Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

An interesting phenomenon is occurring. Doctors are adopting smart phones at an exponential rate, even faster than the general public, a trend very surprising for a traditionally ‘technology averse’ group. A mini-revolution in the medical industry, and happening quickly it seems.

Why is this happening? One reason may be that these phones (like an iPhone or Blackberry) offer easy connectivity and computing ability and are being used to access the internet and social media sites. Traditionally, Doctors work from many different locations each characterized by high-stress inefficient paper-based workflow processes – manually filtering and prioritizing communications in each place mean that critical communications are easily missed.

MovinMeat is an ER physician (with an excellent blog http://allbleedingstops.blogspot.com/)

Potential solutions to managing an overwhelming information flow may help explain the fast adoption by doctors of this new technology, particularly of the iPhone whose reputation depends on ease of use. According to Spyglass Consulting over 90% of physicians were using smartphones to “communicate, manage personal/business workflows, and access information including medical reference materials” and showed a strong preference to the Apple iPhone (44%) to the RIM Blackberry. Here is adoption of the smart phone in general by comparison:

Share of 2010 Q2 smartphone sales to end users by operating system, according to Gartner. Source Wikipedia

Why have busy doctors taken time to embrace the iPhone? Here is perhaps a practical example of why – an iPhone application created by Peter Bentley, a researcher from University College London, that turns an iPhone into a stethoscope. Not only that, if patients have the same app, they can monitor their own heartbeat and send the results, by email (& by phone) to their doctor to analyse. According to the Guardian a free version of the app is being downloaded by more than 500 users a day.

“Experts say the software, a major advance in medical technology, has saved lives and enabled doctors in remote areas to access specialist expertise… Bentley’s iStethoscope application is not the only mobile phone programme lightening doctors’ bags and transforming their practices: there are nearly 6,000 applications related to health in the Apple App Store. The uptake has been rapid. In late 2009, two-thirds of doctors and 42% of the public were using smartphones – in effect inexpensive handheld computers – for personal and professional reasons. More than 80% of doctors said they expected to own a smartphone by 2012.”

Well.  That’s something to be sure.  It would be interesting to know if this technology takeover is happening in other health professions, and if for the same reasons.

What is FindTheBest?

FindTheBest is an objective comparison search engine that allows people to choose a topic, compare options and decide what’s best for them. FindTheBest is organized into nine broad categories including Health and each listing can be sorted by numerous key filters (have a look at the left hand side of the image below). It’s not bad!

So what does that mean in practice? I had a look at health, specifically Life Span Expectancy and Mortality rates and it gave me the results for each and every age so I could compare. So, hypothetically speaking, looking at the category of: female, age: 42.  It told me that statistically speaking a woman aged 42 has a 0.17% chance of dying and 39.57 more years to live. I compared this with stats for 20 years further on when, at age 62, she has a 0.89% chance of dying and 22 more years to live:

The take home message? This hypothetical female has passed the half way mark and has decided to eat more bananas and exercise a great deal.

Thanks to @DrVes for the spot and for the blogging tip!

“How do you trust what you’re reading is quality?”  “When does quality become quality?” These are recurring themes encountered with regard to some of the websites that offer free content. However, aggregator sites gather content of a certain standard or type which may offer an alternative to some of the more traditional ways of peer review or defining quality.

Academic Earth

This is an excellent new educational resource which gathers video lectures from leading Universities such as MIT, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley.  Lectures are free to use and download and there is plan to include social features for users.  As an example:

Private Equity and the Financial Crisis — Yale University lecture by Stephen Schwarzman Co-Founder of Blackstone Group

For a more detailed description on Academic Earth see also Life in the Fast lane’s Academic Earth Open Source Lecture Series.

Science Blogs

This site features bloggers from a wide array of scientific disciplines and only includes those posts which have reached a high academic standard. Launched in January 2006, ScienceBlogs claims to have the largest online community dedicated to science.

Research Blogging

Research Blogging  automatically aggregates only blog posts about peer-reviewed research, many of which appear in Science Blogs and can be recognized by the green tick telling reader they are reading a blog on peer reviewed research.  If you don’t know this site I can highly recommend having a look – topics covered range from Computer Science to Psychology.

YouTube EDU

Newly launched, YouTubeEdu collects all the educational content being uploaded on YouTube by Colleges and Universities.  However, in this case there is no guarantee being made of educational quality and the standards will undoubtedly vary but it is another excellent resource.

Universities providing free content

Although not aggregator sites as such, it is probable that top Universities offering content on a variety of subjects will have reached a certain standard.  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in addition to providing OpenCourseWare recently opted to publish their research articles free online (in addition to sending them to journals for publication) in order to give greater access to the university’s scholarship. Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences have also decided on a similar policy.  The Education Portal lists some of the best free online University courses available.
Overall, does content go through as rigorous a review process compared with more traditional routes – maybe, maybe not. There are new ideas like GPeerReview being developed, however, for sites such as Academic Earth, ScienceBlogs, or MIT to be able to continue to draw traffic by virtue of hosting only the best means they must ensure that content meets their standards – much in the same way as happens in the more traditional routes of peer review.

For more information on the role of blogs as institutional educational tools which also tackles the issue of quality control very well see an article published by PLoS Biol: Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy.