Most of the time, Health IT spawns artificial concepts - born as a result of relentless media hype, each reaches a precocious peak of publicity and then quickly fades away. Buzzwords like RHIO, NHIN, PHR, Chronic Disease Management, etc. were all touted as game changing at one point or other in the past. Now it's more about patient engagement, HIE, Analytics, Care Collaboration. One stands out...
Scientific and medical research has seen explosive growth in the past few decades. Since 1996, the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) has maintained PubMed, a free portal providing access to references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. PubMed now has over 21 million citations going back to 1966, and continues to add a staggering amount (about 500,000 new...
Patient Monitoring is one of the mature, established markets in healthcare industry. A promising trend in that is the emerging 'Remote Patient Monitoring' (RPM) paradigm. (If you don't know much about RPM, this 2009 report from Frost.com is one of most insightful ones out there. It requires paid subscription though). The underlying concept is nothing new in medical device industry, with it's...
David M. Eddy, MD, PhD is a legend when it comes to Evidence-Based Medicine. He coined the term in 1980s, actually. Being exceptionally skilled in mathematics, it was perhaps natural for him to apply it to medicine. The result is Archimedes Model- a mathematical simulation of the human physiology and how it interacts with healthcare interventions. At the heart of the model are a set of ordinary...
TrialX.org is an fantastic example of how the web enables linking specific demand with relevant supply. The services matches users (patients, affected individuals) to ongoing clinical trials using their submitted personal health information. What a great startup idea. Service demand can be tapped easily since users are searching the web for highly specific keywords (almost all include the...
AskDrWiki is an online repository for medial information modeled after Wikipedia. The project was started in early 2007 by four physicians looking for a quick way to share review articles, notes and images in cardiology. The site is a grassroots effort, and geared towards clinical audience- residents, interns etc. Wiki's are a good way to organize collective wisdom in any field, so the concept...
SimulConsult is a diagnostic decision support system started by Dr.Michael Segal. It covers 1,800 diseases that have at least one neurological finding in them. SimulConsult has an interesting logic behind it. Roughly speaking, its knowledge is derived from a 'computational wiki' that is restricted to physician users only. So its database is not only open for viewing, but users can submit...
Curbside.MD is a search engine for finding evidence based clinical information. The idea is to type in the search need as a natural language question that a clinician would normally ask his/her colleague, and get relevant answers from the literature (articles, images, guidelines, etc.) I took it for a test drive with a moderately complex question ('what is the indication for platelet transfusion...