Cyberchondria: Old Wine in New Bottles
Just before Thanksgiving, Microsoft released a study entitled, “Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search.” Ryen White and Eric Horvitz took advantage of a data set that few people have access to (log files from Microsoft’s Live Search engine and MSN Health and Fitness) as well as a survey of 515 Microsoft employees. They also did a great service to those of us who have a problem with the term “cyberchondriac” since they define cyberchondria as “the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web.” That does not describe most internet users and therefore, people might think about retiring the term from general usage. Read more
“The Evidence Gap”: Pharma impedes patient access to better treatment
A lot of effort and study is going into improving healthcare and untangling its cost structure. So methinks it’s nearly criminal when someone blocks adoption of a treatment that’s better, especially when it’s also less expensive.
Case in point, from yesterday’s NY Times: The Evidence Gap: The Minimal Impact of a Big Hypertension Study
The surprising news made headlines in December 2002. Generic pills for high blood pressure, which had been in use since the 1950s and cost only pennies a day, worked better than newer drugs that were up to 20 times as expensive.
The findings, from one of the biggest clinical trials ever organized by the federal government, promised to save the nation billions of dollars in treating the tens of millions of Americans with hypertension.
Six years later, though, the use of [diuretics] is far smaller than some of the trial’s organizers had hoped.
What?? I use diuretics, prescribed by my e-patient doc, Danny Sands. Doesn’t every BP patient? They reduce water content in the body, lowering blood pressure. Why isn’t every BP patient doing this?
Using Aggregate Data to Help Public Health
Public health is different than our personal health. Most people take for granted the role public health agencies play in our lives, but its primary emphasis is tracking disease data across the country in order to prevent a nationwide epidemic or pandemic. Nobody wants another bubonic plague, right?
Public health agencies carry out their mission by standard health data surveillance methods, which usually includes aggregate data hospital reporting and similar methods. They’ve been doing this for decades, and it results in a single agency having a pulse, if you will, on the health of the nation. Such efforts protect us from something like the bird flu, if it ever spread within a human population in this country.
The problem is that this data, collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), often relies on “old school” collection procedures and is therefore often delayed by weeks before the data becomes something we can actually make decisions upon (”actionable”). What if there was a way for technology to help streamline this process?
How Good Are Doctor Rating Sites?
Ruth Given has written a paper entitled, MD Rating Websites: Current State of the Space and Future Prospects (PDF), that was recently published on THCB. It’s a 39-page informal analysis (with an emphasis placed on informal) that takes a fairly good and comprehensive look at the space of doctor rating sites as they exist today.
I think that the main issue Given hit upon in the report (but I’m not sure she recognizes as the primary challenge of doctor rating sites) is the numbers issue. With over 700,000 physicians in the U.S., a ratings database of 10,000 or even 20,000 is pitifully and woefully small.
And not only is such a number small, it is statistically troublesome, likely painting an inaccurate picture of providers listed. If most sites only have one or two ratings for any given physician (and such data is statistically useless, if the average family physician is covering between 2,000 to 2,500 patients), then the sites themselves provide little added value outside of the directory listing. Which, as Given notes, is inaccurate or nonexistent more often than not.
Health 2.0 Northeast Meeting Review
I along with e-Patient Dave, Dan Hoch and Danny Sands, attended the second Health 2.0 Northeast meeting in Cambridge, Mass. on Tuesday night (Oct. 7, 2008). It was an initially well-attended event, with up to 150 people who came out to network (old-school style!) and listen to some presentations on local startups.
New York Times Health Section
The New York Times published an amazing array of health articles yesterday, each one of which is worthy of a discussion on this blog (and not just because we were mentioned in this one).
But I also want to take a minute to appreciate the entire online Health section of the Times, which consistently grabs my attention with its mix of articles, blogs, reference materials, and multimedia offerings. I love reading the comments appended to some of the articles and wish that more articles could turn into such forums. For example, the comments attached to You Can Find Dr. Right, With Some Effort are as useful and thought-provoking as the tips outlined in the article.
Does anyone have a favorite (or least favorite) article to point out and discuss? We can make this an open thread…
For Sale: Revolution Health
Why is Steve Case’s online health venture already looking to sell itself, just a year and a half after it launched? Yet another tale of hubris in the e-health sector.
Cloud computing puts your health data at risk?
In today’s
Windows Secrets, Stuart Johnston writes about the pros and cons of having our health data out on the Internet, as proposed by Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. Quotes: “Selling prescription records is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry”; “Disclosure of health information is [already] out of control.” Yikes?
Doctors’ Digital Footprints
Is it “disordered” behavior to Google your doctor? An article in JAMA suggests that doctors be on their guard.
Surprise! Students Find Inaccurate Health Information Online
A new study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) suggests that inaccurate medical information is easily found and regurgitated by students. But the topic the study chose to study — vaccines — has been under increasing scrutiny and controversy, limiting the generalizability of the results.
white paper
e-Patients:
How They Can Help Us Heal Healthcare
