[Reblog] Inderscience news: Unhealthy information remedy

Inderscience news: Unhealthy information remedy.
Liu has developed a simple metric that can be used to analyse a document or website and ascertain just how reliable the medical information in it might be. The metric counts the number of different health or medical terms in the longest passage of a given document

From the 2 April 2015 post

A little health knowledge can be a very dangerous thing, especially if the information comes from the Internet. Now, research published in the International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, describes a new quality indicator to remedy that situation.

Rey-Long Liu of the Department of Medical Informatics, at Tzu Chi University, in Hualien, Taiwan, explains how the internet has in many cases replaced one’s physician as the primary source of health information, particularly when someone is faced with new symptoms. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation and disinformation readily available on the internet via myriad websites and networking groups that might, at first sight, offer a cure, but may lead to a putative patient following a hazardous route to health.

Liu has developed a simple metric that can be used to analyse a document or website and ascertain just how reliable the medical information in it might be. The metric counts the number of different health or medical terms in the longest passage of a given document. In experiments on thousands of real web pages evaluated manually and with this “health information concentration” metric, Liu has been able to validate with precision those pages that have genuine medical information and revealed the quackery and ill-advised health pages. The approach is much more accurate than conventional web-ranking by search engines and precludes the need for natural-language comprehension by the system.

“High-quality health information should be focused on specific health topics and hence composed of those text areas that are large enough and dedicated to health topics,” explains Liu. “The empirical evaluation reported in the paper justifies the hypothesis. The result also shows that a web page that happens to have many health terms does not necessarily contain quality health information, especially when the health terms are scattered in separate areas with a lot of non-health-related information appearing among them,” he adds. “Quality health information should be written by healthcare professionals who tend to provide both detailed and focused passages to present the information.”

The metric could readily be incorporated into search engine ranking algorithms to help healthcare consumers find high-quality information working alongside more conventional, general quality ranking parameters devised by the search engine companies for detecting relevance, importance, source and author of each webpage.

Liu, R-L. (2014) ‘Automatic quality measurement for health information on the internet’, Int. J. Intelligent Information and Database Systems, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp.340–358.

Unhealthy information remedy is a post from: David Bradley’s Science Spot

Evidence based content for medical articles on Wikipedia?

Related articles

• Evidence based content for medical articles on Wikipedia? (scienceroll.com)
• What’s best care – now available to all (bangordailynews.com)
• Data driven Personalized Medicine Metamed when you cannot afford misdiagnosis (nextbigfuture.com)
• Anecdotes are never evidence…unless they’re your own. (skeptoid.com)
• Searching for Evidence Based Information (hslnews.wordpress.com)
• Costs of implementation of evidence-based therapies for stroke in Ireland (handtutorblog.wordpress.com)

 

ScienceRoll

I would love to get your feedback on a project I just came across on Wikipedia, the WikiProject Medicine/Evidence based content for medical articles on Wikipedia. The organizer of the project is the same as in Cochrane Students’ Journal Club. Please sign up if you are interested in helping us out.

Wikipedia has been accepted world wide as a source of information by both lay people and experts. Its community driven approach has ensured that the information presented caters to a wide variety of people. An article from 2011 in the Journal of Medical Internet Research found that a significant number of experts and doctors consult Wikipedia’s medicine related topics.

Medical information is very dynamic and conclusions and recommendations are turned on their heads based on new findings. Taking this into account it is important to ensure that Evidence Based content is a part of any medicine related…

View original post 26 more words

A changing doctor-patient relationship – latimes.com

 

English: Livingston, TX, 9/25/05 — A doctor talks to a patient with a broken neck at a triage center at Livingston Hospital. Doctors and nurses on FEMA’s Disaster Medical Assistance Team from North Carolina care for patients brought to the 50 bed hospital. The hospital does not have enough staff to care for all the patients evacuated from Texas cities in the path of hurricane Rita. Photo by: Liz Roll (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

 

From the 13 September 2012 article at the LA Times

 

Until now, doctors have pretty much called the shots in the doctor-patient relationship. But change is on the way. Patients, say ahhhhh — it’s about to be all about you.

The new approach is called patient-centered care, and it’s a very good thing, according to Dr. James Rickert, the founder and president of the Society for Patient Centered Orthopedics in Bedford, Ind. “It will mean better outcomes, more satisfied patients and lower costs,” he says.

Here are just a few ways your relationship with your doctor may evolve in the not-too-distant future:

Your doctor won’t be the boss of you...

…

In a patient-centered healthcare universe, doctors will make sure their patients have all the information they need about all their options — and patients will have to tell their doctors their priorities.

“Research suggests that patients want to participate,” Barry says, “but they may be afraid to push back, afraid they’ll be labeled bad patients. Then it’s important for clinicians to draw them out.”

You may have a whole team taking care of you...

You and your doctor will spend more time on the Internet.

That’s because e-visits will replace some traditional kinds of appointments.

“It’s so easy,” says Dr. Redonda Miller, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. “Patients love it — 50% of what we do in the office could by done by email.”

You may also avail yourself of the extensive medical information that can found on the Web. Your doctor should advise you about reliable sources, says Hedy Wald, a clinical associate professor of family medicine at Brown University. “We don’t want people thinking it’s a cure to put egg yolks on their heads.”

Facilities will be designed with you in mind...

 

 

 

Related articles

 

• A stronger doctor-patient relationship for the costliest patients (eurekalert.org)
• New Jersey Plastic Surgeon Revolutionizes Patient-Doctor Relationship with Social Media (prweb.com)
• Three Reasons Why Doctors Need To Spend More Time Talking and Listening To Their Patients (healthecommunications.wordpress.com)
• The Doctor’s Hand: A Healing Touch (thoughtsofdaktari.wordpress.com)
• The Institute for Research on “Humanism in Medicine” Created by The Gold Foundation – To Better Define the Role of Compassion, Altruism, and Respect To Support the Importance of the Doctor/Patient Relationship (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)

 

amednews: Why patients are turning less to media and friends for health information :: Dec. 26, 2011 … American Medical News

 

Image via Wikipedia

amednews: Why patients are turning less to media and friends for health information :: Dec. 26, 2011 … American Medical News

Excerpts from the 26 December 2011 news item of the American Medical Association (AMA)

Consumers’ access to physicians and the quality of information available are affecting their level of interest in seeking outside guidance on their conditions.

By PAMELA LEWIS DOLAN, amednews staff. Posted Dec. 26, 2011.

 

As patient visits to physicians have declined, so has their interest in finding information relating to their health.

The waning interest in information-seeking as patient visits fall is what the Center for Studying Health System Change called a “surprising” conclusion to a survey of 17,000 patients released in November. Visits to physicians dropped 4% between 2007 and 2010. Meanwhile, the percentage of American adults seeking information about a personal health concern in the previous 12 months decreased from 55.5% to 50% in the same period, it said.

Analysts said there probably are multiple reasons for that. The trend could reflect that when patients are less able to see a physician, they are less likely to be engaged in their health. It could be that with physician visits down, patients have more time to spend with their doctor, meaning they have less of a need for outside sources of information.

And they said the decline could reflect that so much information is available — and so much of it conflicting — that some overwhelmed patients may be opting out altogether from researching their health.

For physicians, analysts said, the implication of the study is that when patients come into their offices, they are going to rely on them more than ever for help in managing their health.

1 in 5 patients has delayed or canceled a doctor visit, medical test or procedure in the past year.

The sources of information the center studied were the Internet, print media, television and radio, and friends and relatives. Internet was the only source that went up, to 32.6% from 31.1%. But center researcher Ha T. Tu wrote that the growth failed to keep pace with a strong rise in residential broadband Internet access, which went up from 47% to 66% between 2007 and 2010….

Read the entire news article

Related articles

• How much guidance do patients want with their medical decisions? (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• Epatients: The hackers of the healthcare world [O’Reilly Radar] (jflahiff.wordpress.com)