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The age of digitzed medicine is here. But for all its promises of simplifying doctors' visits, the technology also risks alienating the very people it's meant to help.
The HITECH Act, part of the 2009 federal stimulus bill, has been the final kick in the pants that U.S. health care has long needed to make the conversion to digital. The act states that, by employing electronic health records (EHRs) in a fashion known as meaningful use, doctors are individually
First physicians had to hang signs to remind patients not to talk or text on their cellphones so they would not disturb others. Now that cellphone capabilities have expanded, physicians have a choice: Do they extend that warning to taking pictures with a smartphone?
Though the ban on telephone conversations was motivated by an attempt to keep down the annoyance factor, the implications of snapping pictures inside a practice can go beyond other patients getting a little irritated. If picture-taking is left unfettered, patients could feel violated and sense that a practice doesnt take patient privacy seriously. On the other
As people have turned to Internet media for news, many medical schools and teaching hospitals have responded by joining the blogosphere. For many institutions, blogs allow a more in-depth exploration of a new scientific study or major event than a Facebook post or tweet. It is unclear exactly how many medical schools and teaching hospitals maintain blogs, but the number appears to be growing. In a 2011 survey by the AAMC’s Group on Institutional Advancement (GIA), 44 percent of medical school and teaching hospital respondents reported using blogs as part of their social media strategy.
Ed Bennett, director of Web strategy at the University
It’ll be no surprise to the readers of this blog that physicians’ use of Twitter and other social media has been exploding over the last couple of years. But it may surprise you to know how hard it is to really analyze that data.Last year Dr. Katherine Chretien of the VA Medical Center in Washington, DC, published an eye-opening study in a JAMA letter. Until that point, all we really had were anecdotes and survey responses – certainly not the same as analyzing what physicians were actually doing and saying on Twitter.By leveraging a strong research team, Dr. Chretien was able to narrow a list of 523 potential author candidates to a final group
Doctors prescribing phones apps to manage health problems The Columbus Dispatch Sunday March 31, 2013 7:32 AM Dr. Jennifer Dyer and Duet Health are planning a clinical trial for their app to gauge its efficacy. Doctors are beginning to prescribe smart-phone applications and medical devices they work with to help patients manage chronic illnesses, including heart disease, diabetes and asthma.“I
David May, MD, describes Twitter as a doctors lounge. When he wants to discuss the latest journal articles or clinical research, there are always other doctors on hand to offer their opinions and add to the discussion. But unlike a doctors lounge, the discussion isnt limited to colleagues down the hospital corridor. It can include thousands of people from around the world.The social media world is such an intense, immediately responsive place that you can have tremendous amounts of traffic pointing out the good and bad about an article itself technically, about the concepts that were put forward, and about potential flaws that were in a paper,
Although health care providers say electronic health records offer benefits, some complain that their EHR systems are not designed with the user in mind and, as a result, are inefficient and not intuitive.
In an iHealthBeat Special Report by Kenny Goldberg, experts discussed efforts to improve EHR usability.
One morning recently, I found another physician standing morosely at one of the mobile computer terminals we refer to as “cows”—computers on wheels—that are everywhere now in our hospital. I asked what was the matter. “Oh nothing, really,” she said. “It’s just that I don’t feel I know the patients as well as I used to.”
I knew exactly what she meant. Things are different now that we have the EMR—the electronic medical record. After two months of use, we’ve learned to our sorrow that these records don’t tell us stories that make cognitive sense. Instead they offer data in endless lists.
Before the written word, people told
Propaganda and non-truths abound all around the Internet saying that mobile health apps are everything from a threat to Big Pharma to a way to save billions of dollars in healthcare costs. There may be a future for mobile apps but a lot of work is yet to be done.
Last year I led some market research into mobile apps across all demographic segments and several disease conditions. While we did uncover some opportunities for mobile health we also learned that patients are very finicky about what they want in health apps and even more finicky about being reminded of their health conditions.
We found, for example, that type 1 diabetics
So you’ve decided to take the plunge (or at least, dip your toes) into the Twitterverse. Congratulations! Welcome to a vibrant interactive community. You’ll find plenty of different personalities here and lots of opinions. But if you are like I was back in January 2011, you currently have no idea how to actually use Twitter, let alone how a physician might want to use it.
There are plenty of places to find information about how to start a Twitter account, so I am going to take a leap of faith and say that if you are reading this, you have already set one up. If
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