The Documents You Need, When You Need Them

Few things drive an emergency room staff quite as nuts as a patient who has, yes, carefully considered her preferences, designated a health care decision-maker should she become incapacitated, and documented all that information in an advance directive — which is sitting in a locked safe deposit box or stashed in an bureau drawer at home.

But as we’ve discussed before, that’s hardly an uncommon scenario. In fact, the president of the American Bar Association, Jim Silkenat, told me that until recently, his own advance directive wasn’t easily accessible.

“It was in a file here in my office” in Midtown Manhattan, he said. “My kids knew about it, but they had no idea where it was. Nobody had really focused on it.” Fortunately, since his children live in Scotland and Arizona, Mr. Silkenat hadn’t encountered an emergency requiring them to show up at a hospital with the document.

But enough people do find themselves in that quandary that the association’s Commission on Law and Aging has developed a smartphone app, My Health Care Wishes, that allows you to store your own advance directive or family members’ on your iPhone or Android phone. When you need them, the app lets you present such documents — and other health information and contacts — via email or Bluetooth.

Link to the full article

The article was originally posted on The New York Times.

Predicting Social Trends Two Months In Advance

A new study from researchers at Yale, the University of California-San Diego, the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, and NICTA of Australia, formulated a technique that they claim can forecast social media trends up to two months in advance.

 The study, described in a paper titled “Using Friends as Sensors to Detect Global-Scale Contagious Outbreaks” and published in the online journal PLoS One, focused on the role of “sensors,” meaning central individuals with more social connections who act as sentinels for wider networks, registering an emergent trend before it becomes prevalent across the network and the Internet at large. One advantage of the system is it allows researchers to predict trends based on a relatively small sample size using “local monitoring,” rather than trying to wrangle data from the entire social media universe.

Link to the full article
Link to the research article

Article originally published on MediaPost. 

Earlier this year, Twitter announced that it would provide six data grants to researchers looking to access its vast archives for big data insights. Last week, Twitter selected six proposals out of the 1,300 entries and three teams, HealthMaps, University of Twente, and UCSD, had health-related projects.

HealthMaps is a project from Boston Children’s Hospital that aims to mine data for food borne gastrointestinal illness surveillance. Another, from University of Twente in the Netherlands wants to study the effectiveness of public health campaigns for the early detection of cancer, and the third from UCSD is researching whether happy people take happy pictures.

Originally posted on mobihealthnews.com

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Tailored and Integrated Web-Based Tools for Improving Psychosocial Outcomes of Cancer Patients: The DoTTI Development Framework

Effective communication and provision of information to cancer patients and their families about their disease, treatment options, and possible outcomes improve psychosocial outcomes [7,8]. Recognition of the importance of effective communication has been driven by increased consumer activism, as well as legal imperatives to ensure patients are well informed of their treatment options and are able to exercise control over their role in making decisions regarding their care [9]. In order to make an informed decision, for example, a patient must be provided with clear and sufficient information about the risks and benefits of available treatment options [10]. Failing to fully inform patients about their condition, treatment options, and potential consequences, as well as misrepresenting information, can lead to legal challenges and medical litigation [11]. This has led to a shift from paternalistic approaches to information provision and disclosure within the health care system to a model that emphasizes autonomy and patient-centered care [12], which are reflected in changes to legislation, bioethical guidelines, and accepted principles within the medical profession [12-15].

Originally Published in JMIR

Link to full paper

Facebook Acquires Moves, a Fitness Tracking App

Facebook Messenger. WhatsApp. Paper. Instagram. And now: Moves.

Facebook announced Thursday that it has acquired Moves, a popular fitness tracking app, as part of its broader strategy to operate a set of standalone applications in addition to the flagship Facebook app.

“As part of Facebook’s multi-app strategy, we’re excited to announce that the popular Moves app will be joining Facebook’s suite of applications," a Facebook rep said in a statement provided to Mashable.

The app launched for iPhone in early 2013 and is also available on Android. It has reportedly been downloaded more than 4 million times, and will continue to operate as a standalone app, while some members of its team join Facebook at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

Full article here.

Originally posted in Mashable.

What Big Data Can't Tell Us About Health Care

Jean Malouin, a family doctor in Michigan, woke up one morning earlier this month to an e-mail from a Washington Post reporter, who informed her that a vast release of Medicare payment data from 2012 had identified her as the highest female biller in the country, and the seventeenth-highest over all, with more than seven million dollars in payments. Malouin was soon inundated by interview requests from reporters, and her name appeared in newspapers across the country.

Malouin is a family doctor, which is not a specialty that one typically enters hoping to get rich. Delivering primary care is seen by doctors as hard work that earns comparatively little pay, and it is a job that is only getting harder. That’s because the Affordable Care Act, with the broad ambition of containing costs while improving quality, hopes to move away from a fee-for-service model, toward one in which doctors are paid primarily for keeping their patients healthy, a responsibility that will fall largely on primary-care doctors. At this point, nobody quite knows how to make this vision a reality, but Medicare has funded various demonstration projects to test innovations in care—one of which is led by Malouin, who supervises three hundred and eighty primary-care practices that treat a million patients in Michigan. Payments for care improvement from Medicare at all these clinics are made under Malouin’s name, which is how she ended up in dozens of newspaper reports on the data dump.

Full article here.

Originally posted in The New Yorker.

Tweets about hospital quality: a mixed methods study

Background: Twitter is increasingly being used by patients to comment on their experience of healthcare. This may provide information for understanding the quality of healthcare providers and improving services.

Objective: To examine whether tweets sent to hospitals in the English National Health Service contain information about quality of care. To compare sentiment on Twitter about hospitals with established survey measures of patient experience and standardised mortality rates.

Design: A mixed methods study including a quantitative analysis of all 198 499 tweets sent to English hospitals over a year and a qualitative directed content analysis of 1000 random tweets. Twitter sentiment and conventional quality metrics were compared using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient.

Link to full study

This study was published in BMJ Quality and Safety