Docs get Yelped! 1 in 4 patients now read online physician reviews

Doctors have always had a love/hate relationship with the Internet, and some bristle at the fact that many patients now shop for caregivers in the same way they shop for restaurants and plumbers: using online review sites.

A recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan says 25 percent of Americans now look online for doctor reviews before making an appointment. The study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, says a third of those people make a decision to see or not see a particular doctor based on reviews they read.

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Originally published on venturebeat.com 

The shifting model in clinical diagnostics: how next-generation sequencing and families are altering the way rare diseases are discovered, studied, and treated

We are the fathers of two patients with a newly diagnosed syndrome that is highlighted in the study by Enns et al.1 Our children are two among a handful of others in the world with this disease caused by mutations in the NGLY1 gene. It is the first recognized disorder of deglycosylation. We fully antici- pate that NGLY1 will generate many interesting studies for years to come, but promoting NGLY1 is not our aim here. Instead, we would like to provide you with our perspective on a shift that is occurring in clinical diagnostics. Families of children with serious genetic diseases often enter a diagnostic odyssey, moving from gene to gene in the hope of finding an explanation for the condition. Two new developments in genetics promise to dramatically shorten the time to reach a successful diagnosis: next-generation sequencing (NGS) and family engagement through social media. The very speed with which Need et al.2 and Enns et al. were published suggests a new model for clinicians and researchers. In this model, families, patients, and scientists work jointly to find new patients, confirm or refute hypotheses, exchange clinical information, enhance collaboration methods, and support research toward understanding and treatment.

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Article originally published in Nature

Twitter to Release All Tweets to Scientists

Five hundred million tweets are broadcast worldwide every day on Twitter. With so many details about personal lives, the social media site is a data trove for scientists looking to find patterns in human behaviors, tease out risk factors for health conditions and track the spread of infectious diseases. By analyzing emotional cues found in the tweets of pregnant women, for instance, Microsoft researchers developed an algorithm that predicts those at risk for postpartum depression. And the U.S. Geological Survey uses Twitter to track the location of earthquakes as people tweet about tremors.

Until now, most interested scientists have been working with a limited number of tweets. Although a majority of tweets are public, if scientists want to freely search the lot, they do it through Twitter's application programming interface, which currently scours only 1 percent of the archive. But that is about to change: in February the company announced that it will make all its tweets, dating back to 2006, freely available to researchers. Now that everything is up for grabs, the use of Twitter as a research tool is likely to skyrocket. With more data points to mine, scientists can ask more complex and specific questions.

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Originally published in the Scientific American

When Doctors Play This Game, You Get Better Medical Care

Doctors are required to keep current on best medical practices, but those efforts all too often often don't do a thing to improve patient care. But what if the class is a game — one that lets you compete against other doctors and show off your smarts?

Plus you get funny emails. Oh, and your patients get better, too.

The game combines goofy stock photos with serious questions on blood pressure management.

That's the gist of an online game tested at eight Boston-area hospitals to see if it could improve treatment of high blood pressure by getting practitioners to follow recommended treatment guidelines.

Patients of the doctors and nurses who played the game over the course of a year got their blood pressure under control faster than those whose primary care providers were told to read educational materials instead, a "modest but significant" improvement, the researchers say. The results were published Tuesday in the journal Circulation.

Link to full article here.

Originally posted in NPR.

You Can't Yelp Your Doctor

Some of the country’s best doctors have the worst patient satisfaction scores. Here’s why. Part of being a doctor is learning to suppress your feelings. You get good at being what people need you to be. But it slowly transforms you into something you couldn’t have foreseen—a sort of Stepford doctor—pleasing everyone with your perfect smile and agreeable demeanor, hoping that your patient satisfaction survey will be favorable, no matter the cost.

Press Ganey is one of the top providers of patient satisfaction surveys, according to the Forbes article, Why Rating Your Doctor Is Bad For Your Health.

The government has bet big on these surveys, as a recent article in Forbesnotes. Armed with the idea that “patient is always right,” Washington figured that more customer satisfaction data “will improve quality of care and reduce costs.”

That turns out to have been a bad bet.

In fact, the most satisfied patients are 12 percent more likely to be hospitalized and 26 percent more likely to die, according to researchers at UC Davis. “Overtreatment is a silent killer,” wrote Dr. William Sonnenberg in his recent Medscape article, Patient Satisfaction is Overrated. “We can over-treat and over-prescribe. The patients will be happy, give us good ratings, yet be worse off.”

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Originally published on The Daily Beast. 

Healthcare Beware! New Intruders are Coming - Introducing the New Gold Rush

As the healthcare industry is transforming and becoming more consumer driven, the “5 Ps” are becoming the hub of the industry: prevention, personalization, prediction, preemption and personal responsibility. As a result, there is a rush of new stakeholders who are entering the game and changing many of the rules. Who are these new breed of companies and what are they bringing to this industry? How are they transforming the way healthcare is practiced?

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This text was orignally posted on Forbes.com

"Privacy is Bad for Your Health" Lecture

Leslie Saxon wants companies to have our medical data and explained why at Wired Health. Saxon is the chief of cardiovascular medicine at the Keck School, USC. She is also the executive director of the Center for Body Computing (CBC) and in the years leading up to 2006 -- four spent in college and then 20+ as a practicing physician -- Saxon had interacted with over 37,000 patients. In 2006, she made the switch to digital health tracking, taking data wirelessly from patients' pacemakers and other devices. In the eight years since then, Saxon has seen 308,000 digital patient interactions. A ten-fold increase in patient turnover might seem a lot, but its nothing compared to the plans she wants to see in digital health's future. WIRED Health is a one-day summit designed to introduce, explain and predict the coming trends facing the medical and personal healthcare industries. This ambitious inaugural event was held on Tuesday April 29, at the new home of the Royal College of General Practitioners, 30 Euston Square, London.

Link to video of full lecture at Wired Health

This text was orignally posted on Wired UK

U.S. Mines Personal Health Data to Find the Vulnerable in Emergencies

The phone calls were part Big Brother, part benevolent parent. When a rare ice storm threatened New Orleans in January, some residents heard from a city official who had gained access to their private medical information. Kidney dialysis patients were advised to seek early treatment because clinics would be closing. Others who rely on breathing machines at home were told how to find help if the power went out. Those warnings resulted from vast volumes of government data. For the first time, federal officials scoured Medicare health insurance claims to identify potentially vulnerable people and share their names with local public health authorities for outreach during emergencies and disaster drills.

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Originally Published in the New York Times

Facebook Content Cards Show Friend Activity When the Time Is Right

Facebook is rolling out a new feature to its iOS app that encourages users to share more about what they are doing.

The new feature, part of an app update rolling out to users Wednesday, will surface cards that reveal relevant posts from friends when you check in at a location or post an activity update, such as watching a movie or traveling to a new city.

The cards will appear over your News Feed after you update your status and will only display a few relevant posts at once.

If you check in at a restaurant, for example, the card might display a list of friends who have also checked in there or photos of the restaurant posted by other users. If you post an update about listening to a new song or reading a book, the card might show friends who have also listened to the song or read the book, and what they had to say about it.

Read to the full article here.

Originally from Mashable.

Big Data Treasure Trove From Routine Medical Checkups

Researchers are analyzing pools of patient information collected from routine checkups to help doctors better diagnose their patients.

This type of data is easier to mine thanks to the rise in electronic health records that contain information collected in regular doctor visits.

In one instance, a group of researchers looked at data from patients with sore throats and came up with a way to help determine whether people should see a doctor for a strep throat test or stay home and take aspirin. In another, a pediatrician was able to follow a hunch to study a connection between an eye disease and allergies in young patients with arthritis.

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Originally published in The Wall Street Journal.

New software helps NHS trusts track patient feedback

Patients are increasingly using social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, NHS Choices, Patient Opinion and Google+, to leave feedback about NHS services, engage directly with healthcare providers and interact with the NHS in real-time.

We wanted to build something that will help NHS professionals and the public make sense of all the different channels by putting everything in one place with one set of controls.

HealthBerry is a response to the Francis report and the government's commitment to make the NHS and social care accountable to service users.

Putting Patients First, the NHS England business plan for 2014-15, describes a new focus on gathering direct feedback from patients, their families and NHS staff. And Robert Francis QC stressed the need to put people at the centre of their care by making sure that patients' voices are heard and used to deliver better services.

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Originally published on the Guardian. 

mHealth must be usable for patients, integrated with EHRs: Q&A

As patients continue to adopt mHealth technologies like wearable activity trackers, home monitoring equipment, and smartphone applications tailored to chronic disease management and health research, patient-generated health data (PGHD) is becoming ever more prevalent, detailed, and useful for healthcare providers.  But every new technology has its problems, and the explosive proliferation of telehealth tools is no exception.  From teaching seniors to use monitoring devices to developing strategies to integrate data into a provider’s already-complicated workflow, mHealth is a much more complex proposition than it may initially seem.

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Article text from EHR Intelligence

PCAST Releases Report on Big Data and Privacy

Earlier this year, President Obama asked his counselor John Podesta to lead a comprehensive review of policy issues at the intersection of big data and privacy. As a contribution to that review, he asked his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) to examine current and likely future capabilities of key technologies, both those associated with the collection, analysis, and use of big data and those that can help to preserve privacy. Over the past 90 days, we have reviewed the technical literature, consulted with additional experts whose research or product-development activity focuses on the key technologies, engaged complementary perspectives from social science and the law to help put our technical insights into perspective, and deliberated over what we were learning.

Today, PCAST is releasing its analysis via a new report, Big Data: A Technological Perspective, which details the technical aspects of big data and privacy. The ubiquity of computing and electronic communication technologies has led to the exponential growth of data from both digital and analog sources. New technical abilities to gather, analyze, disseminate, and preserve vast quantities of data raise new concerns about the nature of privacy and the means by which individual privacy might be compromised or protected.

Link to full article and report

Article text from the WhiteHouse.gov Blog

Most Fitness Apps Don't Use Proven Motivational Techniques

If you downloaded a fitness app and didn't become a workout ninja, it may be that the app lacked the scientifically tested motivational techniques that would help get you off the couch.

Instead, most popular fitness apps focus more on teaching you how to do the exercise, according to researchers at Penn State University who analyzed the 200 top apps.

"You need motivational support to turn that knowledge into action," says , a kinesiology professor at Penn State who led the study, which was published Tuesday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

And that's where most of the 200 apps examined fell flat.

Link to the full article here.

Originally posted by NPR.org 

Insourcing Health Care Innovation

Many health care professionals find it irritating when management gurus recommend solving health care's problems with approaches they would “copy and paste” from unrelated industries — a former chief executive of a manufacturing company claims that the same simple lessons that enabled him to transform his own industry can improve value in health care, or a business-school professor offers an eight-point leadership plan that she's translated into health care as easily as if she'd translated it into French. Many people who work in health care value outside perspectives and are open to new approaches — and yet bristle at facile recommendations emerging from these translations.

At the same time, health care improvements can come from people who don't know the field asking, genuinely, “Couldn't you do it a different way?” — where insiders might be less able to imagine alternatives. Principles guiding high-impact innovation are evolving faster outside health care than inside. So it makes sense not to give up on the management gurus entirely, but we can distinguish between those who follow good innovation practices and those who don't. Health care is not a single problem but thousands of problems, and rather than seeking a solution derived from other fields, we'd do better to find a solution process to use from within.

Link to full article here. 

Originally published in NEJM.

Straight talk with...Jamie Heywood

Last month, Genentech launched an unusual five-year research pact. The San Francisco subsidiary of the drug giant Roche partnered with Cambridge, Massachusetts–based PatientsLikeMe to mine the online patient network's database of real-world experiences. In exchange for an undisclosed fee, Genentech now has access to nearly all of the information collected by PatientsLikeMe, which currently includes more than 250,000 members with 2,000 different conditions. The hope is that studying the network will help Genentech learn how to stratify patient populations more precisely and measure drug effectiveness better, among other things.

At the helm of PatientsLikeMe is Jamie Heywood, a mechanical engineer by training who devised the idea for the platform ten years ago when he noticed some striking similarities between the information asked of online dating websites and clinical trial portals. With his brother Benjamin and friend Jeff Cole, Heywood founded PatientsLikeMe later that same year. Nicholette Zeliadt spoke to Heywood about where the crowdsourcing site stands a decade on from its inception and what this new partnership with Genentech will mean for open-participation research.

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Originally published in Nature Medicine

Conversations on Health Care featuring Dr. Chileshe Nkonde-Price

Conversations on Health Care is a radio show about the opportunities for reform and innovation in the health care system. In addition to healthcare headlines, each show features conversation with an innovator in the delivery of care from around the globe.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Chileshe Nkonde-Price, Cardiologist and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/US Department of Veterans Affairs Clinical Scholar at UPENN School of Medicine. Dr. Price discusses the digital platform she developed, Change My Steps, designed to assist African American women in reducing risk factors for higher rates of cardiovascular disease.

Link to listen to the show.

Originally posted on Conversations on Health Care website.

Going viral: How ‘social contagion’ begins and escalates

Understanding the roots of a global, contagious spread of online information may help better predict political revolutions, consumer behavior, box office revenues, public policy debates, and even public health epidemics, a new study co-led by Yale University reveals. The model devised for this study, which identifies those roots and analyzes common patterns of dissemination on a global scale, even predicted the rise of “#Obamacare” as a global Twitter trend.

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Originally published on Yale News.

Digital Drug Safety Surveillance: Monitoring Pharmaceutical Products in Twitter

Background: Traditional adverse event (AE) reporting systems have been slow in adapting to online AE reporting from patients, relying instead on gatekeepers, such as clinicians and drug safety groups, to verify each potential event. In the meantime, increasing numbers of patients have turned to social media to share their experiences with drugs, medical devices, and vaccines.

Objective: The aim of the study was to evaluate the level of concordance between Twitter posts mentioning AE-like reactions and spontaneous reports received by a regulatory agency.

Methods: We collected public English-language Twitter posts mentioning 23 medical products from 1 November 2012 through 31 May 2013. Data were filtered using a semi-automated process to identify posts with resemblance to AEs (Proto-AEs). A dictionary was developed to translate Internet vernacular to a standardized regulatory ontology for analysis (MedDRA®). Aggregated frequency of identified product-event pairs was then compared with data from the public FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) by System Organ Class (SOC).

Link to full text.

This study was published in Drug Safety.

Mapping Physician Twitter Networks: Describing How They Work as a First Step in Understanding Connectivity, Information Flow, and Message Diffusion

Social media, including Facebook and Twitter, is fast becoming an important tool in health care. In editorials, essays, and blogs, physicians have been urged to become active participants in social media as a form of engagement with the larger health community, patients, and peers [1], and as a way to “start an online dialogue” with policy makers and stakeholders [2]. Twitter, the microblogging medium, has been hailed as “an essential tool for every physician leader” [3], one that is “crucial to the development of medicine today” [4], and “just what the doctor ordered” [5].

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Originally published in JMIR

Penn doctor develops smartphone app to help in treating stroke

Thanks to one University of Pennsylvania neurologist, there's now an app to help doctors treat stroke patients. The app is one of the innovations debuting this week at the American Academy of Neurology meeting in Center City.

Stroke physician Claude Nguyen is a self-described nerd. So when he was training at the University of Texas, he thought a smartphone app could help him monitor passing time and other details that are easy to lose track of -- but important for good stroke care.

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Article originally published on NewsWorks, the online home to WHYY news.