepreneurs, leaders, health practitioners, and organizations working together to push this mission forward. There's no doubt that access to better information will help a lot of people.