Google launches a new initiative: it plans to measure your blood pressure, sugar levels. When will they be able to measure all these thing directly without external devices. All these thing integrated in my keyboard and mouse. Wouldn’t that be nice?

On March 5, 2009 the Blommenstein Group hosts a meeting between internet entrepreneurs and health managers: Innovation Lab Health 2.0. Amongst others I will attend this meeting and will talk about MediGO.   A lot of other “well-known”  names are also on the list.  Amongst others Martijn Hulst, Jennifer McGabe Gorman and Marco Derksen. 

Het Innovatielab Zorg 2.0 wordt exclusief ontwikkeld voor bestuurders, directeuren en professionals die werkzaam zijn in de CURE: ziekenhuizen en zelfstandige behandelcentra en de direct betrokkenen zoals de overheid, de koepel- kennis en adviesorganen, de verzekeraars, farmacie en nieuwe toetreders die deel (gaan) nemen aan het ‘ nieuwe zorgen’.

Take a look at the program.

Dean Guistini, blogger at UBC Academic Search – Google Scholar Blog, published a list of 75 medical 2.0 webservices.  He categorizes the webservices in:

1. Academic science 2.0 (social networking) (8 services) 
2. Bookmarking & infomanagement (12 services) 
3. Consumer health 2.0 (social networking) (12 services) 
4. Medicine 2.0 (social networking) (8 services)
5. Micro-blogging, -searching & -aggregation (7 services) 
6. Open knowledge-sharing sites (8 services) 
7. Personal life 2.0 & genetics tracking (13 services) 
8. Search 2.0 tools (10 services)
9. Slide & video sharing sites (10 services) 

Let’s see if we can make MediGO feature the list next year.

I found an interesting article on Reuters about teleradiology and remote medicine. Scans made in the US are sent to radiologists in India. This is a way to reduce costs because hospitals and to overcome the shortage of radiologists in the US.  One of the companies Teleradiology Solutions has a sales office in the Netherlands. I do not know whether a dutch hospital already uses the solution this company offers. 

Telemedicine offers a lot of interesting opportunities. A physician for instance can take a look at a patient using a camera above or near a patients bed. The physician can ask a physician or a nurse to examine the patient while he observes it realtime behind his screen.  This for instance can be very helpful to assess whether a patient really needs to be transfered to a more specialized hospital. This is only one of the interesting opportunities new technology offers. 

But then again, it appears to be very difficult to implement national electronic health records in the Netherlands. So, it will probably take some time before physicians will use the above opportunities.

Berci’s enterprise Webicina is officially launched.  His company offers among other things:

• A Medicine 2.0 package. This is a personalized set of web 2.0 tools designed to solve the problems of physicians, health care workers and patients.
• Building an online reputation. Building an online reputation becomes crucial for medical professionals. A properly written CV or a quality medical blog can establish a successful online presence.
• E-learning tools. Videos, slideshows and online materials with step-by-step tutorials through which you can easily learn to use the web 2.0 tools and methods you need to improve your practice.
• Consulting and workshops. If you would like your collegues or employees to know more about the possible implications of web 2.0 in your field of interest, Webicina can help you through in-person presentations or online webinars and Second Life workshops.

In the most recent edition of the journal Arts&Auto (translation: MD&Car) you can find an interview with one of the founders of MediGO. MediGO is a dutch vertical health search engine.  A month ago a dutch health insurance company started to support this vertical search engine. 

If you want us to include your dutch website in the MediGO search engine please let us know. Be sure to check our criteria first.

Disclaimer: I am one of the founders of MediGO

If I may believe Berci the Medicine 2.0 congres was a big success. You can view some (?) of the presentations on Slideshare. I have not been able to view the presentations yet, but I will do in the next couple of days. Nevertheless I allready wanted to share them with you.

Matthew Holt made a presentation about Google Health. He tries the different possibilities of Google’s service. His final word about this service is:

Google Health has made a decent start, allthough there are lots of holes, and it would have been nice for this to have come sooner. I do though have faith in their ability to improve and fix their product in relatively rapid order.  (Hey they even fixed Blogger eventually!)

The key is to add functionality and increase ease of use so that consumers find it a really valuable tool. And the keys to that (as apparent from the tethered PHR world) are the provision of relevant content, lab results, great tools, and connection to physicians.

The components are there, in a way that no one outside the world of Kaiser, Group Health, etc. has done. For the 85% who don’t live in that world, let’s hope that Google, Microsoft and the rest can get this done. Google’s effort, though limited, is for me [Holt] the most ambitous and hopeful to date.

And don’t forget to take a look at Berci’s presentation at the Medicine 2.0 convention.

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Envision Solutions delivered its second report (pdf) about the evolving medical/ health blogosphere. The report is about:

the way people are using various interacting technologies for health.

The report comes up with the following final thoughts:

The two studies outlined in this report illustrate how health blogging has come of age over the past several years. Once dominated by medical professionals, the health blogosphere has grown to incorporate a diverse range of people in the United States and around the world. We also found that concerns about the credibility of health bloggers may be misplaced. While many bloggers continue to view content developed by their peers critically, most believe conflicts are routinely disclosed. Given this, we can be reasonably confident most health bloggers are operating trustworthily.

Martijn Hulst expands the implications to the Dutch blogosphere. He states that the Dutch blogosphere is also going strong.

Marco Derksen, founder of Marketingfacts and Upstream, writes (in dutch) about Health 2.0. He summarizes the most interesting sites about Health 2.0. Medblog.nl is also included in his list.  He also comes up with a presentation by Carlton Doty of Forrester Research.

Bertalan Mesko, founder of Scienceroll.com, starts a new Health 2.0 service called Webicina.

Webicina is an online service created by Bertalan Mesko, the author of the award-winning medical blog, Scienceroll.com, and aims to help physicians enter the web 2.0 era with personalized Medicine 2.0 Packages; step-by-step tutorials; webinars and online image building solutions.

It is not yet clear what it is going to be, but I am very curious.

As of today, the dutch health insurance company ONVZ supports the dutch medical search engine MediGO. Seven out of ten dutch consumers consult the internet for health information. Since it is hard for a consumer to determine the reliability of health information MediGO scans information displayed on the websites before adding it to its database. Visitors also can rate the websites and influence the ranking by doing this.

ONVZ does not influence the search results nor the included websites. You can read more (in dutch) about this on MediGO.nl.

Disclaimer: I am one of the co-founders of MediGO.

Hello Health is going to change the world. Or at least the way medicine is practiced. Hello Health is an initiave of Jay Parkinson. You wanna know why? Rumours are that in about three weeks they will launch a new service. Do not forget to take a look at his blog.

Dr Iain Doherty, Director, Learning Technology Unit Faculty Medical and Health Sciences from The University of Auckland wrote a very interesting article about health 2.0.

Abstract
From 1.0 to 2.0

Web 1.0
Web 2.0
Health 2.0
Web 2.0 and Health 2.0 Summary

Health 2.0 and Health Professionals

Blogs
Wikis
Podcasts
Social Networks

Health 2.0 and Health Consumers

Health Advice and Information
Health Prosumers
Health Communities

Pedagogy 2.0 and Health Education

Pedagogy 2.0
In With The Old
Learning from the Past

Concluding Remarks
References

Source: Scienceroll.com