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Global Health Communication: The Top 10 In 2010

00001From Blog 4 Global Health — an “interactive blog from the Global Health Council’s Policy, Research and Advocacy team” — here’s The Top 10 in 2010 Global Health Communication. An excerpt:

If global health communication was characterized by anything in 2010, it was the rise of Twitter and other social media among non-profit organizations as a way of bypassing increasingly irrelevant traditional media and taking their messages directly to their target groups. From the Global Health Council, we saw more and more of our members — large and small — embracing new media like blogging, micro-blogging and social networks like Facebook. At the year’s last meeting of our Global Health Communicators Working Group in November, I asked for a show of hands of those whose organizations were not using social media. No hands went up.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

HealthMash: A Next-Generation Health Information Search Engine

HealthMash, WebLib’s next-generation semantic health search engine, will release an iPhone application in January. It utilizes proprietary natural language processing and semantic technology tools and resources in order to find highly relevant, reliable, and recent health information from the most trusted sources and facilitate user exploration and discovery.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

What Is Telebaby?

There are more and more premature babies, and the situation for their parents is dramatic. They would love to be with their newborn 24 hours a day, but in most cases they obviously can’t.

At the Dutch UMC Ultrecht, they’ve launched a project under the name Telebaby, in which cameras were installed at the incubators and parents can watch their child live 24 hours a day — even through a mobile device.

The system is password protected, of course, so only the parents can access the specific video channels. Isn’t it great? A very human but not that expensive idea — a really Dutch approach.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Social Networks For Doctors: One Place At A Time

I suspect that in the next couple of years we’ll see the emergence of a viable social network for physicians. It hasn’t happened yet, but I suspect that we’re getting close. Physicians are increasingly dabbling in mainstream social sites.

But maybe that’s a problem. After all, a doctor can only hang in so many places. If you have “The Facebook for Doctors,” do you expect us to spend our time there instead of on Facebook itself? Maybe we will, and maybe we won’t.

Beyond the obvious requirement of a network to deliver value, I think the rate-limiting factor is old-fashioned bandwidth. You can only be one place at a time. If I spend my days on Twitter, I’m not likely to spend my days on said doctor’s network. I will go there for particular things and to talk to certain people about specific issues, but like most doctors I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what I want. I’ll know it when I see it. (Actually I do, but I’m keeping it tip-top secret.) Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*

200 Healthcare Systems In 4 Minutes

Hans Rosling, director of the Gapminder Foundation, just released another spectacular video featuring 200 years of 200 healthcare systems with 12,000 numbers in four minutes. Enjoy:

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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