Hans Oh's Blog

Category: opinion

  • Google Scholar – not ready for prime time

    I came across a comprehensive review of Google Scholar available from the Thomson Gale Publishing group. As you know, Google Scholar is a dedicated search tool aimed at “academics” to search information regarding journal articles, reports, and other “scientific” literature. In a previous post (Google Scholar: Don’t believe the hype?), I shared some of my…

  • Disruptive Technology #6: Wearable technologies

    The disruptive technology profiled in this post is what I generically call “wearable technologies”. By wearable technology, I mostly mean “wearable computers”, but I don’t want to limit myself to just computers. Wikipedia.org defines a wearable computer as “a small portable computer that is designed to be worn on the body during use” (you can…

  • bio-diversity revisited

    Previously, I wrote on the topic of bio-diversity as related to standards (read post here). I read an interesting post on slashdot.org that is prompting me to re-visit the idea of bio-diversity in health care, and specifically in eHealth. As we know from our high-school biology classes, “bio-diversity” means having a variety of biological matter,…

  • Disruptive Technology #5: Patient reports

    Trust. Who do you trust? Who do you trust to take care of you and your family? The disruptive technology profiled in this post is: Consumer reports and ratings. When we go to purchase a consumer good, most people do some research before making a purchase. Today, much of this research gets done online via…

  • Wikis and eHealth

    I read this interesting article on Time.com describing the “wiki” phenomenon, titled “It’s a Wiki, Wiki World“. Could this wiki be a glimpse of the future eHealth/health care world? My personal experiences with wikis have been via wikipedia.org and from an experimental (well, I call it experimental, but “development” may be a better term) wiki…

  • Disruptive Technology #4: Ebay, auctions, and markets

    I’ve noticed that “markets” have not been discussed as contributing to or (at the very least) affecting health care and eHealth. Perhaps this is because I am in a Canadian context where anything that remotely challenges the tenets of the Health Care Act are pooh-poohed and dismissed as being somehow “un-Canadian” or ideological. For today’s…

  • Disruptive Technology #3: The digital home

    While we’re loathe to admit it, the digital home will likely alter the face of health care/ehealth in ways that we can only begin to imagine. The “digital home” is the technology that I will discuss in this post. In Canada, health care interactions have traditionally been conducted in either a hospital or a physician’s…

  • Disruptive Technology #2: iPods, handhelds, and mobile devices oh my!

    In 2004, we saw the rise of the iPod digital music player (well, at least here in North America). The iPod was the must have device. I talk about the iPod because it is just the most recent iteration of another disruptive technology: handheld or mobile devices. Handheld devices first caught on with the marketing…