Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The New Scientist reports that “Sixty-one per cent of American adults seek out health advice online.” Looking for medical advice online is okay as long as you don’t rely on a unreliable sites. For instance, who would trust a user generated site like Wikipedia? The answer to this question, is doctors. According to a report…
Bob Laszewski has a great posts on 5 false “solutions” to reduce health care costs. These are: EMR: Making electronic medical records universal will greatly improve health care quality, but the impact on cost will be minor. Better quality care can reduce iatrogenic injuries and reduce cost, but the cost reduction–if any–will likely be small…
From the BBC: “…researchers found Web searches for common symptoms such as headache and chest pain were just as likely or more likely to lead people to pages describing serious conditions as benign ones, even though the serious illnesses are much more rare. Searching for ‘chest pain’ or ‘muscle twitches’ returned terrifying results with the…
Google searches as a public health resource: Google.org has released Flu Trends, an online reporting tool for flu-related search activity. It’s long been theorized that Google’s search data would be useful to predict epidemics. This is the first time they’ve released a tool like this to the public. As they say on the main page: We have found a…
Is it better for a physician to have more information or less? Should physicians utilize diagnostic support systems (DSS) which base their recommendations on hundreds or thousands of data points or should they trust their gut instinct? Most rational people would say that physicians should use DSS–not blindly–but as a tool to guide their decisionmaking.…
Information technology has the possibility of greatly increasing the efficiency of health care. EMRs can reduce the cost of accessing patient information. New technologies can make medical devices more effective. But is there a cost to increased medical technology? GigaOM wonders “…will widespread diagnostics increase the burden on healthcare? Somewhere between 10 and 50…
MedPedia is a new project similar to Wikipedia but for medicine. It will act as an online collaborative medical encyclopedia available to the general public. Unlike Wikipedia, content editors and creators are required to have an MD or a PhD. Organizations funding MedPedia include some well-known acronyms: CDC, NIH, and FDA. One question remains: will…
As I noted in an earlier post, choosing a Medicare part D plan is difficult. However, there are resources to help people choose a Medicare Part D plan based on which prescriptions they are taking and where they live. Medicare has its own Personalized Plan Search. The private sector also has come up with user-friendly…
Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School has launched HealthMap, an automated data-gathering system used to track disease. HealthMap aims to organize and disseminate this online information using feeds from various public health organizations. This is similar to the concept I first saw at the Who Is Sick website, but the HealthMap seems to be…
Today, Google has made its Google Health program publicly available. You can get a tour of Google Health here and FAQs are available here. TechCrunch has a great comparison (“…Hands-on Look“) of Google Health and Microsoft’s HealthVault. “Whereas HealthVault’s strengths seem to lie in tying together different health information silos on the back end, Google…