Health Sites: Some Are More Equal Than Others

January 21, 2010 · Filed Under trends & principles · 118 Comments

Update: Roni Zeiger of Google Health emailed me and gave permission for me to post the following statement, which I think is a helpful addition to the conversation:

Health information is obviously an important category of information users are looking for. For this health search feature we decided to offer users one source each from a governmental health agency, a medical institution, and a commercial site. We’ll study how users like these choices and continue to iterate. None of these sites is paying any money to Google to be included in the feature. Google is 100% committed to ranking websites objectively to provide the most relevant information to users. Websites cannot pay for higher search rank.

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Eric Schmidt wants to solve health care’s “platform database problem” and one critic has countered that “computers cannot practice medicine.” One of Google’s initiatives is to guide consumers to safe, trusted health websites. Is that such a bad thing?

Search result placement can make or break a site or a business model, which is where dot-com blogs come in, but they also have the potential to make or break a consumer’s access to health information, which is where e-patients.net comes in.

First, some background. Search is central to health information gathering: Two-thirds of consumer health inquiries start at a general search engine. The trend line for consumers’ reliance on health search is so steady, in fact, that Pew Internet stopped updating it in 2006. Other researchers seem to take search dominance as an article of faith, too: Harris Interactive, Manhattan Research, Center for Studying Health System Change, National Cancer Institute’s HINTS – none have recent data on health search, at least on their public sites.

What has changed are the search results. Read more

Tags: Bing, Center For Studying Health System Change, comScore, Eric Schmidt, Google, Harris Interactive, Healthwise, hitwise, HONcode, librarians, Manhattan Research, Mayo Clinic, national cancer institute, NIH, Pew Internet, Pew Research Center, Webmd, Yahoo

Shared Kismet: Wikipedia and the NIH

July 16, 2009 · Filed Under positive patterns · 25 Comments

The National Institutes of Health hosted a Wikipedia Academy today to train scientists, communications staff, and other NIH staffers in how to contribute to what has become a top source for health information in the U.S.

(For more details, please see the NIH press release, a Wikipedia project page, and a Wikimedia Blog post.)

The NIH communications team invited me to observe this continuation of the conversations we had started about participatory medicine in June and September 2008. It was amazing to be there to see these two learning cultures meet for the first time. Read more

Tags: National Institutes Of Health, NIH, Twitter, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia

NIH Summit on Health Disparities

December 17, 2008 · Filed Under demographics, hc's problem list · 4 Comments

NIH is sponsoring a summit this week, The Science of Eliminating Health Disparities. I heard about it from Mary Brophy Marcus’s article in USA Today and I found this press release online, but I haven’t seen other coverage of the event. If you spot stories about the summit in the news, on blogs, on Twitter, etc., please post links in the comments.

The summit program is a treasure trove of ideas for conference organizers who want to answer Gilles Frydman’s call to action.

Tags: digital divide, health disparities, NIH

Taxpayer Access: The NIH Public Access Policy

September 30, 2008 · Filed Under policy issues · 3 Comments

Every year, the U.S. federal government funds more than $29 billion in biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The research, which inspires about 80,000 individual articles (each year), is then published in journals that only subscribers can access. Doctors, scientists, patients, taxpayers, and health professionals are unable to access NIH-funded research without paying access fees that can reach $30 per article or over $23,000 for an institutional yearly subscription.

“Taxpayer access” – the principle that American taxpayers should have free, timely, public access to the results of publicly funded research – would change this, and put critical biomedical research into the hands of those who need it.

Tags: NIH, OA, Open Access

E-patient Interview: Sheryl Stein

May 1, 2008 · Filed Under e-patient stories, others' e-patient stories · 5 Comments

Sheryl Stein, known to many as “wrekehavoc,” dispenses her wisdom and humor on a 6,000-member online community of parents (using good old listserve technology) and on her blog. In this third edition of our e-patient interviews, Sheryl talks about the power of community and how “reaching out via the internet is now an ingrained habit in our world.” Jump in here…

Tags: blog, chronic disease, Common Variable Immunodeficiency, community, CVID, Delivery Methods, Diagnosis, Diagnostician, e-patient, Gammaglobulin Therapy, Health Care Decisions, Humor On, Immune Deficiency Foundation, Ingrained Habit, Listserve, NIH, No Doubt, Pamphlets, Patient Interview, Patient Interviews, patient networks, Pharmaceutical Company, Pros And Cons, Self Advocate, self-care, Whopper