healthcare technology

Because of the explosion in the use of social media at conferences, every attendee is potentially their own reporter. Attendees broadcast their thoughts on twitter with a hash tag followed by the name of the conference and the year.

Thus, last year I was able to follow Chest 2012 by simply following “#Chest2012” on twitter. Attendees use social media to discuss presentations in real time giving you clinical pearls, findings of the latest research in pulmonary, critical care, sleep, and thoracic medicine, and even post pictures of slides demonstrating important findings.

By simply following the twitter feed of a particular scientific conference, you can easily learn about the latest research, clinical pearls, even check out pictures of key slides during a presentation.

I have taken this approach to several meetings, even ones that may not necessarily be within my particular field.  For example, while it hasn’t been worthwhile for me to take the time and expense to attend Kidney Week or ASCO, or ACEP, I am interested to know what comes out of these conferences.

Following the tweets from those conferences gives me practical information diluted from a week of scientific sessions.

While these benefits are useful, there’s another significantly more tangible benefit that comes from using social media, particularly while at the conference itself: networking.

Over the past year I have been excited to have made connections through social media with many colleagues around the country. But making those connections through social media is only the first step.

Human beings are after all social creatures. Face to face connections are ultimately more productive and satisfying than anything that we can accomplish online. So at this year’s conference I will be looking to use twitter as a tool help me connect with my colleagues at Chest 2013.

By being active at the meeting and sharing my experiences through social media I’ll surely add to the community of professionals with which I interact.

A lot more at the original source: http://caduceusblog.com/archives/1366

TRANSFoRm aims to develop the technology that facilitates a learning healthcare system (Figure 1). It brings together a highly multidisciplinary consortium where three carefully chosen clinical ‘use cases’ will drive, evaluate and validate the approach to the ICT challenges. The project will build on existing work at international level in clinical trial information models (BRIDG and PCROM), service-based approaches to semantic interoperability and data standards (ISO11179 and controlled vocabulary), data discovery, machine learning and electronic health records based on open standards (openEHR).

TRANSFoRm will extend this work to interact with individual eHR systems as well as operate within the consultation itself providing both diagnostic support and support for the identification and follow up of subjects for research. The approach to system design will be modular and standards-based, providing services via a distributed architecture, and will be tightly linked with the user community. Four years of development and testing will end with a fifth year that will be dedicated to summative validation of the project deliverables in the Primary Care setting.

Lots more at : http://epractice.eu/en/cases/transform