Health stats go online in NSW
Kate McDonald, Pulse+IT
“NSW Health has launched a new website allowing easy access to population health data for the state.
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Public Health
A service model for improving healthcare delivery in rural developing communities
Leach RJ et al, International Journal of Services, Economics and Management, 4(1)
The infrastructure needed in developing countries, especially in rural areas, often makes providing state-of-the-art healthcare cost prohibitive. We describe a highly asynchronous service model for healthcare delivery that is inexpensive, at least compared to the usual implementation of telemedicine, and involves technical service, public health, training and political aspects.
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9 ways health IT – beyond EHRs – helps patients
Kristine Martin Anderson, Government Health IT
“Even among very knowledgeable people, the concept of health information technology is often equated with its most familiar element, “electronic health records.” Adoption of electronic health records are a critical first step to realizing the transformational power of Health IT – but getting out of paper enables even greater HIT capabilities.
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Mixed uptake of social media among public health specialists
Ben Jones, Bull World Health Organ
“Sari Setiogi was worried. In the wake of the Japanese earthquake back in March 2011, panic about the effects of a possible radiation leak at the Fukushima nuclear plant had caused a number of rumours to spring up on social networking site Twitter.
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Implementation of an innovative, integrated electronic medical record (EMR) and public health information exchange for HIV/AIDS
Herwehe J et al, J Am Med Inform Assoc, 2011
Louisiana is severely affected by HIV/AIDS, ranking fifth in AIDS rates in the USA. The Louisiana Public Health Information Exchange (LaPHIE) is a novel, secure bi-directional public health information exchange, linking statewide public health surveillance data with electronic medical record data. LaPHIE alerts medical providers when individuals with HIV/AIDS who have not received HIV care for >12 months are seen at any ambulatory or inpatient facility in an integrated delivery network.
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Eyes on the Prize – Using EHRs to Transform Public Health Practice
Jonathan French, HIMSS Blog
“The EHR Meaningful Use Program promises to revolutionize the practice of medicine – and similarly -presents a great opportunity to transform the practice of public health.
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Assessing Vaccination Sentiments with Online Social Media: Implications for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Control
Salathé M, Khandelwal S. PLoS Comput Biol, 7(10)
There is great interest in the dynamics of health behaviors in social networks and how they affect collective public health outcomes, but measuring population health behaviors over time and space requires substantial resources. Here, we use publicly available data from 101,853 users of online social media collected over a time period of almost six months to measure the spatio-temporal sentiment towards a new vaccine. We validated our approach by identifying a strong correlation between sentiments expressed online and CDC-estimated vaccination rates by region.
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Text Messaging in Health Care: A Systematic Review of Impact Studies
Yeager VA, Menachemi N. Biennial Review of Health Care Management, 2011
Background
Studies suggest text messaging is beneficial to health care; however, no one has synthesized the overall evidence on texting interventions. In response to this need, we conducted a systematic review of the impacts of text messaging in health care.
Methods
PubMed database searches and subsequent reference list reviews sought English-language, peer-reviewed studies involving text messaging in health care. Commentaries, conference proceedings, and feasibilities studies were excluded. Data was extracted using an article coding sheet and input into a database for analysis.
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Public health and HIE: MPI synchronization
Noam Arzt, Government Health IT
“One of the key elements of an HIE is the Master Patient Index (MPI), which associates records from multiple sources accurately with a single patient.
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Collective Health Intelligence: A Tool for Public Health
Marsh AJ et al, Future Visions on Biomedicine and Bioinformatics 1, 2011
Web 3.0 is fast approaching. The European Union Future Internet Assembly, the roadmap for the Web heading towards semantic interoperability and building on the UK’s adoption of the Internet and social media are accelerating this development. A number of health portals are opening, some with facilities for the capture of Patient Based Records. Collective Intelligence will be generated that, applied to health, has potential to support Public Health policy. By using the Internet, millions of people in the course of their daily activities contribute to uncertified data stores, some explicitly collaborating to create collective knowledge bases, some contributing implicitly through the patterns of their choices and actions.
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Is all the MU data “meaningful”?
Jeff Rowe, Healthcare IT HITECHWatch
“We interrupt these dog days of summer for a bit of a doctors’ food fight.
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Social Media and Health Care: Why Add Another Task to a Busy Physician’s Day?
Mark Ryan, iMedicalApps
“In these last few months, I have been lucky enough to discuss the use of social media with physicians in a number of settings. One of the major themes of these discussions is determining the value of social media that makes it worth adding to a physician’s day already filled with patient care, insurance, and other administrative work.
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Public Health pilot connects with Electronic Medical Records
Rosie Lombardi, Technology for Doctors Online
“Doctors still use paper and fax to share data with Public Health authorities, but recent pandemics have underscored the need to automate data collection. To this end, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) ran a pilot during the second wave of the H1N1 pandemic (Oct 2009 to May 2011).
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Twitter used to track public health trends
Rosie Lombardi, Technology for Doctors Online
“Twitter allows millions of social media fans to comment in 140 characters or less on just about anything: an actor’s outlandish behavior, an earthquake’s tragic toll or the great taste of a grilled cheese sandwich. But by sifting through this busy flood of banter, is it possible to also track important public health trends? Two Johns Hopkins University computer scientists would respond with a one-word tweet: “Yes!”
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Social Web mining and exploitation for serious applications: Technosocial Predictive Analytics and related technologies for public health, environmental and national security surveillance
Kamel Boulos MN et al, Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine,100(1)
This paper explores Technosocial Predictive Analytics (TPA) and related methods for Web “data mining” where users’ posts and queries are garnered from Social Web (”Web 2.0″) tools such as blogs, micro-blogging and social networking sites to form coherent representations of real-time health events.
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Send the Questions to the Data
Wes Rishel, Gartner
“One of the insights of the PCAST report was the utility of sending the question to the data vs centralizing the data to answer questions. It may take a long time to achieve this by defining a new universal data language and using digital content management to manage consumer privacy preferences, but what happens if we uncouple that the basic “question to the data” notion from the more elaborate vision of the Report?
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Tweets Provide Lots of Public Health Data
“The phenomenal growth of social media has created an unprecedented communication vehicle. Twitter alone allows millions of social media fans to comment in 140 characters or less on just about anything.
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Infodemiology and infoveillance tracking online health information and cyberbehavior for public health
Eysenbach G. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 40(5 Suppl 2)
Infodemiology, an emerging area of research at the crossroads of consumer health informatics and public health informatics, as well as infometrics and web analytics tools, can be defined as the science of distribution and determinants of information in an electronic medium, specifically the Internet, with the ultimate aim to inform public health and public policy. Infodemiology data (derived from unstructured, textual, openly accessible information produced and consumed by the public on the Internet, such as blogs, websites, and query and navigation data) can be collected and analyzed in near real-time.
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Wikipedia: a key tool for global public health promotion
Heilman JM et al, J Med Internet Res, 13(1)
The Internet has become an important health information resource for patients and the general public. Wikipedia, a collaboratively written Web-based encyclopedia, has become the dominant online reference work. It is usually among the top results of search engine queries, including when medical information is sought. Since April 2004, editors have formed a group called WikiProject Medicine to coordinate and discuss the English-language Wikipedia’s medical content.
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Building a Telemedicine Network in the Sunshine State
Jessica B. Mulholland, Governing
“When someone is injured in Key West, Fla., emergency personnel can bring trauma specialists 130 miles away in Miami straight to the scene — virtually.
As part of a pilot, emergency room personnel at the Lower Keys Medical Center in Key West and specialists at Miami’s Ryder Trauma Center each have a mobile cart complete with a laptop, a high-definition video camera and wireless Internet capabilities.
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