Big Blue Tracks Flu

From San Jose Mercury News:

IBM said Thursday that it is giving health authorities and others around the world expanded access to free software it partly developed in San Jose to help track bird flu and other infectious diseases.

The software - dubbed Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler, or STEM - can create computer models of how diseases spread geographically. IBM said it would make the software available on the Web site of the Eclipse Foundation, which provides open-source software.

What an idea! Using a computer to track a disease in the information era! Why didn't I think of that...

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MySpace: Doctor Edition

With the traffic that it generates, MySpace has become one of the top internet destinations for the younger generation on the internet. While I doubt it will be duplicated, there are now some attempts to make "The Virtual Physician Lounge." Quite recently, I was approached by one company that is attempting to create exactly this type of service, and was looking for "influential bloggers." This week, I was emailed an invitation for the new Sermo community.

Personally, I think these services face an uphill battle. Physicians are hardly lonely teens that have the need to post every minutiae that happens to them or their patients (not to mention issues of confidentiality and HIPAA). Also, unless there is compelling content, and enough discussion, it looks like a dead forum, and no one will return. Still, there may be room for one or two players in this area, and if it offers some value to the busy doctor, they may gain some traction in this niche market.

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Computer Psychotherapy

Say "Hi" to Hal....

From BBC News:

Computer-based therapy should be available to all patients in England from April, says the government. Patients with mild depression or anxiety should receive therapy instead of drugs, but there are long waiting lists around the country.

A trial of one computer programme - 'Beating the Blues' - found it more cost-effective than other treatments.

But experts warned computer-based therapy was not for everyone and access to therapists also needs to improve.

So what happens when the computer detects suicidal ideation or plan? Does it send the robot to the house? Does this mean that prozac et. al. are out of business?

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Smart As Einstein

Faster emergency room care for you and your family.

Imagine visiting an Emergency Room where they already know you! Your name, primary care physician, even insurance information is there ahead of time. That’s the idea behind ER pre-registration at Einstein at Elkins Park.

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Now imagine the Doctor not having to ask the names of the medications that you're on at 2:30 am...

Tipped through Medgadget.

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Serious Screen

While the wow factor is pretty cool with this thing, once you get over that the question becomes, okay so what's this good for if it's not portable? Sharp believes that it'd be a killer presentation tool for business meetings. Instead of brainstoming and having people write their ideas on paper the team could write on the display and make it more collaborative and visual. Doctors could present images of X-rays and CAT scans to collaborate and circle stuff they see in the images.

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Ok, it's official, I really want one of these.

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Playstations To Aid Medical Research

From Tech News World:

The evolution of video gaming took another quantum leap forward this week with the announcement that researchers are now enlisting Sony's (NYSE: SNE) Latest News about Sony PlayStation 3 Latest News about PlayStation 3 (PS3) in the fight against diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's and several forms of cancer.

The Tokyo-based Sony said owners of Internet-connected PS3s will now be able to participate in a range of scientific experiments led by Stanford University's Folding@home program.

The Stanford program is focusing on how two-dimensional protein strands in the human body fold into the three-dimensional molecules, according to Vijay Pande, associate professor of chemistry at Stanford University and lead researcher on the project.

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Trust Your Decisions To A Computer, Study Finds

A study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shows computers might do a better job than family members when it comes to guessing the wishes of critically ill hospital patients.

Researcher David Wendler, a bioethicist for NIH in Baltimore, made a surprising discovery when he compared the accuracy of loved ones versus computers in determining whether a medical patient would want to receive life-saving treatment in a dire emergency.

The issue strikes home to people whose family members have been incapacitated before signing an "advance directive" order, which specifies what treatments patients wish to receive if they lose the ability to make decisions. In situations where terminally ill or comatose patients do not have advance directives in place before, life and death decisions fall to their closest relatives and caregivers. These life or death decisions can be extremely difficult, especially when surrogates must guess at what the patient would have wanted.

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And how exactly does the doctor ask the computer if a feeding tube is appropriate? I'm not sure that can be easily programmed in.

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Mobile Clinical Assistant

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It doesn't look like it will fit in my white coat pocket!

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Stuck At the On Ramp of the Info Superhighway

In a world where most people routinely e-mail friends, family and colleagues, and many exchange e-mail with teachers, newspaper columnists and even the pizza delivery guy, it's a weird fact: Most of us still don't have e-mail relationships with our doctors.

For a decade, experts in medicine and technology have been saying that patient/doctor e-mailing was an obvious trend just waiting to explode. But studies show a very slow adoption of the practice: Just 8% of adults said they had received e-mail from their doctors in an online survey in 2005 by Harris Interactive for The Wall Street Journal Online.

Although 25% of doctors said they communicated online with patients in a survey last year by Manhattan Research, other studies suggest a smaller number do so regularly.

Maybe the fact that there's no code for an email encounter or instant messaging has something to do with it. Then again, perhaps it's the fact that you can't examine a patient through a computer. While this may evolve, the Doctor-Patient relationship is based on a face to face encounter.

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