Kevin Clauson's blog

    The World Health Organization (WHO) Global Observatory for eHealth (GOe) has just released the fourth volume of its eHealth series, “Safety and security on the Internet: Challenges and advances in Member States“.

I was glad to have helped serve as a lead author for this edition and was similarly happy to see the reviewers listed in the volume had representation from the international pharmacy world.

This eHealth series volume explored survey results from over 100 participating countries. Data in the publication were originally collected as part of the second global survey on eHealth by WHO. This fourth volume of the GOe eHealth series was focused on four major areas:

*Internet pharmacy
*Online health information seeking and quality
*Digital literacy
*Internet safety and security

Notably, the process of legally purchasing medications online still lacks a global consensus, as most (66%) countries still do not have any legislation in place that specifies if Internet pharmacy operations are either allowed or prohibited.

The 86-page report fully characterizes the findings from these outlined domains. It also includes case studies that illustrate the advances and challenges in these arenas such as the Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites (USA & Canada) for Internet pharmacies and the Health On the Net Foundation (Switzerland) and PeRRSonalized Medicine (Hungary) for online health information quality.

We are very excited that the Nova Southeastern University College of Pharmacy has officially launched our Center for Consumer Health Informatics Research (CCHIR)! Like all undertakings of this magnitude, it has been in the works for some time and has benefited from tremendous support from many corners - in particular the Chair of the Department of Pharmacy Practice and the Dean of the College of Pharmacy. Below is a presentation outlining some basics about the Center. I look forward to working with its faculty and collaborators and steering the CCHIR toward many great developments in the future.

Launching a Center for Consumer Health Informatics Research

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Florida Society of Health-System Pharmacists (FSHP) was held in Orlando during the weekend. Since it is a state organization conference, it is much smaller than gatherings like the ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting. This allowed for a streamlined set of programming tracks and a more relaxed atmosphere. There were also some interesting individual sessions (and necessities) on medication errors, pain management, etc.  I particularly liked the presentation on "Cyberhealth", which focused on issues with Internet Pharmacy. Additionally, I had the opportunity to present "Pharmacy: Is there an app for you" at the meeting.

@kevinclauson

Pharmacy: Is there an app for you

The most recent issue of the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education featured a Technology in Pharmacy Education section. There is some really interesting reading in this section including, "Use of Twitter to Encourage Interaction in a Multi-campus Pharmacy Management Course" by @Brent_Fox. Brent actually authored several articles including, "Knowledge, Skills, and Resources for Pharmacy Informatics Education", which he wrote along with the newly installed Chair of the ASHP Informatics Section Allen Flynn, informatics luminary and frontliner Chris Fortier (@FortiPharm), and I. With this article, we tried to summarize the baseline informatics knowledge that pharmacy students should possess upon graduation, framed within med use processes. My hope is that it will be of real practical use to educators and others as specific recommendations are provided regarding activities and resources for class and curricular integration, rather than just observations made from 30,000 feet. Also, as with all articles in AJPE, this one is open access (OA) in that it can be accessed free, full-text by anyone.

@kevinclauson

Our College of Pharmacy recently held its annual student seminar night. A semester's worth of P3 student work culminated in over 100 podium and poster presentations. There were a number of outstanding student efforts; however, I am featuring this one is it fits the theme of the blog and the student group made it available on Slideshare. The work represents their preliminary analysis and has some interesting findings. Congrats to them and to all of our students. I look forward to seeing a final version of this and several others at the FSHP Annual Meeting.

@kevinclauson

Social Media and the Patient's Role

Last semester I taught Consumer Health Informatics and Web 2.0 in Healthcare in the College of Pharmacy (COP) after having coordinated several iterations of it in the MS in Biomedical Informatics Program. At the end of the COP course, I asked the students for their opinions about the most useful and least useful lectures of the semester (with an eye towards improving future offerings). Many of the students mentioned topics that were discussed by one of the six excellent guest lecturers. While I sincerely appreciate each guest lecturer’s contribution, I thought it would be even more meaningful to share a student response about each guest lecturer/topic.

I’ll use the format below to do so (lecturers appear in the order they taught during the semester):

Student quote
Guest Lecturer
Affiliation
“Lecture Topic”

The course’s most useful lecture was Dr. Kang’s since it focused on policy and the big picture instead of just one or two tools.
Jeah-Ah Kang, PharmD
Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising, and Communications (DDMAC)
“Promotion of FDA-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools”

Most useful was Dr. Gualtieri’s because it may be the only one that really looked at things from the patient’s side.
Lisa Gualtieri, PhD, ScM
Tufts University School of Medicine
“Blogging for Health: Communicating the Experience of Illness”

One of the best things about working in academia is interacting with a constantly changing set of students.  We have a particularly diverse group at my University in terms of background, country of origin, language, and maturity.  And while it may be cliche, it is true that in teaching them you can learn just as much from them (if you are open to it). 

I have dabbled with aspects of instructional design, cognitive load theory, multimedia learning, etc., and other RxInformatics folks like John @poikonen have posted about Beautiful Evidence, but I recently had a rotation student focus my attention on a seemingly simple element: font.  Mr. Salvatico opened my eyes a bit in terms of free resources for fonts and their utility.  While we didn't see eye-to-eye on the frequency of font variation in lectures, I definitely learned from our exchanges.  In the spirt of these exchanges, I present the following Fun with Fonts 'case study'.  Please be aware these lyrics do carry a parental advisory warning.

@kevinclauson

P.S. A good way to see if your students are actually listening in class is to introduce this clip by Katy Perry and KENNY West and see how fast it takes one of them to correct you to KANYE West. 

The most recent hat tip for alerting me that one of my articles was published goes to @redheadedpharm, who also has one of the most thoughtful pharmacist authored blogs out there IMHO. I should note that by drawing my attention to the article, TRP does not endorse the contents nor see eye-to-eye with me regarding pharmacists, pharmacy, or social media. And that's ok. I have to think no rational person just wants an echo chamber. In fact, I may revisit the whole 'landscape of pharmacist blogs' in a future post if I can figure out a way to do so that doesn't involve generating the hate e-mail and widespread snark that the AJHP article did.*

There are a number of initiatives, sites, and platforms trying to capitalize on the power of social media and social networking to enhance research efforts. A few of them are ResearchGate, Health InnoVation Exchange (HIVE), and VIVO. Each offers something a bit different; for a full list of 'biomedical communities' check out this excellent resource by @Berci Mesko.

Aside from those 'communities', can social media enhance research? For me, the answer is a resounding yes. I have both observed and directly benefitted via plenty of resources. Here is a random sample: a source of support for grad students that hosts data sets, actual datasets made freely available for conducting research, a how-to for using Facebook to recruit survey participants, and a prelim study on use of Facebook for health education.

                      [Click image to enlarge]

 A tweet by Katherine Chretien (@MotherinMed) that her new article on physicians & Twitter has been published in JAMA served to remind me that I forgot to blog the poster presentation of our project, "Analysis of a national sample of pharmacist generated Twitter content" that was presented at the 45th Annual ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting in December in Anaheim. I did remember to send a tweet with a link to the image at the time (#ashpmidyear), but the rest escaped me. The poster is the PharmTwitter project that @markhawker and I and a couple NSU students worked on and represents an earlier stage with preliminary results. As an aside, we prepared a 'conventional' version of this poster for the meeting as well and then put it to a vote among the project team members as to which one to use at the conference. The vote ended up being a tie, so we had to use a tiebreaker.

Hopefully the full results will be coming soon via a journal near you (hint: it's won't be JAMA). All comments, as always, are welcome.

@kevinclauson

The Medicine 2.0 World Congress on Social Media and Web 2.0 in Health, Medicine, and Biomedical Sciences is one of the most valuable conferences I have ever attended.  It was the meeting in this arena with the clearest focus on actual research and evidence for Medicine 2.0 issues and also offered the best opportunity to connect with other researchers, clinicians, e-patients, business and policy people.  In fact, the very first Medicine 2.0 Congress was where I was introduced to (and/or first met IRL) so many people who went on to become research collaborators, colleagues, and friends. 

In the spirit of that original meeting, I am excited for this year’s Medicine 2.0 at Stanford (September 16-18, 2011).  I have always appreciated the fact that Medicine 2.0 has truly been an international gathering, but am happy to see that it is coming to the United States for the first time.  I am also eager to see another first,  the one-day Stanford Summit at Medicine 2.0, which will directly precede the Medicine 2.0 Congress.  The Summit is lining up to have an incredible array of moderators and panelists.

I saw a tweet by John @Poikonen that alerted me to the fact that a second article in as many weeks has been published on pharmacy and blogs. Two pharmacy students (Justin Elkins and Chilla Goncz) and I authored "Use of blogs by pharmacists", which appears in the new issue of the American Journal of Health System Pharmacy. We identified all blogs that were pharmacist-authored, active (i.e. posts in the last 3 months), and written in English. Blogs focused on pharmacy, but not written by a pharmacist were excluded. Forty-four blogs were identified that fit those criteria. We used the most recent 5 posts to assess the blogs based on six categories (e.g. practice based topics, identifying information, positive language, critical language, professionalism and miscellaneous).

Most pharmacist blogs (68%) were written anonymously (versus 43% in Lagu's study of physician and nurse blogs). Pharmacist bloggers were equally represented by community (43%) and non-community settings (43%); the practice settings of the remainder were indeterminable. These blogs most commonly used positive language to describe the profession (32%), other health care professionals (25%), and patients (25%). Critical language was more commonly observed in descriptions of patients (57%); almost half of all posts contained profane or explicit language (48%).

We've seen analyses of blogs by physicians & nurses [1], medical bloggers [2], etc. However, the excellent article "Analysis of pharmacy-centric blogs: Types, discourse themes, and issues" by Jeff Cain (@jjcain00) is the first analysis of pharmacy-centric blogs. It appears in the the new issue of the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association and presents a balanced view of the pharmacy blogosphere. It found that social media promotes transparency (except for authorship). It also recognized that the degree of disinhibiton in the Web 2.0 world may have contributed to a substantial number of these blogs containing negative content about patients, pharmacy, and other healthcare professionals.

Recently I have seen another round of the cyclical deluge of posts, pointers, and tips telling people what Twitter is meant for and 'instructing' them how they should use it. Most of this advice is invariably wrong simply because there is no certain way that Twitter should be used. It is impossible. Even Twitter doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up yet.

However, there are three perpectives about using Twitter that I believe have real merit. The ties that bind all three are that each touches on a range of uses for Twitter and the tones are personalized and/or contemplative, rather than authoritative.

1. How I Use Twitter as a Killer Filtering App by @Doctor_V [Nov 3, 2010]
Concise, clean approach that recognizes the fluid nature of the tool and how it can be employed

2. Twitter: filter, suggestion box, idea machine, window by @SusannahFox [Oct 18, 2010]
Four featured functions of Twitter including example accounts that support each method used

Both of those posts, like all good blog posts, have a number of comments that really add value. The third perspective is...well, it's a little different. I first watched it on my phone and felt like I was watching a cross between Phil Laak and Mike Caro. @AndrewSpong aptly characterized it as "structured free association". Just keep your hands inside the car and hang on for the ride that is:

3. The Four Modes of Twitter: Focused, Filtered, Serendipitous and Random by @PhilBaumann via @HealthIsSocial [Oct 29/Nov 4 2010]

The title of this post is shorthand for four of the keynote presenters at next week's mHealth Summit (follow at #mhs10) in Washington DC. In addition to these four keynotes by Bill Gates (@BillGates), Ted Turner, Aneesh Chopra, and Judith Rodin, there is a great lineup of speakers and moderators. There is a dizzying array of tracks and talks to choose from, but for me there are a handful that are particularly relevant. These include Najeeb Al-Shorbaji, who directs KMS at the World Health Organization, @SusannahFox of Pew Internet & American Life and e-patients.net, who is asking the right questions and always has cool new data right around the corner, Matthew Holt (@boltyboy), who is behind THCB and Health 2.0 [and who will hopefully be bemoaning Chelsea dropping points the Sunday prior], @JoshNesbit whose video about Frontline SMS I regularly use in my informatics course and who presents one of the most compelling cases for mHealth [seriously, you may be dead inside if it doesn't speak to you on some level].

It is encouraging when something brings all of the major pharmacy players together. In this case, it is the Pharmacy e-Health Information Technology Collaborative, and it is comprised of the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP), Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP), American College of Clinical Pharmacy (ACCP), American Pharmacists Association (APhA), American Society of Consultant Pharmacists (ASCP), American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), National Alliance of State Pharmacy Associations (NASPA), and the National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA). It has also been announced that the Collaborative will have Tom Menighan, BS Pharm, MBA, ScD as Chair and Shelly Spiro, RPh, FASCP (@shellyspiro) as Director.

This should be a really interesting semester since it is first time I will be teaching "Consumer Health Informatics and Web 2.0 in Healthcare" in the College of Medicine - Biomedical Informatics Program and in the College of Pharmacy (COP). This is the third time I have taught this elective in the Masters of Biomedical Informatics (MSBI) Program, but it is the first for Pharmacy (and obviously the first time concurrently).