My last visit was for an annual checkup a few weeks ago and we were talking about point-of-care tools and integration with his EMR.  It turns out that their EMR has no useful functionality to help find or produce patient education handouts he can quickly sent to a printer

I told him it would not be difficult to make a tool that would enable him to find authoritative handouts quickly and easily from the paid resources his practice has available, and he expressed interest in that idea.

He hasn’t followed up, but I found the idea interesting, so I started thinking about what sort of tool could be built for this purpose that could be integrated into any EMR using only patient handouts that are available at no cost on the Web.

With that in mind, I came up with a Google Custom Search Engine for use by providers at our hospital, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be used by any institution or practice.

The idea behind this is that any search result is not only authoritative, but that it is within a click of a “print” button.

There are built-in refinements for large print, pediatrics, Spanish language, Seniors, and low literacy.

Please give it a try here.

Internists and medical libraryfolk: I’d be grateful for your feedback!

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I did NOT mean to post the same video with the same post title a day after Nikki did.

[/EDIT]

Ever have a hard time explaining the placebo effect? Let Dr. Ben Goldacre do it for you in this video from the NHS:

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Abstract

There is an increasing need to help health consumers to achieve timely, differentiated access to quality online healthcare resources. This paper describes and evaluates methods for automated classification of consumer health Web content with respect to qualitative attributes relevant to the preferences of individual health consumers. This is illustrated in the context of identifying breast cancer consumer web pages that are ‘supportive’ versus ‘medical’ perspective, as compared to an existing manual classification employed by a breast cancer portal with personalised search preference options. Classification is performed based on analysis of word co-occurrences and an enhanced decision tree classifier (a decision forest). Current classification test results for ‘medical’ versus ‘supportive’ type resources are 90% accurate (95% confidence interval, 86-94%) using this decision forest classifier. These early results are indicating that language use patterns can be used to automate such classification with acceptable accuracy; however, a wider range of websites and metadata attributes needs to be assessed and compared to end-user feedback. Future application may be either in a tool to facilitate metadata coders in populating the databases of domain-specific portals such as BCKOnline, or in providing tagging or sorting on content type on live search results from health consumers.

Full Text: PDF (Free, registration required)

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Is anyone else really tired of seeing these articles and pretending these sites matter? They might one day, but they don’t now.

Anyway, the Pew Internet and American Life Project (Please tell me I’m not the only one who quietly thinks “pew-pew-pew!” to himself every time Pew is mentioned?) says:

Nearly half (47%) of internet users, or 35% of adults, have turned to the internet for information about doctors or other health professionals.”

Nothing surprising there.

“These health information seekers, however, are not likely to post their own reviews of doctors: just 7% of those who looked for information about doctors online (and 4% of all internet users) report posting a review of a doctor online.”

Well, nothing surprising there, either. The vast majority of Wikipedia’s users (or Digg’s) are there to read, not to contribute. Isn’t this the overwhelming trend in most “social media”? (And wouldn’t noting this context be important? What does this item from Pew mean without such context?)

I’ll state again that I think every physician rating site I’ve seen is useless. When patrons (or friends) ask me how to find a good specialist, I recommend avoiding these sites. The advice I gave one family member was to get in touch with local, regional, and national patient support groups for the diagnosed (or suspected) condition necessitating a visit to a specialist. If you want the opinion of informed patients, that’s where you’ll find it.

Just for good measure:

I like lolcats. Sue me.

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• Google Flu Trends
• FluTrackers
• The DoD Worldwide Influenza Surveillance Program
• World Health Organization
• Centers for Disease Control

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Other posts on this site about ‘Flu

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Some interesting numbers. Not sure about the rest.

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University of Wisconsin Department of Family Medicine physician Derek Hubbard, MD instructs family doctors on how to find clinical information [on the Web] at the point of care.

There are definitely some good tips for clinicians here, but a couple that make me a little uneasy (like using info from About.com as a patient handout).

Dr. Hubbard might also be interested in using the Consumer Health and Patient Education Search Engine.

[Hattip: Ratcatcher]

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Watching misinformation spread is sort of entertaining. Check out all the people who talk about not eating pork on Twitter. (The flu is not spread by eating pork.)

Hah! As I was writing this post, the latest xkcd appeared!

The CDC’s Emergency Preparedness and Response Twitter feed seems to be a frequently-updated source of sanity:

RSS Feed for CDC’s Swine Flu site

Maps
Google Map 1 (H1N1 Swine Flu)
Google Map 2 (”Swine Flu 2009″)
Google Map 3 (”HPAI H5N1 30-Day Outbreak Map”)

HealthMap (previously mentioned here) might be the most complete map visualization. HealthMap’s twitter feed is also interesting, but gives a more panicked impression than that of the CDC (see above)

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Our goal is to provide unique user-generated data on side effects and subtle side effects of medications. We want to know how these prescription drugs make you feel.

I’ve seen stupid applications of social media in healthcare, but this may take the cake as the dumbest I’ve seen in a good while.

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Havidol is clearly an amazing new drug. Thank goodness there’s such a wonderfully detailed site to tell us all about Havidol and how it can treat Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder (DSACDAD).

Click to visit the site

Great parody of direct-to-consumer advertising.

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