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IADIS e-Society 2009 conference (Barcelona 25-28/02/2009)

The IADIS e-Society 2009 conference aims to address the main issues of concern within the Information Society. This conference covers both the technical as well as the non-technical aspects of the Information Society. Broad areas of interest are eSociety and Digital Divide, eBusiness / eCommerce, eLearning, New Media and E-Society, Digital Services in ESociety, eGovernment /eGovernance, eHealth, Information Systems, and Information Management.

IADIS organise two more conferences around the same dates and location:
IADIS International Conference on Mobile Learning 2009
IADIS International Conference on Information Systems 2009

Health 2.0: patients-led research

Patientslikeme is a social network of patients created a couple of years ago. The patients shared their experiences with the disease to other patients. Health professionals can also participate. Now there are active communities on neuromuscular disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson's, fibromyalgia, mútliple sclerosis, diseases associated with mood (anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder ...) and AIDS. At present, more than 23,000 patients share their data.
At the end of 2007, there were some data that suggested that lithium could slow the progression of the evolution of the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Fornai published a paper in this topic in February 2008). From these data and using the platform Patientslikeme, Karen Felzer (a californian researcher in seismology and daughter of a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and Humberto Macedo (affected amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, from Brasil) launch a study to see the effect of lithium in a broad group patients. This is an inquiry without "professional researchers". A research study organized by the patients themselves. In a short periode of time they recruited more than 200 participants, which folow-up for six months. In November 2008 published the results showing that lithium has no effect on the evolution of the disease. Patients have done a quick and transparent study.
This new model of patients-as-partners is a key element of Health 2.0

Stretching Moodle for healthcare innovation

Moodle has become the preferred e-learning platform for the academic community. Moodle combines active learning and pedagogical innovation.
Some of its features (student centredness, open source, lecturer control...) have convinced to reach LMS summit. Even though the current version is not 2.0ish, it is expected that it will be fairly improved in the next version (actually named 2.0).

We did consider to stretching Moodle for business (healthcare) innovation purposes and these are the results of our group session.

What is an innovation group?
A group of people that share a common goal and think and discuss to advance a topic to be implemented in a real context (application). Group members then share visions, documents and thoughts during and undefined time span.
It may exist a working plan (but it may considerably differ) and a set of deliverables might be set beforehand.
The innovation group drivers are participation, thinking differently, making knowledge explicit, bringing new ideas...

What Moodle could offer for innovation?
[Needs & Tools]

1. Gathering opinion: Queries, Surveys (internal use only), Forums (debates, input quality appraisal)
2. Subgroups: Queries
3. Managing tasks and events: metacourse as parent and multiple activities as dependants
4. Communication: internal messaging
5. Participation monitoring: monitor engine, reporting (activity, participant), input quality appraisal through forums.
6. Resources management: based on active roles
7. Collaboration: blog (personal rather than group blog), wiki, glossary (automatic linkage)

Tasks: to receive input from participants (non shareable)
[...]

Tagging everything (on your PC)

It's a common people problem: files a thousand in your PC or external memory classified in folders under folders. Searching an old document becomes a nightmare. Indeed, Google Desktop is a solution but it doesn't fit for images or image-PDFs.
Folksonomy has brought us the tagging system and some applications like Delicious have gained a time share in your daily digital experience. But this is not enough, we need a system to tag our files and find more easily what we are looking for, particularly if we are the only ones to blame.
tag2find address this shared need and can be extremely useful for a bunch of purposes (collections, scientific research, digital libraries...). In healthcare, you can tag your medical images, clinical cases and your scientific output. If you find out additional needs, feel free to comment.

Kevin Kelly: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web

Barcelona, E-Health capital 2010

Viviane Reding, European Comissioner for Information Society and Media, announced in World of Health IT 2008 meeting that Barcelona will be hosting the European Union's eHealth Ministerial Conference in 2010.

Among the organisers: HIMSS, the European Commission, the Ministry of Health and Consumption of Spain, and the Government of Catalonia.

From E-HealthCat, we are delighted of hosting this event in our favourite venue.

Digital contents consumption in Spain

The Observatorio Nacional de las Telecomunicaciones y de la Sociedad de la Información belongs to the public body red.es and its main aim is to analize the information society in Spain.

Recently, the Observatory has published a white paper on Digital Contents (Libro Blanco de los Contenidos Digitales). There is a full chapter dedicated to the Network Society and summarise the use of tools such as wikis, blogs, repositories, etc...

Two thirds of Spaniards (64%) consume digital contents. Music and films are the king contents (more than 70%). Interestingly podcasts are consumed by only 0,8% of digital users.

Health information is used by 44%, a 2-bagger regarding 2004.

Medting

Medting is an internet social community tailored for clinicians to share their clinical cases and browse a disease atlas. Equipped with medical image software and videos, doctors may ask for second opinions, share cases or stock private ones for self-learning. All visual information may be shared embedded too. This is just an example:


Integration with PubMed for citation searching and a tagging system based on SNOMED CT allow users to collaborate and discover sound information.
It is surprising that such a venture is supported by a business model completely free for end-users (doctors), even if they are premium users. Advertisement in weekly email reports and a licensing system for organizations are the only two revenue streams.

Third healthcare revolution

Sir Muir Gray foreword Web 2.0 in the Health Sector, a industry review with UK perspective (by Lindsey Birnsteel from E-Health Insider). Comparing industrial revolutions (we are in the 3rd one according to Manuel Castells) and healthcare revolutions (we are too in our third according to Sir Muir Gray), there are some unsolved problems that e-health (symbol of the new revolution) might contribute to address:
• errors;
• poor quality care delivery;
• poor experience of patients;
• waste;
• unknowing variations in policy and practice;
• failure to introduce high value interventions;
• uncritical adoption of low value interventions;
and
• failure to recognize uncertainty and ignorance.

An executive summary of Birnsteel report is accessible here, though the full report requires order.