Hans Oh's Blog

Category: analysis

  • Could ehealth raise public awareness of clinical conditions?

    I came accross an interesting article published in BMC Medicine titled “Do citizens have minimum medical knowledge? A survey”. The authors found a “consistent and dramatic lack of knowledge in the general public about the typical signs and risk factors of relevant clinical conditions”. What surprised me was that this finding seemed to apply to…

  • Patients want more performance information available online. Where do we go from here?

    Came across an interesting little blurb reporting on a survey. In the the survey conducted in the UK, nearly 80% of patients want “more information on how their NHS hospital performs available on the internet”. Nothing too shocking, right? My first thought was to question whether or not this matters. From my personal experience working…

  • Telehealth Ontario: Is it doing more harm than good?

    A while back, I wrote about my experience using the Telehealth Ontario service. In my particular case, my experience was satisfactory. As I understand things, Telehealth Ontario is meant to be a service that “can help you decide whether to care for yourself, make an appointment with your doctor, go to a clinic, contact a…

  • Learning from the past and living with legacy systems

    Over the past eight years that I’ve been in the “real world”, I’ve had opportunities to work at various parts of the health care system from promoting healthy behaviours to children of family violence, preparing a small community hospital implement a new electronic records system, developing a quality improvement program and conducting business process re-engineering…

  • Should patients be worried about the security of their health information?

    Should people be worried about the security of their health information? In the past, I used to believe that perhaps the issues of security and privacy (an issue that is related to but NOT identical to security) were overblown. I would go so far as to suggest that those with vested interests used these two…

  • Disruptive Technologies in Health Care: A summary

    My apologies for not getting to this post sooner, but this past year has been … eventful. Here is my list of disruptive technologies that could be used in to improve and change health care. I have included links to the entries highlighting each technology – no need to rehash what’s already been written. Disruptive…

  • A look at the "dark side" of ehealth

    A look at the “dark side” of ehealth In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman writes about the unconscious effects of television in society. He later generalizes that technologies inherently favour certain types of interaction, thinking, conceptualization, and communication. For example, the written word (i.e.,…

  • Podcasting in Healthcare – Revisited 2006

    Almost a year ago, I posted an entry on the topic of podcasting in health care (Podcasting in Healthcare – Is there a future?) and then followed it up with a quick search of podcasts available on Apple’s iTunes music store (Podcasting in Health – A look at Apple iTunes v4.9 for health podcasts). I…