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Hacking Health in Hamilton Ontario - Let's hear that pitch!

What compelled me to register for a weekend Health Hackathon? Anyway, I could soon be up to my ears in it. A pubmed search on Health Hack...

Showing posts with label AHIC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AHIC. Show all posts

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Consumer health information discoveries

I have been finding a lot of consumer health information websites, both local and international - a whole bunch of them - and I think it all started when I went to the announcement yesterday for the CISCO/McMaster University Professorship in Integrated Health Biosystems, as well as a Research Chair in Bioinformatics. This doesn't have a consumer health informatics label on it, but should have a Big Data one and be a separate post. Patients come into it when data from clinical trials will finally not go to waste but will be cross-linked with research databases to be put to use for medical research. If personal health records ever catch on, and patients consent to have data (whether de-identified or not - but probably de-identified) used for research, this would also be a mine of information as the original vision for PHR was to include genomic records, the intent being the development and perfection of personalized medicine.

This made me think of Dr. Danny Sands who teaches Medical Informatics at Harvard and is working for CISCO. He had a presentation at a conference (AHIC) where I was also delivering my first student paper presentation. Anyway, I read Danny's bio at CISCO which lead me to a blog he participates in called e-patients.net. It has interesting links to the Society for Participatory Medicine, and the Journal of same.

Impressed with that find, I came across by happenstance the meforyou.org website - a website that can cure you. For some reason this site reminded me about some research and journal articles I read, on how intercessory prayer doesn't work scientifically speaking.  It is a website inspired by Facebook new media but created by U of San Francisco:

UC San Francisco is the only university exclusively focused on human health. For 150 years, we've tackled the world's most vexing health issues, from diabetes and malaria to AIDS and cancer. We are driven by the idea that when the best minds come together, united by a common cause, great breakthroughs can be achieved. Because we believe it is perhaps the greatest single breakthrough that can be achieved, we have committed ourselves thoroughly to the realization of precision medicine. We began this movement knowing that we could not do it alone, and continue assured that we will do it together. Join us.

And then I found this surprising and local "searchless" health information website - hi - consumerhealthinfo.ca (a URL I wished I could have claimed). You can't not appreciate the layout, and user interface (think old people with no time to read extensively.) I think Dr. Mike Evans  ( Dr. Mike Evans curates the best health information found online. ) contributes to this site which lead me to his blog and website, which is simply brilliant, and this viral video!




And finally after this amazing journey just seemed to be beginning, Dr. Evans recommended the ultimate consumer health informatics website NHS.UK  I had recently read on a Yahoo website the UK's National Health Service was in the top ten biggest employers in the world! Well, a lot of them were busy preparing this website, and I relish reading their entire medical encyclopedia someday.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Integrated Digital Pathology - no more microscopes?

At the Advances in Health Informatics Conference a few days ago, we saw several amazing presentations on digital pathology.  Dr. Slyvia Asa talked about integrated digital pathology with telepathology, robotics, and streamlined processes for diagnoses to the point of care - all with a rapid turn around time.  She quoted something by Sir William Osler, which I was able to find on the net for another talk she gave on pathology and informatics < here > and that was "As is your pathology, so goes your clinical care".  When Osler was a young student he used to study bacteria from a reedy marsh not far from where I am typing this, and examined it with the greatest new technological marvel of that age - the microscope.  Listening to Dr. Asa describe their integrated pathology labs at Toronto's University Health Network, it sounds like radiologists are exclusively using digital imaging to read pathological sample slices and make diagnosis.  This was evident to me as well when I visited an anatomy lab in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster, where the instructor showed us how digital imaging was being used more frequently than microscopes.  He took a picture of a human cardio sample with his iPad, and then displayed the image on a big screen.  He was able to zoom in with great detail on the pixels.  


To quote from this article by Dr. Asa:



The future of pathology will be reports that are comprehensive clinical consultations that incorporate all of the imaging, biochemical, histologic, molecular, cytogenetic, and epigenetic data. Pathologists will not have two screens in front of them; most will have four. And they won’t want that microscope at their desk because it’s not good for their neck.

So what I see in the year 2020 as pathology is digital radiology, digital endoscopy, digital cardiology, digital genetics, all the relevant information on my four-screen computer in front of me, wherever I happen to be, always with quality assurance as an important part of it, and as the center of personalized medicine.

Monday, March 12, 2012

The Direct Project

Part of the talk I will give at the Advances in Health Informatics Conference at York University next month will refer to the work of the Direct Project. I heard about this from reading John Halamka's Geekdoctor blog post. I thought it was a very exciting prospect for pushing health information to the personal health record. Before I give my talk, I have to become more reacquainted with it, but it looks like most news on it is coming form a twitter stream. My talk will look at the system architecture of "tethered" personal health records, and so, here is an architectural picture of Direct Project. It is a proposed Health URL - once again - the idea seems to be to be a major advance to securely transport health information. I have as yet seen any sign of pilot projects underway in Canada, but I would be most interested in seeing one started.