davidrothman.net

Sure, you’ve heard of sites/services that invite consumers to rate physicians, but Medziva invites users to rate labs and comment on various tests.

From the About Medziva page:

…You can discuss amongst yourselves which lab test and which lab would be a good lab for you to get your tests done from or which labs you could recommend to your physicians to get your testing done from.

Why do we do this?

There are so many labs out there offering new tests which could help diagnose certain conditions at an early stage, which helps physicians treat you in a more effective way. There may be smaller labs which may do a better job at lab testing that diagnose conditions better and offer more detailed results than the tests offered by the bigger labs. Our effort is to discover the smaller and mid-size labs out there.

I wonder, though, if enough people will actually care about this to populate the site with the necessary minimum amount of data to be useful.

October 10th, 2007 | Category: "Social Software", Consumer Health Info, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology, Video | Comments (2)

Need help keeping up with all the blog posts about Internet Librarian International 2007? LibWorm can help.

Try this query or this feed.

October 9th, 2007 | Category: LibWorm, Technology | Comments (3)

From the Arizona Daily Star comes this article:

Deadly cancer eludes diagnosis: Scared woman finds answer missed by 6 Tucson doctors

Norma Greer made a correct diagnosis of Inflammatory Breast Cancer that six physicians missed.

How did she diagnose her condition?

…it took Greer herself less than an hour to come up with a possible IBC diagnosis, after she plugged her symptoms into the Internet.

Velly intellestink, no?

The Washington Post has an article titled Real Hope in a Virtual World
about patients who believe they’ve experienced real therapeutic benefits from Second Life.

After suffering a devastating stroke four years ago, Susan Brown was left in a wheelchair with little hope of walking again. Today, the 57-year-old Richmond woman has regained use of her legs and has begun to reclaim her life, thanks in part to encouragement she says she gets from an online “virtual world” where she can walk, run and even dance.

Roberto Salvatierra, long imprisoned in his home by his terror over going outdoors, has started venturing outside more after gaining confidence by first tentatively exploring the three-dimensional, interactive world on the Internet.

John Dawley III, who has a form of autism that makes it hard to read social cues, learned how to talk with people more easily by using his computer-generated alter ego to practice with other cyber-personas.

Tangental commentary: The gallery of images is interesting. I suppose it is just human nature, but have you noticed that almost everyone makes his or her Second Life Avatar more attractive than he/she is in real life?

October 8th, 2007 | Category: Consumer Health Info, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology | Comments (1)

The existence of the show isn’t news, but I just came across a video advertisement for it:

The premise of the show:

Frances O’Brien, devout Catholic and panic disorder sufferer, runs a very tight ship as Head Librarian at the Middleton Interactive Learning Centre. Her life unravels when she is forced to employ her ex-best friend, Christine Grimwood – now facing criminal charges – as the Children’s Librarian.

Suddenly, long buried feelings that Frances has suppressed since she last saw Christine nineteen years ago, rush at her like a truck. She must do all she can to contain her menacing past and concentrate on the biggest event of the Library calendar year – Book Week.

More here (PDF).

October 8th, 2007 | Category: Perception of Libraries/Librarians, Video | Comments Off

[Update: As Nikki points out, it is cheaper to buy via Amazon.com and should be available around October 26th.]

As previously mentioned, Alexia Estabrook and I wrote the chapter on RSS. Alexia rocks.

More information and the order form are available here.

I wonder when I’ll get my copy. Haworth’s site says it is supposed to be available “Summer 2007,” but it is now Autumn.

October 8th, 2007 | Category: "Library 2.0", For Medical Libraryfolk, Medical Librarianship Blogs, Technology | Comments (6)

My brother sent me a link to an article about IBM’s Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine.

The Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME) provides an interactive 3D model of the human body that displays health information at a glance so doctors can visualize the medical histories of their patients and thereby improve care. With a click of the mouse a doctor can view a particular part of the avatar “body” to trigger a search of medical records and retrieve relevant information.

October 6th, 2007 | Category: For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology | Comments (1)

Congratulations to my friend Mary Carmen Chimato on being selected for the ALA’s Emerging Leaders 2008 program!

October 6th, 2007 | Category: Personal | Comments (1)

A video from Google.

Testimonials from real patients and physicians on how the Internet has helped them with their health care treatment and delivery.

Above: Embedded video. If you are reading this via your feed aggregator, you may need to visit the site itself to view.

What bothers me about this video is that “the internet” isn’t the best tool for ANY of the purposes mentioned in this video. There are better tools for finding quality health information than Google and “the internet.”

Also: What is “Health Think”? (See opening and closing titles)

October 5th, 2007 | Category: Consumer Health Info, For Medical Libraryfolk, Information Literacy, Search, Technology | Comments Off

From the About Us page at OutOfPocket.com:

Did you know that health care is the only industry that sells services to consumers without openly disclosing prices? Consumers today are required to make more decisions about their own health care and as a result, transparency has become an important issue. Consumers are demanding more choices, better service and disclosure of prices

[snip]

…we have launched OutOfPocket.com to help consumers look-up and compare out-of-pocket health care costs for common medical services. OutofPocket.com is a directory of true prices for health care services, and allows you, the cost-conscious consumer, to compare costs so you can effectively manage your health care dollars. The contents of the directory are contributed by consumers to share with other consumers and everyone is invited to participate — including the uninsured, and the insured.

[snip]

…OutOfPocket.com is a collaborative effort by consumer champions like you. Price transparency is a powerful force that will help transform the health care industry and you have the power to influence this change. By exposing health care prices, consumers collectively may ultimately change what providers charge – and how much consumers pay.

The idea might be a good one, but there doesn’t seem to be much data for my area at the moment.

October 5th, 2007 | Category: "Social Software", Consumer Health Info, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology | Comments Off

HealthVault appears to be Microsoft’s offering in the field of patient-created personal health records.

When it’s your job to protect your family’s health, you need every advantage. Imagine if you had a way to collect, store, and share the health information critical to your family’s well-being.

HealthVault is the new and FREE way to do just that.

Imagine controlling the flow of your health information. Whether you need to search the Web for the most up-to-date treatments, catalog existing health records, receive test results, or monitor current physical readings — HealthVault gives you the control you need.

I like that they put a short version of their privacy policy on the front page:

Our Health Privacy Commitment
1. The Microsoft HealthVault record you create is controlled by you.
2. You decide what goes into your HealthVault record.
3. You decide who can see and use your information on a case-by-case basis.
4. We do not use your health information for commercial purposes unless we ask and you clearly tell us we may.

To read our full Privacy Statement, click here.

The other day, I mentioned a class of sites/services that includes SugarStats, ReliefInsite, and Fertility Friend – sites that help patients track data that is of diagnositic or therapeutic value to the patient or the patient’s healthcare providers. Wouldn’t it be great to have a free PHR service that included an optional module for each of these purposes?

October 4th, 2007 | Category: Consumer Health Info, EMRs/EHRs/PHRs, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology | Comments (2)

NetDoc’s Hospital Rankings prompts the user to enter his/her zip code and places markers on a Google Map that indicate the HHS Hospital Compare rankings for nearby hospitals.

[Via]

October 4th, 2007 | Category: Consumer Health Info, For Medical Libraryfolk, Mashups, Technology | Comments Off

Just stumbled across these excellent presentation slides by Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and CEO of Atlassian.

Above: Embedded presentation slides. If you’re reading this in a feed aggregator, you might need to visit the site to view them.

October 3rd, 2007 | Category: "Social Software", Technology, Wikis | Comments Off

ReliefInsite.com is yet another site/service for healthcare consumers. This on helps patients track chronic pain in great detail (location, time, type, interference with daily life) and securely share the information with appropriate healthcare providers.

This isn’t wildly dissimilar in concept from SugarStats for diabetics and Fertility Friend for women attempting to conceive. All of these help the patient conveniently track the minute details of important health information that is of use to both the patient and the patient’s healthcare provider(s).

Even if I liked the “2.0″ suffix generally (I don’t), I wouldn’t want to call these “Health 2.0″ tools because they’re not really social. What are we to call this class of tools? What other sorts of patients would most benefit from such tools?

October 2nd, 2007 | Category: Consumer Health Info, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology | Comments (7)

What is bioscreencast.com?
Bioscreencast.com is a website that has video tutorials or screencasts for the biological sciences. Currently, these tutorials are created by researchers across various biology disciplines. In our next version, we will add the capability to let users upload their own screencasts. Our goal is to build a community of life science researchers and provide a platform to share knowledge on usage of tools that aid research.

Cool! You can view or share screencasts displaying PubMed expertise as Quicktime videos.

October 2nd, 2007 | Category: For Medical Libraryfolk, Search, Technology, Video | Comments (3)