New Trends in Health Social Media: Hype or Evidence-based Medicine? (Medinfo Panel)

Members of the IMIA Social Media Working Group seek input and interaction form all those interested in addressing the title/topic of their Medinfo2013 panel – “New Trends in Health Social Media: Hype or Evidence-based Medicine?” Luis Fernandez-Luque, IMIA Social Media WG Secretary, writes:

In order to allow interaction with the health social media community we will post a series of blog entries about the different topics addressed in our panel. What do you think? Is Social media Hype or Evidence-based Medicine? Where do you think the research is going? What are your thoughts?
See the blog post on the SMWG site for further information: http://imiasocialmedia.wordpress.com/

The panel summary states: “The use of social media in the health domain is growing continuously in the terms of use and also complexity. This panel will provide and overview of the current situation and the challenges ahead. The presenters will provide an engaging discussion rooted in the evidence of the emerging field of Health Social Media. Among other topics the following aspects will be addressed: gamification, personalized medicine, patient safety and other topics that will be discussed in the panel.”

Panellists include heterogenous researchers from the WG:

• Luis Fernandez-Luque, MS (Norut, Tromsø, Norway);
• Annie Lau, PhD (Centre for Health Informatics, Australian Institute of Health Innovation, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia);
• Carol S Bond, Dr (Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, United Kingdom);
• Kerstin Denecke, PhD (University Medical Center of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany) ; and
• Fernando José Martín-Sanchez, Professor (Health and Biomedical Informatics Research Unit. The University of Melbourne, Australia).

Medinfo2013, the 14th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark on 20-23 August, 2013 – see www.medinfo2013.dk

Context Sensitive Health Informatics Pre-Medinfo2013 Conference: Submissions Now Due 08 February

Prof. Marie-Catherine Beuscart-Zéphir (Past Vice Chair), and Prof. Christian Nøhr (Chair of the IMIA Human Factors Engineering for Healthcare Informatics Working Group) wish to announce that the Call for Papers is available for the “Context Sensitive Health Informatics” event, a pre-Medinfo conference jointly organized/supported by several IMIA WG (Human Factors Engineering for Healthcare Informatics, Organizational and Social Issues, Health Informatics for Patient Safety).

The event will be held on 17 and 18 August, 2013 at the Danish Institute for Medical Simulation at Herlev Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Call for papers – deadline EXTENDED TO 08 FEBRUARY
Context Sensitive Health Informatics is about health information technologies and their environments. Environments may be people in different roles such as users, designers, and evaluators, but also nonhuman constructs such as organizations, work practices, guidelines and protocols, buildings and markets. We invite original contributions addressing the conference topic.

For more information about the conference and the call please see the conference web site:  www.cshi2013.org and the attached downloadable document: IMIA Context Sensitive Health Informatics Call for Papers

Submission of paper: 8 February 2013
Notification of acceptance: 2 April 2013
Submission of final papers: 22 April 2013

This is an official event of several IMIA WGs and is supported by IMIA, AMIA, EFMI and other organisations.

Call for Papers: Enabling Technologies in Geriatric Medicine and Rehabilitation – Deadline 01 March 2013

Dr Michael Marschollek (Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics, Germany and IMIA Wearable Sensors WG) invites submission of papers to Joint Focus Theme Issues of Methods of Information in Medicine (MIM) and Zeitschrift für Gerontologie und Geriatrie – European Journal of Geriatrics (ZGG) on the theme of  Enabling Technologies in Geriatric Medicine and Rehabilitation. Guest Editors: Michael Marschollek (MIM), Clemens Becker (ZGG).

The deadline for electronic submission of contributions is 01 March, 2013. The full details are in the downloadable PDF version of the Call (CfP Enabling Technologies 2013 MIM ZGG). Please submit your paper electronically (as an email attachment) to the Guest Editor at Michael.marschollek[at]plri.de. In accordance with the submitting authors he will allocate your manuscript to one of the two journals and provide details on the review process. Submissions of full papers should be limited to about 4,000 words (25,000 characters for ZGG). Papers must not have appeared in, nor be under consideration by other journals.

Demographic change with rising numbers in co-morbidity leads to an increased demand in clinical geriatric expertise as well as in geriatric research. In order to alleviate the effects that aging will have on our societies in terms of increased functional deficits, waning possibilities for participation and communication and a potential risk of emergencies, supportive technical solutions are frequently proposed. Such technologies may comprise a wide range of solutions including e.g. wearable sensor-based systems, ambient assisted living systems for personal environments or communication support tools. To make sure that the rapidly advancing field of research in technologies for the elderly meets the demands of the persons in need, research efforts should be interdisciplinary. Evaluation in controlled clinical trials or field experiments is extremely valuable and therefore highly commended.

Inventory of Health IT Evaluation Studies

The IMIA WG Health Technology and Quality Assessment and EFMI WG Assessment of Health Information Systems provide and maintain the Inventory of Health IT Evaluation Studies and Systematic Reviews, available for free at: http://evaldb.umit.at

Dr Nicolette de Keizer, Chair of the IMIA Working Group (http://www.imia-medinfo.org/new2/node/154) writes:

This repository was created to help researchers to identify evaluation studies that have been conducted in defined settings. It now contains more than 1700 references to published evaluation studies and reviews of evaluation studies of health information systems.

A health information system in this context comprises all computer-based components that are used to enter, store, process, communicate, and present health related or patient related information, and which are used by health care professionals or the patient themselves in the context of inpatient or outpatient patient care. Each entry is indexed according to, among others, type of evaluation information system, clinical domain, evaluation method, and evaluation criteria. All entries are searchable based on a combination of parameters and thereby it allows much more specific searches than, for example, the MeSh-terms in PubMed. For each entry, the abstract can be reviewed, and a direct link to PubMed is provided.

The repository is the result of a systematic literature search in PubMed, conducted in 2003 [1] and updated in 2006, 2009 and 2012. Since 2009, the repository is also updated based on input from researchers from all over the world. To support this, the repository website offers the possibility to propose studies that should be entered into the database. Since 2010, between 150 and 200 distinct visitors visit http://evaldb.umit.at each month.

References
[1] Ammenwerth E, de Keizer N. An inventory of evaluation studies of information technology in health care trends in evaluation research 1982-2002. Methods Inf Med. 2005;44(1):44-56. Erratum in: Methods Inf Med. 2005;44(3):III.

Context Sensitive Health Informatics Pre-Medinfo2013 Conference: Call for Papers

Prof. Marie-Catherine Beuscart-Zéphir, outgoing Vice Chair of the IMIA Human Factors Engineering for Healthcare Informatics Working Group wishes to announce that the Call for Papers is available for the “Context Sensitive Health Informatics” event, a pre-Medinfo conference jointly organized/supported by several IMIA WG (Human Factors Engineering for Healthcare Informatics, Organizational and Social Issues, Health Informatics for Patient Safety).

The event will be held on 17 and 18 August, 2013 at the ITX Lab at Herlev Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Call for papers
Context Sensitive Health Informatics is about health information technologies and their environments. Environments may be people in different roles such as users, designers, and evaluators, but also nonhuman constructs such as organizations, work practices, guidelines and protocols, buildings and markets. We invite original contributions addressing the conference topic.

For more information about the conference and the call please see the conference web site:  www.cshi2013.org (under construction)

Submission of paper: 1 February 2013
Notification of acceptance: 2 April 2013
Submission of final papers: 22 April 2013

This is an official event of several IMIA WGs and is supported by IMIA.

Updating the IMIA Strategic Plan – Contributions Invited From IMIA Members and Colleagues

IMIA is in the process of updating and re-focusing its Strategic Plan. We need your input to help us.

IMIA’s current Strategic Plan – titled Towards IMIA 2015 – was approved by the IMIA General Assembly at its meeting in Brisbane, Australia in 2007, in conjunction with Medinfo2007. It can be found via http://www.imia-medinfo.org/new2/node/5

We have an outline for activities over the next year (or just less than), with the aim of presenting the updated and re-focused Strategic Plan to the IMIA General Assembly at its meeting at Medinfo2013 in Copenhagen, Denmark, in late August 2013 (www.medinfo2013.dk). The core taskforce members leading this activity are are Antoine Geissbuhler (Chair), Lincoln de Assis Moura, Jr. (Vice chair), Nancy Lorenzi, Fernando Martin-Sanchez, Christian Lovis, Lucy Westbrooke, Alvaro Margolis, John Holmes, S B Gogia, Peter Murray.

As the first stage of this, so that we have some initial thoughts for the IMIA General Assembly to discuss in Beijing at its 2012 meeting, we have a short(ish) set of high level questions. These can be found in the document at http://eepurl.com/oxnH5 We invite you to return your answers by 20 September 2012, so that the first set of results can be analysed and presented at the Beijing meeting.

We invite IMIA members (in particular Member Societies, Working and Special Interest Groups, and Institutional members) to read the current Strategic Plan, and consult within their organisations on ideas as to how it should be re-focused and updated. We also invite individual members of any of these groups to contribute their views.

May Meetings and Events

The following events will take place in May, many of which are organised by IMIA Member Societies, and we encourage colleagues to support them.

May 10-11, 2012   ehealth2012: Health Informatics meets eHealth
http://www.ehealth2012.at

Location: Vienna, Austria
Organisers: Working Group Medical Informatics and eHealth of the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) and the Austrian Society for Biomedical Engineering (ÖGBMT)

May 14-15, 2012  2012 European Summit on Trustworthy Reuse of Health Data (invitational event)
http://euhealthdata2012.imia.info

Location: Hotel Metropole, Brussels, Belgium.
Hosted by IMIA, in conjunction with supporting and sponsoring organisations.

May 21, 2012   PERVASENSE2012 workshop: Situation recognition and medical data analysis in Pervasive Health environments
http://www.pervasense.org

Location: San Diego, CA, USA
Organised in conjunction with with IMIA Wearable Sensors WG – http://www.wearable-sensors.org

Dates: May 27-30, 2012  eHealth 2012: Innovating Health e-care
http://www.e-healthconference.com

Location: Vancouver Convention Centre, Vancouver BC, Canada
Organisers: COACH, Canadian Institute for Health Informatics, Canada Health Infoway

Casemix Summerschool in Talinn, Estonia: 11-15 June, 2012

In a joint initiative, Patient Classification Systems International (PCSI – http://www.pcsinternational.org) and the EFMI Casemix Working Group are organising a Summerschool in Talinn, Estonia from June 11 -15, 2012. The school is focused on the principles of measuring health care for quality, funding, outcome management and most of all to share experience in many countries around the globe.

Information about the Summer school, including registration fees, accommodation, etc.  is available on the PCSI website – http://www.pcsinternational.org and via the downloadable PDF file (1.2MB).

The 2012 INTERNATIONAL CASEMIX SUMMER SCHOOL will provide a mix of introductory case mix methodology information along with more advanced concepts all within the context of interactive working sessions, exercises, and opportunities to learn from the experts and students alike during classroom time as well as during various social events. During the school, students will work in groups to share experiences from their own backgrounds and countries and will be asked to elaborate on specific case studies and present back to the larger group.

IMIA Working Group ‘Security in Health Information Systems (SiHIS) Event: 03-05 August, Australia

The next meeting/event of the IMIA Working Group ‘Security in Health Information Systems (SiHIS) will be held on 03-05 August, 2012 in the Gold Coast, Australia. This will immediately follow the HISA (Health Informatics Society of Australia) conference, which is being held on 30 July to 02 August in Sydney – http://www.hisa.org.au/page/hic2012

The theme of the SiHIS meeting will be: Global Citizens – Accessing and Sharing Health Data Across International Borders. The meeting topics will include, but not be limited to:

• Medical Tourism
• Education of global technologies – e.g. cloud computing for health
• Collaborative medical/bio research data linkages across borders
• Novel technical solutions to support global Privacy and Security
• Personal Control of Health Records – e.g. obsolescence, removing data, data location
• De-identification for international sharing – i.e. is it strong enough for each country?
• Privacy protection technologies
• International health data standards
• International Policy Framework – update on effectiveness.

SiHIS WG members may contact the WG Chair and Vice Chair for further information – see http://www.imia-medinfo.org/new2/node/150

Some information is included in the downloadable announcement document (485kb, PDF) and further information will be provided nearer the event.

The most recent SiHIS meeting was held in Hiroshima, Japan in November 2009.

Launch of The Social MEDia Course

The growth of social media is changing how medicine is practiced and healthcare is delivered. The ways in which patients, doctors, and all healthcare professionals communicate and manage their interactions is changing due to the growing use of common social media applications and the growth in use of increasingly powerful mobile communications devices.

However, Dr. Bertalan (Berci) Mesko believes that medical education is lagging, and needs a revolution (in his words). In 2008, Berci launched a course at the University of Debrecen, Medical and Health Science Center in Hungary; this was the world’s first university accredited course for medical, dentistry and public health students abut social media and medicine. After several iterations of the course, which proved extremely popular with students, from February 2012, he began to teach the course at Semmelweis University of Budapest, the oldest medical school in Hungary (1769). The course is now an elective course that is part of the official medical curriculum at the two universities,  is taught to several hundred students and runs over 14 weeks.

As the next step, Berci has now launched The Social MEDia Course (http://thecourse.webicina.com/). This is a free online course, available to anyone to access. While the course was primarily designed for medical and public health students as well as medical professionals, the vast majority of the presentations can provide useful pieces of information for patients and basically for everyone interested in health and social media.

The Social MEDia Course uses a series of 16 ‘Prezi’ (prezi.com) presentations that run online, and each one is accompanied by a test that can be completed. On completion, a badge is added to the user profile which you can share on any social networks, and after finishing all 16 elements, a personalized certification is available to show successful completion of the course. An introductory Prezi gives an overview of the course.

Berci is a member of IMIA’s Social Media Working Group, and the course has been revised with, and will be monitored by, input from an international advisory board that includes members of the IMIA SMWG (http://thecourse.webicina.com/pages/advisory/).