Denise Silber's eHealth

A 2.0 Interview of Miguel Cabrer, MEDTING founder and ex digital hospital CIO

Miguel Cabrer founder of MEDTING, a global site for the exchange of  medical information and images, will be a panelist at Health 2.0 Europe in Paris. Formerly CIO of Hospital Son Llatzer, the first digital hospital in Europe (European Commission eHealth Award in 2004) and eHealth Coordinator for the Balearic Islands Health Department,  Miguel Cabrer is now an independent eHealth Advisor, Member of the HIMSS EMEA Governing Council and Member of the IMIA Web 2.0 taskforce workgroup.  Our Health 2.0 Regional Ambassador to Spain, Miguel even found the time to be interviewed!  

 

Denise says: Please tell us the main reason for a physician to use Medting?  

Miguel says: Physicians use Medting to share a clinical case with a colleague from anywhere in the world.  They also store images and videos, build clinical cases, and access content for research and learning purposes. Content can be restricted to invitees only.  A hospital or other organization can create its own extranet with the Medting Enterprise platform.  

Denise says: How did you get the idea that there was a need for these different functionalities?  Was it something you would have wanted  when you were working in a hospital?  

Is TrialReach.com the new Google of the segment?

 Question : Which online clinical trial repository will French internet users consult?    Reply : Those which are the most Search Engine optimized and the most ergonomic. There is always room for a new player who does both well, hence the title of this post equally available in French on DeniseSilber.com.

The purpose of the original post was to demonstrate that competition for traffic is international in this seglment.

Born in the UK, just across La Manche / the Channel ;-), the site TrialReach.com has an impeccable internal search function that enables the user to enter successive critria and manage its personal data.  The home page is Web 2.0 / Googlish clean. And it seems easy to get around.

Is the data base complete ? Possibly too soon to say, but there are nearly 90K trials listed.

Last night, when I wrote the French post, the Afssaps or French medicine agency's data base was inaccessible. Is it ergonomic. That's another question... https://icrepec.afssaps.fr/

And of course there are other major options for internet users.

a) ClinicalTrialsSearch.org lets you look for sites in France

http://www.clinicaltrialssearch.org/france_clinical_trials.html

b) So does the US government 

ClinicalTrials.gov

http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cntry1=EU%3AFR

Cancer.gov

http://www.cancer.gov/clinicaltrials/search

c)  The IFPMA provides a French interface as well as other languages

http://clinicaltrials.ifpma.org/no_cache/fr/monportail/index.htm

d) Let's not forget OrphaNet and its annuaire d'essais cliniques for rare disease (in multiple languages)

So, online publishers beware. There is a competition for traffic to clinical trials even in your home country, since users will find international sites with large data bases even before the national ones. Welcome to the web, TrialReach.com We'll be following you.

signed Denise or @health20paris

Rating or Narrating, that is the question : how best to relate the patient experience

This April 6–7, the Health 2.0 Europe conference will feature the many ways in which Web 2.0 tools are providing innovative solutions to, amongst others, our fundamental need for self-expression, known more recently as “user-generated content”.

Several panels will refer to these issues, but we will focus in this post on the Hospital and Payers’ panel. Payers want to ensure that their patients are being oriented to good care. Hospitals want to know that they are being considered “justly”. The Health 2.0 panel will include demonstrations by Guide Santé (France) and Patient Opinion (UK), both web 2.0 sites created by physicians concerned by patient satisfaction with hospitals and clinics. Payers like the UK NHS and Big-Direkt from Germany will participate in the conversation and Big-Direkt will also demo their new online tools.

Rating sites in health are high profile in France, especially amongst those who are rated and some early entrants have bit the dust for methodological reasons. Rating sites, however are not all identical and they are certainly not alone in capturing the patient experience. They live alongside online story telling or narrative tools, deployed in a variety of ways on sites that will be featured in Paris from a dozen countries.

How did all of this come about?

Communicate (animated film on you, your health, and the internet)

Independent evaluation of web sites of French hospitals and clinics

How good are the web sites of French hospitals and clinics? Which web sites should be studied? Which criteria should be included in the review, with what methodology?

Well, the short answer to the long question is that Denise SIlber convinced Basil Strategies ;-) to study the web sites of what are reportedly amongst the best hospitals and clinics in France. The conclusions of the Basil Study are that these institutions are clearly not perceiving the benefit to their organization in maintaining an attractive, up to date site that answers most of the basic questions, recruits new employees, and actually saves its institution time and money. The average score was 50 out of 100, with no major difference between public, private, and not for profit, although the best one seemed to be public and the worst, private.

More on the study soon!

French hospitals & clinics must make public 10 specific quality indicators

On Dec. 30, 2009, the French daily official publication (Journal Officiel) regarding law stated that French hospitals must make readily available to the public (ie as in on the institution's web site ) 10 quality indicators as follows, demonstrating yet again, the relation between the quality of care and the availability of information.

ICALIN (fight against hospital infections), ICSHA (consumption of hydro-alcoholic products), SURVISO + (surveillance of infection in O.R.);  ICATB (proper use of antibiotics);  a composite score of the above

+ 5 scores from the patient file: management of the patient file, time required to receive post-hospitalization letter (which in Denmark would be instantaneous), record of pain evaluation, nutritional prevention,  anesthesia file.

It is interesting to note that this request does not come from a Twitter-like movement on the ground, but more from traditional lobbying, by patient groups and efforts of the French Health Authority (HAS). Hopefully it will be picked up and amplified by the tweeters.

Will hospitals be able to comply with this request? Please see the following post which discusses Denise Silber's exclusive new study of hospital web sites...The short answer is "unlikely". If the information is just "thrown up there" on sites that are already not well-organized, the information will not really be accessible.

Free Wiki handbook on Medical Informatics and more: just out on Wikipedia in time for New Year's

The Wikipedia Handbook of Biomedical informatics is itself a gem "published" today, thanks to the wonderful new Web 2.0 world in which we live and in particular to the organizational  efforts of Pr Renato Sabbatini in Brazil. Read on for  the reasons to not miss out on this one!

Health 2.0 in Europe: Couldn't? Wouldn't? Does!

(first published on the Health Care Blog)

They said it couldn’t happen in Europe, that social media and online tools wouldn’t catch on, because the healthcare context was soooo different from the US. They said that Europeans don’t worry about access and cost, that they aren’t looking for information online because they they trust their doctors utterly and fully, and that European doctors don’t go online, except if they're Scandinavian. Well, it just isn’t so!

The world's first wireless pacemaker was not implanted today

Search the news on Google via keywords +pacemaker + wireless + first and you'll think according to certain articles that a NY state patient received today the world's first wireless pacemaker. That is not the case. It is not even certain that she received the first wireless pacemaker in the US. She did receive the first wireless pacemaker of a specific manufacturer, St Jude. Other manufacturers such as Biotronik and Medtronic have produced wireless pacemakers and defibrillators for several years; whether the technology is internet or GSM-based, the patient benefits from the same result, of knowing that his or her data are communicated automatically to the physician's office daily.

IAGG: conference on aging in Paris July 5th to 9th

Silber's Blog will be covering through Twitter #IAGG09 the IAGG world congress on geriatrics July 5 to 9 in Paris. Please visit the newly designed sites (professional and consumer) of Health and Age.