Month: March 2005

  • Conceptualizing self and others when using eHealth

    I wonder if using eHealth has any affect on how health care providers perceptions on their role(s) and/or the patient-provider relationship. What about for patients? Health/health care has essentially been a face-to-face interaction for essentially hundreds (if not thousands) of years. Now, we’re introducing technologies directly into the heart of what is a very intimate…

  • eHealth: A North American phenomenon?

    Question: How widespread is eHealth around the world? Answer: I think that there’s considerable interest from many parts of the world. I mean, when I see the many health informatics/ehealth research centres (e.g., UK, Australia, Canada, United States, Germany) there seems to be considerable interest. But, since I was born and raised in a Canadian…

  • Google Scholar: Don’t believe the hype?

    When I heard about Google Scholar a few months back, I was initially excited at the prospect of being able to search academic/research references quickly, with the power and ease of using Google. Here’s the description from Google: “Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts…

  • Update on systematic review – evaluation frameworks

    The systematic review for health informatics/ehealth evaluation frameworks continues slowly. I just realized that there may be another potential source of data that I never considered previously – academic websites. Let me explain… So far, my search strategy has been as follows: Electronic indices: Medline & Embase University of Toronto library catalogue Manual search of…

  • The Digital Hospital – another resource

    Yahoo!Finance has a link to a series of articles on the “digital hospital” by Business Week Online. There’s a feature on some if the issues with trying to evaluate digital hospitals, which was a pretty good piece. Other features include short pieces on “Mr. Rounder”, Computers on Wheels (COWS), and mobile computing. Good reading with…

  • Web downloads as predictors for citation impact

    I came across an interesting web article that compared the number of downloads of a scientific article. The article is somewhat dense with a number of figures and formulas. Honestly, I don’t completely understand it all, but I get the gist of the article (I think). Here’s a quick recap. The authors wanted to know…

  • The Digital Hospital

    Here’s an interesting report from PricewaterhouseCoopers titled “Reactive to Adaptive: Transforming Hospitals with Digital Technology” (soft copy is available for free – you just need to provide some information about yourself). I haven’t had a chance to read the document in detail, but I did manage to give it a quick scan. From what I’ve…

  • More thoughts on the "Fundamental Theorem of Medical Informatics"

    Okay, I couldn’t help but think about this theorem a bit during the day. Here are some of my thoughts: Corollary #1 identifies an intelligent user. I suppose there is an inherent idea that the user is a health care professional of some sort. Friedman provides a bit more detail and describes intelligent user as…