A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association accents the limits of web-based health management tools that are currently available.
Researchers focused specifically on tools for managing diabetes, but the drawbacks could extend to other tools designed to help patients do everything from lose weight to quit smoking. The study concluded that "despite their abundance, few practical web-accessible tools exist." In many case, the tools suffered from poor design that made them difficult to use.
Google announced yesterday that its layered 3D browser of the human body has become an open-source project. Google Body was built by Google engineers in their "20% time" - the 1/5th of Googlers' time and energy they can devote to creative projects - of which all other human beings are jealous.
Zygote Media Group, which provided the imagery for Google's modeling, has built Zygote Body with the code. It offers the same navigation and features. To support this launch, the Google Body team has built a new, open-source 3D viewer at open-3d-viewer.googlecode.com. Thanks to the work of Google engineers, any developer can now use the same kind of 3D model browser for her or his own project.
Men are more likely than women to turn to Facebook and other social networks for healthcare purposes, according to a survey by accounting firm PwC.
Not surprisingly, the survey of 1,000 adults found that younger people were more likely to use social media than older people for healthcare purposes. Overall, nearly a third of respondents, and 50 percent of those under the age of 35, had used social media for healthcare purposes, which can range from registering a complaint to looking up informational videos on YouTube.
The PwC report concluded that social media would continue to be a factor for healthcare providers and consumers, saying that healthcare is "no longer social media's wallflower." At the same time, however, ambiguous regulations, privacy concerns and a host of other factors all limit how patients and healthcare providers use social media to make decisions.
You're more likely to use your smart phone to search for information about sexually transmitted diseases and mental health issues, but searches on serious conditions like diabetes and cancer are still coming from desktop and laptop computers.
Those were among the findings in a study released by Healthline Networks for the top searches on its health information site in 2011. Chlamydia was the number one query for mobile device users, while cancer was the top search from desktops and laptops.
The Web health space is expected to see revenues quadruple to $400 million by 2016, and much of that growth could come from companies selling gamification services. This week, Keas, a firm co-founded by former Google Health chief Adam Bosworth, announced it had raised $6.5 million. Keas' social health game uses a Facebook-like feed that a company's employees, or "players," use to join teams and sign up for weekly health goals, earning points when they reach them.
The concept of gamification been has around since at least 2010, but it's new enough in the Web health space that research into its efficacy isn't comprehensive yet. But Dr. Ash Nadkarni, resident physician in the Department of Psychiatry at Boston Medical Center and founder of Appguppy Mobile, an application creation service, said early results are encouraging. Gamification addresses some of the shortcomings of prescription-based therapies, like noncompliance and poor nutritional and fitness education.
They're not Facebook-like numbers just yet, but after just seven months Doximity has signed up about one out of every 20 U.S. physicians for its LinkedIn-like networking service.
That amounts to more than 30,000 doctors, or twice as many on LinkedIn. The reason doctors shy away from LinkedIn and other mainstream social networks is, unlike Doximity, there are no privacy protections in place that will keep physicians on the right side of patient privacy laws. Previous attempts at a doctor-only social network required physician anonymity, which made it all but useless when it came to make referrals or conferring on a diagnosis.
On Monday, Doximity launched ExpertFinder, a new service the company says will make it easier for doctors to find experts and opt-in to research interviews. The announcement seems to position Doximity as an early leader in the mobile health care device market, which could quadruple to $400 million in annual revenues by 2016.
The iTunes app store will contain just over 13,000 healthcare-related apps by 2012, a sign that the caring and treatment for the sick - or even those fearing they are sick - is moving to the mobile device.
Analysts also say that these apps are increasing in price during a period of rising healthcare costs and a significant rise in the number of professional-aged people without health insurance.
Mobile phones could be used to track peoples' physical activity and other health factors, using data gathered from existing community groups to track performance against baseline standards for health, rewarding individuals and groups exhibiting healthy patterns, and changing our relationship with food, exercise, medicine, insurance and general health. That's the bold vision of the future articulated by Dr. Brigitte Piniewski, Portland, Oregon-based Chief Medical Officer of PeaceHealth Laboratories, in a must-read interview on Mobile Health News this weekend.
Piniewski says young people in the United States are experiencing widespread hopelessness about their employment and insurance prospects for the long term. In part as a result, they are developing habits today that will aim them in very bad directions for their long term well-being. A data-driven realignment of our relationship with health, to move us away from crisis-prompted medical reaction and towards a culture of prevention and self-care, could not only help remake our society here in the United States. It could also help provide models that the developing world, where mobile device penetration is high but processed food consumption is low, could use to leapfrog our own experiences with self-destructive individual and collective behavior.
The social Web has a tendency to fold in on itself. Shortly after the launch of Google Plus, for example, users began to complain that it was only being used to talk about Google Plus. Drew Olanoff, currently the community manager for Get Satisfaction, would prefer that social networks revolved around their people instead of themselves. After being diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2009, Olanoff built his experience into a Web phenomenon that offered connections, support, and some hopeful levity to people affected by cancer. His work is now bolstered by the launch of a new social network called I Had Cancer, which has created an engaging, Web-centric support system for cancer fighters, survivors, and their friends and family.
Drchrono, a free iPad health care app for doctors, has become the first app of its kind to be included in a federal program that encourages medical professionals to use digital instead of physical record keeping. Medical practices that use drchrono to manage their patients can receive as much as $63,750 in federal funding.
