Health wisdom , not just information

I am always on the look out for web services delivering knowledge services in the field of health. I run a non-profit organization, RAKSHA, for exactly this purpose and seek new ways of achieving democratization of knowledge in health.

Organized wisdom is a well thought out web service. This interview with the team at Organized wisdom clearly spells out their views and visions for this knowledge service. The talk with their Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Howard Krein and Esther Dyson , one of the investors was very interesting.

The service claims to be ” a free service that provides patients with easy access to the best information available in easy to navigate Wisdomcards, helps patients to prepare for their appointments and helps streamline some to the conversations that must take place.”
So, I decided to explore this service logged in as a patient searching for information about my imaginary headache. The first thing i noticed was the cleanliness of the welcome page. Simple, no unnecessary multimedia ( as is VERY often the case with medical information sites) and therefore, fast navigation between pages.

The fonts were friendly, the letters bold and easily legible. It didn’t intimidate me, as a patient, with its vastness of information. There was a large search box in a major location with built in prompts via a drop down menu. So far so good.

What really won me over was the neatly laid out information. Not too deep on the first page, just plain English medical speak for an average person.There were links to more scholarly items, but everything i could possibly want to know as a patient was easily available within 2 degrees of separation. There were links to support forums, foundations and drug information ( again in plain English).There were chat rooms, message boards, personal blogs, every useful service i can think of today. They were also initiating a” LIVE chat with a doctor” service, which is now in a beta phase.

All in all, I really liked this service and i am sure something like this will soon be up and running in India, preferably in the Hindi language.
Amen.

–Data for Doctors–

E-Health Insider :: From data to information to transformation

Information is power. Everywhere.
Information is made up of chunks of data put together into a meaningful structure.

As health care professionals, we produce lots of data everyday when we treat our patients. It includes the patient”s past habits, family history, past diseases, current symptoms, response to certain drugs, reactions to drugs……and on and on.

We need to be able to collect and collate all this data so as to help us in making better decisions in the future. The currently followed practise commonly is — we treat all the patients according to what we were taught in medical school–.

But illness and disease don’t remain static. They evolve everyday. They follow the path of least resistance. Whenever a disease finds a path not blocked by doctors, it pursues rapidly down that path.And we doctors are left guarding only the fixed doorways that we were taught of in Medical school ( or even later, via medical journals)

The only way to stay in the game is to continuously monitor the evolution of the disease by real-time/continuous data gathering and monitoring. This helps us spot very early trends in disease evolution and “block” those paths and escape routes for all diseases.

This article here provides some very good examples and methods of data capturing for clinicians. I hope all doctors in India soon realize the importance of data gathering and analysis in their day-to-day practice.

Read more.

Evolution of Information and its current forms.

I always like videos like this one.