Month: March 2005
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Open Access Publishing – power to the people
There’s an interesting commentary in this week’s BMJ titled “Open access publishing: Too much oxygen” by Jeffrey Aronson. Aronson’s basic argument is to temper support of open access publishing. He also believes that the current model of publishing is working well pointing to the number of different journals sprouting up. Aronson argues: We need to…
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Canadian Medical Association Leadership Series: Future Practice 2005
The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) released a new publication in their Leadership Series titled Future Practice 2005. The report is a series of articles directed toward physicians about the use of technology in their office and also provides some updates as to the current state of telemedicine and electronic health records in Canada. I haven’t…
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Now for some *real* eHealth
Now, here’s an interesting article from MSNBC.com that is really about e-health. The article describes healthy ways to respond to a computer crash. I never realized that so many people talk to their computer or get violent toward it. I know that in my most frustrated moments, I wish I could smash my computer. Looks…
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New articles on evaluation in eHealth/health informatics
I came across two new articles on evaluation in health informatics. Ammenwerth E, Shaw NT. Bad health informatics can kill – is evaluation the answer? Methods of Information in Medicine 2005;44:1-3. Ammenwerth E, de Keizer N. An inventory of evaluation studies of information technology in health care: Trends in evaluation research 1982 – 2002. Methods…
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eHealth is not a panacea
There seems to be a prevailing sense that by using information and communications technology more effectively in health care, that many of the problems we face will somehow (magically) disappear. An opinion piece available on Computerworld’s website (“It’s the year for e-health records” by John Halamka) makes it seem like eHealth will be the cure…
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eHealth research funding from Health Canada
Here’s an interesting call for research proposals from Health Canada titled “Innovations in the Health System: eHealth“. Deadline for submissions is May 4, 2005. One million has been set aside to fund up to six projects. The objective of the research grants is as follows: The Health Policy Research Program (HPRP) is seeking to enhance…
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Strategies for Searching EMBASE
A recently published article by Haynes et al (2005) studied how to optimally search EMBASE (see below for citation information). For those interested in searching for articles on EMBASE, you need to consider the factors of a search: Sensitivity: The proportion of high quality articles retrieved; Specificity: The proportion of low quality articles not retrieved;…
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Learn how to search EMBASE better
Brian Haynes, Monika Kastner, Nancy Wilczynski, and the Hedges Team at McMaster University published this interesting and useful article on how to better search EMBASE. FYI – “EMBASE is a comprehensive and international bibliographic database renowned for its extensive coverage of the drug and biomedical literature” (EMBASE.com). EMBASE is similar to the National Library of…