Study: Text messages are effective intervention for asthmatic children [Healthcare Informatics]
According to the results of a study, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, sending a child with asthma a text message that prods them on their symptoms and help them better understand the condition can improve outcomes. “It appears that text messages acted as an implicit reminder for patients to take their medicine and by the end of the study, the kids were more in tune with their illness,” Rosa Arriaga, study leader and senior research scientist in the College of Computing’s School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, said in a statement.
Can making data beautiful engage patients and boost health literacy [Med City News]
Providing consumers access to their data without overwhelming their health literacy threshold is probably the biggest challenge for companies developing patient portals to provide access to electronic health records. Too much of a focus on images can be distracting but too much text can cause eye strain or be daunting for users. And you still need to guide users through the components so there needs to be, if not breadcrumbs, an easy way for users to navigate.
Why doctors should use their real name on Twitter [KevinMd.com]
What we say on Twitter as doctors, particularly with medically related topics, carries weight. By saying we are doctors gives our tweets a greater level of authenticity that is not commonly afforded to other users. Not only do we hold power with knowledge, we are respected for the judicious use of our knowledge which has been painstakingly acquired over many years and enhanced by a responsibility for life long learning. It is incumbent upon us to not abuse this privilege.
UC San Francisco opens Center for Digital Health Innovation [UCSF]
Institutions around the world are experiencing fundamental cultural and societal shifts brought about by the explosive use of social media, mobile technologies and cloud computing. “While health care has not experienced the full force of the social media revolution, it will shortly,” Blum says. These technologies will truly democratize health care, and UCSF must be prepared to integrate them into its infrastructure and workflows, he says. These technologies will generate an unprecedented flood of clinical and research data that UCSF will need to manage, analyze and optimize for clinical care, discovery, and education.
5 ways Pinterest can be used for patient education in healthcare [ParkerWhite]
As more and more people use the Internet to search about healthcare, Pinterest is a way to organize the information they find, also allowing for them to share content easily with others. The other potential benefit from Pinterest is to reach people when they’re in various Internet “mindsets.” It can be a way to reach the patient when they’re not necessarily concerned with a particular problem at the moment (i.e. searching for specific health information for an issue they have right now). Pinterest can provide a medium for reaching patients to remind people of the many aspects of their life in which health plays an important role.
Specialists see tools to treat pain in video games [NYT]
…TubeRunner is one of four of galaxy-themed video games created specifically for this complex, where pain specialists and game developers are piloting an approach to measuring pain. Dr. Julia Finkel hopes that using technical data from games and interactive activities to objectively identify and monitor pain can help determine how to evaluate the techniques used to treat it. Central to their effort to quantify pain, said Dr. Finkel, the chief of pain medicine here, is a squat, rectangular black box with three eyes peering up from below the screen. It was a Kinect, a motion sensor device that allows users to control games using gestures and spoken commands.
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