Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Innovative uses of Health 2.0 and Social Media

 

Imagine a ‘Wiki” to empower patients

Several Health Wiki’s are already online.

WikiPublicHealth  (WiKiPH)  is  a U.K. based information source. It remains an open source for articles by anyone. It appears to allow anyone to register/log in/and create articles

Health Wiki News 

 

HealthWikiNews is an already established site closely moderated by an advisory panel. It is hosted on WordPress.

Imagine that you have asthma, and rather than give you a set of instructions about what to do if you have an attack, your doctor invites you to help write them? Would that make patients feel more engaged and empowered in managing their health care, and would that ultimately make them happier if not healthier?

These questions are being raised by Dr. Samir Gupta, a respirologist at St. Michael's Hospital.

His research has found that a wiki - a website developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content - can be an innovative new tool for developing individual asthma action plans.

West Wireless Institute: aggressively advancing the mHealth ecosystem

Founded by billionaire entrepreneurs Gary and Mary West, and guided by a blue chip laden executive team with all of the elements required to both think big and execute, the Institute has burst onto the scene in 2011.

Post image for West Wireless Institute: aggressively advancing the mHealth ecosystem, interview CMO Joe Smith, MD

There is no single organization worthy of mention in the same breath with San Diego-based West Wireless Health Institute when discussing the contribution of non-profit groups to the mHealth movement.

West Health Policy Center

West Wireless Health Council

West Wireless Health Fund

The opportunity presented itself to interview the Institute’s Chief Medical Officer Joe Smith, MD, PhD. During our conversation I was able to ask Dr. Smith about each of the projects and how they have progressed to date. The complete transcript can be found at the mHealth home page.

The organization also offers Fellowships.

More  trends in HIT, will they facilitate Health Reform by enabling cost reduction?

 

IBM has unveiled a clinical-analytics platform to provide doctors with insight into patients' conditions using natural-language processing and machine-learning capabilities similar to Watson.

 

IBM is moving on from "Jeopardy" to finding treatments using genetic data. The company announced it has developed a data-analytics platform called Clinical Genomics that uses algorithms and analytics similar to that of Big Blue's Watson supercomputer to find treatments for conditions based on a patient's genetic profile.

IBM's Clinical Genomics fits into the growing trend in health care of using big data to develop personalized medicine, which is the ability to use a patient's personal genetic characteristics to prescribe medical treatment for conditions, such as cancer, hypertension and AIDS.

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