research

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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].

The verdict is in. The quality of health information in Wikipedia is inadequate as a sole source for pharmacists [1], medical students [2], dentists [3], and patients [4]. However, it is good enough for use by nursing students [5]…well, sort of.

Determinations about adequacy are based on studies which evaluated the freely editable, online encyclopedia based on characteristics such as reliability, scope, and accuracy. A clear consensus has emerged from that body of literature collectively rendering a decision that Wikipedia is not a suitable resource for high level consultation or citation. The use (and citation in particular) of Wikipedia by healthcare students and professionals seems to irk practitioners and educators moreso when there are high quality alternatives, suggesting the perception that citing Wikipedia in those cases simply reflects a lack of awareness and laziness. To be fair, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been unwavering in his stance that no encyclopedia should be used as a reference source for college level work or above.

There has been a lot of interest in the meaningful use debate surrounding electronic medical records (EMRs) of late, but I read a post by @TedEytan that got me thinking about a different kind of 'meaningful use'. The topic of his post was the differences between mHealth and eHealth, but what really caught my eye was the coined term "Internet's Informant General" (to describe @SusannahFox of Pew Internet). I had not come across the term before and I found it very striking. I have recently been working on a project involving panels of key informants representing their respective countries and the idea of this combined with a 'representative virtual office' like Internet Informant General was oddly compelling for some reason....much more than another in a line of czars (little 'c'). The fact that this office was faux filled by someone on the strength of their research (and ability to communicate/disseminate it) made it even more interesting as an idea.