Having written a chapter on eResearch for a book on Health Informatics, I decided to make a video which will be used by the editor, Bob Hoyt, in an eBook edition to come out soon. Both the video and the chapter emphasize the progress that has been made in informatics tools to support every phase of clinical research.

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UX has always been one of my favorite topics. So often ignored in application development, usability is key to the success of any website or app. Fortunately, there is  a Usability Professionals Association dedicated to the concept.  A recent presentation at the Northeast Ohio Chapter focused on the evaluation of the usability of the Cleveland Clinic website. This comprehensive review lead to the development of standards for the website based on user input.

Check out the presentation by Kaitlan Chu:

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Last week I was fortunate to attend TEDx Maastricht in person for the second year in a row. There were several great talks, all inspiring and some surprising. The beginning and end represented innovations in care of very different types. Beginning with a demonstration of FaceTalk, a live demo of an interdisciplinary consultation between 3 physicians on 3 continents sharing CT scans and more in real time. The final presentation of a video of interviews with young adult cancer survivors even facing death with courage. Patients were certainly invited and had an impact on the overall tone of the conference. One example was  Clarissa Silva who said about her recovery from mental illness, “Courage is being afraid but doing it anyway.”

A big hit was Paul Levy who talked about healthcare and soccer (football). One choice quote is advice to a girl from the team of 11 year olds he coaches: “Think about what you are going to with the ball before it arrives.” This certainly applies to future thinking in the dynamic health care environment. Check out his book, Goal Play. Then there was Paul Grundy from IBM made the comparison of physicians as the master builders of European cathedrals, trying keeping everything in their head as knowledge explodes. This leads to his conclusion of Smarter healthcare by smarter use of data.

Much anticipated was Roni Zieger, formerly of Google Health presented on Embrace the Patient Story. He talked about his own experience with a medical problem but then discussed how patients can become experts in their own care and therefore experts with others. His collaboration with Lucien Engelen, MyHealthStory, was a beginning down his new path. Now he is planning with Gilles Frydman of ACOR a new venture called Impatient Health, because they and many patients are impatient to participate fully in not only helping others as Patient Experts but also as active participants in research.

A great surprise was the introduction to the documentary “The Waiting Room.” Afterwards I had the opportunity to view the film – it is a heart-wrenching view of the real struggles of the uninsured in the US using the emergency room for primary care. I hope with the producers that the film will have a role in the health care reform debate.

Thanks to Lucien Engelen and Corine Jansen of the Radboud Reshape and Innovation Center for making this event possible. Looking forward to The Future of Health 2013.

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This Conference in San Francisco about all thiNgs research. It looks like some great content on secondary use, omics in EHRs, big data, platforms and ontologies. Heady stuff. This is the third year for this conference and it is combined with translational bioinformatics. The 350 participants represent a strong support for this speciality.
Can this group help to transform healthcare?

http://www.amia.org/jointsummits2012/cri-schedule

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There is increasing interest in Sentiment Analysis of social media. The brief messaging systems like Twitter and Facebook allow for picking out words and phrases using algorithms to find positive or negative sentiment. There are an increasing number of tools to do sentiment analysis and market research firms willing to do it. Using a simple tool like TwitterSentiment can get quick results but are they meaningful for healthcare? For instance, looking at “Mayo Clinic”, the results are rated as negative but examining the tweets show a mix of statements and some rated negative (78%) have to do with waiting for someone in surgery or concern about illness rather than care or quality. But using their twitter handle @MayoClinic shows 90% positive. Similar results are seen with Cleveland Clinic and Hopkins Medicine. Perhaps tools with a license fee are more sophisticated and show clearer results. An market research firms may take more time to tweet algorithms to sort out positives and negatives.

But hospital reputation is not the only use of sentiment analysis in health care social media. What are sentiments about diseases and conditions? In a brief check, cancer was more positive than cancer. But some comments are mixed, “thanks love! My roommate got diagnosed with cancer” is rated positive. My conclusion, sentiment analysis in healthcare requires fine tuning – what is good news, what is bad, what is neutral? The temporary pain of treatment can be a real downer but the results a real high. I will be interested to see more written on this in the future. Some research has begun, such as, this article on cancer survivorship.

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This is a presentation I gave to the Dutch delegation to HIMSS. It reflects much of my current thinking about current and future trends in health IT.

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