Oxford Healthonline

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Oxford Healthonline

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: education medical)

'healthonline' was previously DIPEx - a well know resource for understanding illness and health. Well worth a look if you don't already know about it. I've been thinking about a presentation for a healthonline workshop about the potential of Web 2.0 and education. So thought I'd better add to this Blog and share some thoughts.
Medical and other students need to understand people and what healthonline has is a repository of people's experiences. Just imagine that a student could create their own area (personalisation) within healthonline and then find and pull together information that fits e.g. their course on obesity. We can go further and have (possibly with actors) doctor/patient encounters discussing and diagnosing. A 'doctors view' would allow a specialist to provide comments. A 'patients view' would do the same. There could be some surprises here - a paper with a colleague of mine shows, for example, how some men value having a chronic BMI - or as they put it being a 'fat bastard'. Puts a new layer onto all the medical advice....

Sharing and Med Soc conference

Just back from the BSA Medical Sociology conference in wet Brighton. As always I came back wondering at the breadth of the papers I got heard and the way small empirical dominate the conference. As it was a 40 years anniversary there was a touch of 'old lags' - 'back in those days..' feel about a plenary or two...

Point of this post is that following my presentation I said I would put it on 'slideshare' - not that anyone had heard of it. So uploaded it last night and was surprised to find that my previous slide set had been viewed over 300 times. That is a far larger audience than the original presentation ever had. So this show the utility of open publication in that you can reach and communicate your ideas with a potentially vast and international audience.

So the slides are about - putting mediated health information into a historical context (paper was 'new' once) and to think about the 'new' ways we think about how to 'sort out' the vast amount of information on - things like this!

Why the image ? Check the slides - and I have always wanted an exotic coffee machine!

Journal silos

Spent ages trying to upload a paper to a well know academic journal. Publishing houses are buying into new tech that – to follow – Ritzer’s thesis makes me do more work (The McDonaldization Thesis, London: Sage). Well OK but the way this is set up restricts academic work.
How?
The journal I attempted to post too has pre set keywords. None of them correctly link to my paper – which was invited to be innovative and I would like to say is. Each stage like a computer game has to be completed or you can’t move onto the next. I have to ‘view’ the pdf the site makes of my paper before I can hit the complete button.
Why does this matter?
Like the previous post this is about academic silos in that the software is forcing us into boxes e.g. I can't use the right keywords because the paper is about new things (for this journal).
My first Blog rant - oh and 'Web 2.0' is not in that list!

Journal grazing

The library has changed how new issues of journals are displayed. In most libraries there are a set of display shelves which have all the new journals gathered together so you can potter through anthropology to zoology via history. When I get the time or have a issue I want to think about I enjoy a supermarket like graze through these shelves. Can't do that now as all journals are scattered into library classified disciplinary silos.
Why does this matter?
All disciplines are most interesting at the boundaries with others e.g. geography journals have some good sociology. Medicine is multidisciplinary and I have found new ideas from reading a journal I would never know existed without a bit of shelf grazing.
What about e-journals I hear you (and the library say) ? No I cant graze those easily as they are slotted into publishers silos ….
I try and get students to visit the library and have in the past explained the art of journal grazing. This also introduces the feel of real paper the smell of a fresh new publication...
So another sad cut to academic work.

Doctor in store?

Are doctors like any other consumer product?  A new wave of Web sites that allow the public to rate and comment on named practitioners suggest that this might be so. Anyone can say (nearly) anything about identified doctors on these sites.  Lets look briefly at  some background - data might be free to ‘flow’ in global information networks but it is ultimately anchored in material place or places. RateMD and other sites located in the United States are legally protected from such challenges to their user generated data. Passed by the United States Congress in 1996, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides immunity from liability for those who publish through an ‘interactive computer service’ information provided by others. In other words owners of a user generated review resource are not legally responsible for the content provided by others provided they have mechanisms in place to prevent obscene or racist content.

The Australian Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act (1999) offers a similar level of protection for site owners. Objections by the Australian Medical Association to sites such as RateMD extending reviews to Australia practitioners therefore have no legal power. An attempt by the Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Medical Protective Association obtain the IP addresses of users, who it was claimed had written defamatory reviews of Canadian doctors also failed this legal basis. Oppositional acts have been attempted through the Internet. For example, a Google group named ‘I hate ratemd’ suggests that doctors ‘locate your own name and leaving overwhelmingly positive posts. Get everyone in your practice to do the same…’. However, the RateMD sites dismisses such tactics and claims that ‘multiple patients’ submitting content ‘from the same computer’ will be identified and removed. A site launched in the summer of 2008 named, ‘iWantGreatCare.org’, that seeks to replicate the form of RateMD for Britain, has given rise to opposition amongst the doctors writing the medical Blogging community.

A number of well publicised instances of professional misconduct and negligence has contributed to an increased scepticism about doctors. Such cases have also resulted in reforms to complaints procedures and changes to medical education and assessment This does not imply that trust between patient and doctor has been undermined but rather that patients, as consumers, are aware that their doctor may be fallible, the science on which their practice is base sometimes suspect and the health care system potentially flawed. In other words as well as being vigilant of their own health individuals must also vigilant about the nature and quality of the medical expertise they may call on for advice. So do user review site expose medical practice to the a gaze like we find amongst customers in the department store?

I would not want to follow the similarities with a department store too closely but an implication is that some users will be disappointed if the doctor or service they choose fails to live up the expectations raised by the information read on the review sites. I should also say that there are sites where students can rate their professor...