Health 2.0 Advisors

This is a new website called Health 2.0 Advisors. The description on the front page of the website is as follows:

Health 2.0 is a rapidly developing and powerful approach that uses the Web to collect, refine and share information. It is transforming how patients, professionals and organizations interact with each other and the larger healthcare system.

The foundation of Health 2.0 is information exchange plus technology. It employs user-generated content, social networks and decision support tools to address the problems of inaccessible, fragmentary or unusable healthcare information.

Health 2.0 connects users to new kinds of information, fundamentally changing the consumer experience (e.g., buying insurance or deciding on/managing treatment), clinical decision-making (e.g., risk identification or use of best practices) and business processes (e.g., supply-chain management, business analytics).

Understanding Health 2.0 has become mission-essential. Health 2.0 Advisors helps clients critically evaluate Health 2.0's continuing evolution and the ways its tools and processes can maximize value in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Here is the link to their list of publications page.

Medpedia

Medpedia is a new health information wiki which is contributed to by medical professionals only. The supporting Universities include Harvard, Stanford, Berkley and Michigan. This will be a step up from Wikipedia for serious medical information.

Do you love iGoogle?

For a year or so now I have been using iGoogle as my home page. It keeps me grounded... the weather for Canada and Australia, France and China (there are some real contrasts there!), the top news stories for my favourite places, my Gmail account and a Facebook app, a special tab to house all the blogs I subscribe to and so on. In my cyber travels tonight I've been visiting the links posted by US College students about the Google Apps they love. I love this one a lot!

Using Google Calendar to coordinate your life at work, home, community

I use Google Calendar to sync my work and family commitments. I stumbled across this link tonight and thought it would be good to include in my blog. This entry in Google Student Blog shows quickly how you can use Google Calendar (G-Cal) with your work or student team.

To see a list of Google Applications (apps) being used in US colleges and Universities visit this link.

Hawaii tries out online health care

For people in Hawaii, going to see the doctor just got as easy as booting up their PC.

The state is the first to offer online physician visits statewide, under a program that kicks off Thursday. Residents can chat with a doctor over a standard Web browser (IE 7 or Firefox 2) or carry out their visit over the telephone. Those with a Webcam can also use that to share video with the doctor. The service will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week (with a few monthly maintenance outages during low-volume times). Members of Hawaii's largest insurer, HSMA (which operates the state's Blue Cross and Blue Shield) pay $10 for the 10-minute consultation, while non-members pay $45.

Click here for the whole story.

New Year's Resolutions

This year I will try to be more focussed on what I do and how I do it. I have the usual teaching load and a few projects to complete but I now seriously need to focus on commencing my PhD.

So, the backlog of projects that need to be completed are:

1. Complete writing the chapter of the fieldwork book with Helen Larkin at Deakin University
2. Commence and complete writing the chapter of the fieldwork book with Merrolee Penman from Otago Polytechnic
3. Complete the wiki project at the University of Alberta with the PT group
   
4. Commence and complete the wiki project at the University of Alberta with the OT group and with the SLP group
5. Respond to ethics committee requests for the blogging project with EBIRS so that this project can get going by February 2009 (we're presenting the findings at CAOT in June!) It was hopefully going to commence in January but hey... ethics is not through yet!
   
6. Write the articles I was going to write for OT Now looking at the role of Web 2.0 in OT education and practice
   

So, my resolutions are to keep gradually moving ahead with each of these projects and NOT take any more on. I also want to be calm and organized in my teaching and marking load, and enjoy watching our students develop, grow, learn and then fly out into practice :-)

This year I will commence my PhD and I will use Web 2.0 from beginning to end! I even thought about asking Commoncraft if I could use their approach in developing my proposal. You know the guys... "hmm hmmm hmm... XYZ in plain English"

So, this blog will be a place this year for keeping focussed by downloading my brain regularly!

GraphJam

Ok, another virtual timewaster, and an opportunity to express your frustrations without really being direct... Here's Graph Jam (thanks to Sue Waters for pointing this one out too).

Merry Christmas!