September 27, 2007
Use of Online Healthcare Tools
According to a recent study of consumer's use of online health care tools, the most popular tool was a search for a physician or a facility. The study population were 3,403 non-elderly, commercially insured US consumers who use online health care tools. The survey found that 23% of respondents use health plan selection tools, 19% use online health risk assessments, and 12% use drug quality comparison tools. Interestingly, 18% of responders said that they have used online drug cost comparison tools, and 34% of those said that they were confident that they were making the right decision by using the drug cost comparison tool. Nine percent of respondents said they have used a hospital quality comparison tool, while another 9% said they have used health care cost information tools.
The survey was conducted by Forrester Research in the second quarter of 2007.
Source: iHealthBeat
September 23, 2007
Health 2.0 Conference
Health 2.0 Conference took place this past week in San Francisco. The goal of the conference was to get the leaders in Health2.0 to meet each other and to meet the key individuals in large health care organizations, technology, finance and anyone with an interest in the topic. Online consumer aggregators such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, WebMD discussed their views on the use of Health2.0 in the future of online health. In addition leading providers & health plans like Kaiser Permanente, Regence BCBS and BCBS Minnesota provided insights on how they plan to use these Web 2.0 tools.
There were demonstrations of the latest innovations from big and small Health2.0 technology companies. Some of the panels and discussions centered around topics including:
> fostering new online patient communities
> designing health-focused search engines
> connecting physicians to each other
> providing health care tools for consumers (including administrative and clinical tools)
For more information:
Health 2.0 website
Health Blog
Update 9/24/07
Some videos from the conference
September 17, 2007
Studying Internet Technophobes
A group of psychologists are being hired by BT, a large Internet provider in the UK, to study individuals who are reluctant or fearful of using the Internet.
Statistics on UK net use suggest that 39% of households do not have web access and some preliminary research suggests that for some people, using the Net is very stressful.
The study will attempt to ascertain feelings, attitudes and approaches to the Internet by a small group of 'technophobes.' Participants will be coached about using the Internet and examine why they are reluctant. In addition, readings of physiological changes will be taken when they go online.
To acquaint them with online life, subjects have been given a broadband link, a laptop, webcam and a digital camera. A two-month training plan has also been developed that will introduce them to what they can do on the Net.
The participants will also be encouraged to record their experiences on video or in still images and comment on what they discover. Their videos and images will be shown on the "Journey to Inclusion" website documenting the project.
Links:
September 11, 2007
Web 2.0 and Medicine: Poster Session on Second Life
A science and medicine poster session was held on Second Life.
Poster presentations and discussion included:
- web 2.0’s impact on medicine
- medical blogs (code of ethics, rankings)
- medical wikis
- medical podcasts
- videocasts
- search engines
and the Second Life project, the Ann Myers Medical Center
A poster about Tiromed.com described a unique medical community (with more than 2600 members from 70! countries) and a presentation on Biowizard.com, a site founded by PhD students to create a free, web-based community for life scientists and physicians, aimed at making the world’s biomedical research information universally accessible and useful. So if you would like to use a more interactive Pubmed, then try Biowizard!
There was also a poster and discussion on Drug Design and web 2.0. It appears that complicated processes like drug designing become easier by using web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, mailing lists, Second Life).
Related Links:
Upcoming Related Conferences
* The third Healthcare Blogging & Social Media Summit
o September 17/18, 2007
o The Chicago Hilton, in Chicago, IL, co-located at Consumer Health World
* Personalized Medicine: Breaking Down the Barriers and Achieving Results
o October 11
o The Conference Center at Harvard Medical School
Top 10 Virtual Medical Sites on Second Life
Source: Science Roll Weblog
September 06, 2007
Brain Painting: The Aesthetics of Neuroscience
What do you get when you combine art and brainwaves? Brain painting. Colorful fractal images from electroencephalograms. Bill Scott from UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute along with others, recently developed a new neuroimaging technology that creates a fractal signature from an EEG. He has successfully utilized this technology as a form of EEG biofeedback.
His primary area of investigation has been the use of biofeedback in treating addiction and anxiety disorders and he has published, presented and taught in the techniques of biofeedback for use in clinical practice.
The Brain Paint software when used in a biofeedback clinical situation, compares previous responses to questions with current responses and calculates specific recommendations to improve results. It also calculates and stores subtle indicators of progress in growth scores; these are then referenced to find protocols that work well and flag protocols that you may want to avoid with a particular individual. It also gives audio and visual representations of that same linear data. Additionally, BrainPaint extracts a new metric on the complexity of the EEG and feeds that back visually in a language the brain functions in. Acording to its creator, "our brains and BrainPaint are complex systems -- BrainPaint takes information communicated directly from the brain and creates real-time fractal images that the brain appears to understand."