My First Impact Factors
posted on 4 Jul 2008I know it’s a small step for a scientist but an exceptional day for me as I’ve got my first impact factors (2.78!).
Amino Acids. 2008 Jul 2. [Epub ahead of print]
Transdab wiki: the interactive transglutamin (...read more)
from ScienceRoll
PubMed API
posted on 4 Jul 2008Now, you know we have Pubmedfight in our hands to be able to resolve disputes between two scientists. But what about InterMEDI, a collaborative intelligence for biomed professionals. Excerpts from the blog Personomics:
With the (...read more)
from ScienceRoll
Cool Technology of the Week
posted on 4 Jul 2008
Tonight, the Boston Pops will host another dazzling display of fireworks on the Esplanade in Boston. As cymbals crash, fireworks will explode on cue. Ever wonder what technology is behind the pyromusical synchronization? Computer controlled firing systems are the cool technology of the week. Here's a list of leading companies. (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Informaticopia
posted on 3 Jul 2008For those of you who aren’t already aware, Informaticopia is a great blog run by Rod Ward and colleagues. The blog presents "eclectic news and views on health informatics and elearning" and is based in the UK, but reports on worldwide issues. I’ve been following Informaticopia for a few years now and have learned greatly from it.
Just recently, Rod and co were recognized for their great work (...read more)
from Hans Oh's eHealth Blog
My Closet
posted on 3 Jul 2008from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Genetic Companies in Trouble in California
posted on 3 Jul 2008Months before, Steve and I, we both said it would happen. And now look at this announcement:
The California Department of Public Health has issued notices to 13 laboratories to cease and desist performing genetic testing for California residents until the laboratories meet the requiremen (...read more)
from ScienceRoll
Pubmedfight
posted on 3 Jul 2008You definitely know Googlefight where you can compare the number of search results returned by Google for two terms or expressions (Wikipedia).
What about a similar tool in health science? Here is Pubmedfight (...read more)
from ScienceRoll
Today's Healthcare CIO - C. Martin Harris, MD, MBA
posted on 2 Jul 2008Dr. Harris is on the cover of Health Management Technology, the July Issue. The article is an interview on being a CIO in a health care organization. Who better to explain the role that someone leading a key organization into the future of EMRs, PHRs (including a Google Health partnership), eResearch, and online consults. Certainly a leader and an innovator.
Technorati: Healthcare IT (...read more)
from eHealth
Shameless Self Promotion
posted on 2 Jul 2008Once in a while you have to promote yourself. Well, in this case HIMSS has done it for me. I am please to receive the Spirit of HIMSS Award. Nice article about mean appears today in their HIMSS Weekly Insider.
Not often does one get such acknowledgement for volunteer work but HIMSS finds ways to do this on a regular basis as they are dependent on many devoted volunteers to make the organization a success. I am pleased to be part of that process. I am in good company for this award.
Technorati: PHRs (...read more)
from eHealth
Massachusetts Clinical Data Exchange Legal Agreements
posted on 2 Jul 2008Across the country, many towns, states, and regions are thinking about clinical data sharing. There is substantial variation in the business models, the data shared, and the stakeholders involved.
However, every clinical data sharing entity needs an operating agreement to create the organization and a customer agreement to add trading partners.
In the interest of transparency, I am posting the
Operating Agreement (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Big Think: The Future of Genomics
posted on 1 Jul 2008Big Think is a new service featuring interviews with famous experts about important topics. Here is a recent interview with Dr. Pardis Sabeti, Assistant Professor at Harvard University who focuses on the future of genomics:
(...read more)
from ScienceRoll
Web 2.0 in Health Care - slides available
posted on 1 Jul 2008I recently presented a webinar on this topic. Since slides from a previous version of this presentation were already on SlideShare, I decided to add the new one there as well.
Emerging Trends and Opportunities for Health Care Organizations to Leverage Web 2.0Previous: Web 2.0: Beyond Open Source in Health CareIf you search onHealth 2.0 (...read more)
from eHealth
Innovation Integration Timeline: Where is Medicine 2.0?
posted on 1 Jul 2008I found this great timeline on the blog of Jay Parkinson (original: juliaallison). This is the Innovation Integration Timeline:
they are invented they are adopted by a few they are ridiculed they are adopted by a few more they are feared they are adopted by a few more they are discussed they are adopted by many they are praised they are absorbed into everyday life they are seen as so obvious it’s hard to imagine the world any other way they are written about in mainstream mediaMedicine 2.0 (...read more)
from ScienceRoll
Technology Secrets of the Congressional Clock
posted on 1 Jul 2008
On June 11, as part of Healthcare IT Advocacy Day in Washington DC, I visited several offices on Capital Hill (Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Jim McGovern and Barney Frank) to discuss the importance of ePrescribing, data standards, and support of incentives for EHR adoption.While wandering through the House (Cannon, Longworth, Rayburn) and Senate (Russell, Dirksen, Hart) buildings (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Medical Education Evolution: Time for a change
posted on 1 Jul 2008I just finished my last exams so now I’m officially in the last year of medical school. I believe I know exactly the problems of medical education as there are some of them even at the best universities. I believe medical education is still traditional while medicine is not traditional any more.
read more)
from ScienceRoll
Healthcare 100
posted on 30 Jun 2008Looks like I am still listed in the Healthcare 100 blogsbut not in the first 100, but number 200. Interesting mix at the top: Bad Medicine, Medgadget, WSJ Health blog, Kevin MD and the Healthcare blog. Worth reviewing the list from time to time to see what rises to the top. If I had time, I would work on the algorithm.
Technorati: Health 2.0
(...read more)
from eHealth
Bar Coding Medications
posted on 30 Jun 2008I was recently asked how outpatient prescriptions and over the counter medications are bar coded and how inpatient medications should be bar coded if they are repackaged.
Here's the overview.
Some outpatient prescriptions and most over the counter (OTC) medication package bar coding today use the 12 digit UPC-A bar code symbology. The OTC bar code may contain the NDC number or the Universal Product Code (UPC) number for the product.
Many outpatient medications that have the UPC number in the bar code also have a 10 digit National Drug Code number printed on the package (usually placed near the drug name) , in a 3 part format separated by dashes i.e xxx-yyy-zzz (where xxx=manufacturer, yyy=product, zzz=package size). A company called RxScan (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Medicine 2.0 carnival at Highlight HEALTH 2.0
posted on 29 Jun 2008The 27th edition is up at the Highlight HEALTH 2.0! Check out all the posts and news about the world of medicine 2.0 and health 2.0. Thank you, Walter Jessen, for hosting Medicine 2.0!
Medicine 2.0 is a blog carnival about the impact of web 2.0 on medicine and healthcare.
(...read more)
from ScienceRoll
Writing to come & a new blog of interest
posted on 29 Jun 2008Apologies for not writing much lately, but things are very hectic. I do, however, have several posts planned and some drafts written up. I just haven’t too much time to sit down and flesh out my thoughts.
In the meantime, I would like to suggeset another blog that came to my attention that may be of interest to you. It is titled "e-Health Tech: e-Health Technology, Research, Initiatives and Education" and can be found at "http://e-healthtech.org/ (...read more)
from Hans Oh's eHealth Blog
Health News in Second Life: Health 2.0?
posted on 28 Jun 2008This week, I organized a session for 23andMe in Second Life and it turned out to be quite an interesting event. Jen McCabe Gorman gave Second Life a try and listed some reasons why to use it in health 2.0:
hell of a lot cheaper than traveling More Interesting Q&A Flying in Second Life was a blast Credibility is established beforehand SpeedMedical & Psychological Sites In Second Life:
Second Life in Practice (...read more)from ScienceRoll
Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 17: Organizing Committee
posted on 28 Jun 2008This January, I attended the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 16 conference in Long Beach, CA. It was a one-in-a-lifetime experience and I enjoyed talking about Medicine 2.0 and organizing a live Second Life medical exercise for the medical students of USC.
Now, I’m truly honoured to be in the organizing committee (...read more)
from ScienceRoll
Should green precede gold open access - or should we mandate gold OA? (ie regulate publishers rather than researchers)
posted on 28 Jun 2008Listening to the talks at ELPUB yesterday about the efforts and money being poured into institutional repositories, as well as the efforts needed to educate researchers on self-archiving, and hearing about the self-archiving (green Open Access) mandates and their implementations at the NIH (panel session with Neil Thakur) and the CIHR (Geoff Hynes), it dawns on me that self-archiving leads to this giant, complex "parallel" publishing system (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Citing blogs, preserving cited webpages etc with WebCite
posted on 27 Jun 2008Today I presented at the 12th International Conference on Electronic Publishing held in Toronto our work on WebCite, an archiving system for cited web-accessible objects (e.g. webpages, blogs, wikis, online datasets, PDF reports, preprints, any non-journal/non-book webmaterial which cannot be assumed to be present or archived in libraries.
WebCite makes Internet material CITABLE and PERMANENT (ARCHIVED).
WebCi (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Cool Technology Commentary - RFID Safety
posted on 27 Jun 2008On Wednesday, JAMA published an article about the risks of active and passive RFID to other hospital equipment.
The Associated Press and ABC News issued major stories about it.
Although the study focused on RFID tags, the issue is more generic. Electroni (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
If you use Gmail, I have your Xoopit Invitation
posted on 26 Jun 2008With all the photos and videos I’m dealing with in my email right now, I love Xoopit.
The service scans your gmail account for media (photos, videos, etc.). The Firefox add-on allows you to easily manage/search/sort/view this media.



I’ve asked for and was given 100 invitations for readers of davidrothman.net. Click here to get started (...read more)
from davidrothman.net
More Than a Reminder to take your Pills
posted on 26 Jun 2008From the Boston xconomy is a story about a start up which does more than remind people to take their medication. Nonadherence with medication is a real problem. InnovationRx first does a 20 minute interview to determine the best strategy to get past the roadblocks to medication compliance. They use text messages and emails to encourage adherence and send reminders. The cost is $7.99 per month, or $96 per year and may be something that health plans will be willing to pay for.
Technorati: Health 2.0 (...read more)
from eHealth
Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle
posted on 26 Jun 2008
I live in Wellesley, Massachusetts where we recycle nearly 90% of our solid waste. How is this possible? Here's my personal story.As part of my effort to be more eco-friendly, I spend each S (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
New Oncology Website
posted on 25 Jun 2008OncologyStat is a relatively new website with loads of information on cancer. Oriented toward the medical professional, the site boasts of 12,000 users since launching in September 2007. It has a depth of content including journal scans, drug and treatment info, news, blogs and a tab specifically for ASCO 2008. Looks like a worthwhile offering. Registration is required to view most content but there is no fee. The site is produced by Elsevier.
Technorati: Health 2.0 (...read more)
from eHealth
Register for July Session of Human Factors 101
posted on 25 Jun 2008The Healthcare Human Factors group is now offering a four-hour course on human factors and patient safety, open to all and free of charge for UHN employees.
(...read more)from Drupal blogs
The Gift of Time
posted on 25 Jun 2008
Time is the one commodity you cannot buy and you cannot make more of. To me, this means that time is our most valuable resource.The role of the CIO to allocate their time to those people and projects most needing of attention.
Every day, I would (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Presentation Tomorrow on Web 2.0 in Health Care
posted on 24 Jun 2008The Health Management Congress invited me to give this talk as a webinar tomorrow at 2pm EST. The full title is: "Emerging Trends & Opportunities for Healthcare Organizations to Leverage Web 2.0".
Details from the website:
The social-networking revolution is coming to health care, at the same time that new Internet technologies and software programs are making it easier than ever for consumers to find timely, personalized heal (...read more)
from eHealth
Our Pen-and-Paper Doctors
posted on 24 Jun 2008The New York Times has an editorial today on the need for physicians to adopt EMRs. It is in reaction to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The slow pace of fast change is happening in healthcare IT. Not devoting enough resources to health IT continues the short sited path of the past. The advantages are clear - get on board and devote the resources. Improved government incentives will help.
Technorati: EMR (...read more)
from eHealth
Medicine 2.0 abstracts now available
posted on 24 Jun 2008The Medicine 2.0 Congress in Toronto (Sept 4th/5th, 2008) has selected its presentations from over 120 submissions and posted the abstracts on its website. Stay tuned for the announcement of the keynote speakers.
It's going to be a great conference, not to be missed! Early bird registration rates expire on June 30th, 2008.
(...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Electronic Health Records for Non-owned clinicians - Sharing data among providers
posted on 24 Jun 2008At times, the business case for interoperability is not entirely clear. If data sharing reduces the volume of redundant lab tests, then the healthcare system as a whole wins, but someone loses revenue.
Over the past year, I've seen a remarkable change in attitude among clinicians in Massachusetts communities. They are demanding data sharing. Here's the history, the specifics of the clinician requests, and the plan for making it happen.
When we first conceived our host (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
The Petabyte Age
posted on 24 Jun 2008The latest issue of Wired magazine includes a series of articles lead by the editor Chris Anderson's article, "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete." In Wired's usually controversial approach to topics, he leads off with the quote, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." In the petabyte age, we move from local storage to storage in the cloud and "information is not a matter of (...read more)
from eHealth
Updated Health 2.0 definition
posted on 23 Jun 2008From Ted Eytan, MD, who invited commentors to suggest edits to a previous definition. As always, Health 2.0 is person-centric:
"Health 2.0 is participatory health care. The combination of content and community enables the patient to be an active partner in their own health care and the citizen to be an equal partner in improving the health system."
I like the "combination of content and community" - it speaks to the importance of reliable content in health care and the importance of mutual support. Also, the definition avoids the overused term empowerment and focuses on partnership with the provider and system.
Good job.
Technorati: Health 2.0 (...read more)
from eHealth
Automating Inpatient Documentation
posted on 23 Jun 2008This year's IS Retreat focused on Acute Care Documentation and transforming inpatient wards into paperless workflows in support of our goal to have 85% of the BIDMC medical record automated by 2011.
Here are the minutes of our retreat, documenting our strategy for automating inpatient records.
1. A single point of entry for our built applications (or as few entry points as possible) would (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Introducing Simon Gabriel Rothman
posted on 22 Jun 2008Born at 5:30 AM today, weighing in at 6 lbs 3 oz. I uploaded the following embedded video quickly for distant grandparents:
Music is You Ruined Everything by Jonathan Coulton
Liz and Simon are both doing great.
I will likely not be blogging for a while and will be slower in answering email than usual. Thanks in advance for your understanding.
Tired and very happy,
-David
(...read more)
from davidrothman.net
ISI/SCI Journal Impact Factors in Medical Informatics: Open Access Journal on Top
posted on 21 Jun 2008Yesterday, on June 20th, 2008, ISI/SCI released their 2007 Journal Citation Reports, reporting journal impact factors for the worlds' most important scholarly journals. The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) remains one of the most successful Open Access journals in the world*. For the second year in a row, JMIR came out as the #2 ranked journal in the medical informatics category (out of 20 journals). JMIR slightly improved its impact factor to 3.0 and has now almost the same impact factor as the leading medical informatics journal (JAMIA), whose impact factor dropped to 3.1. JAMIA is published by Elsevier and backed by an influential scientific society (American Medical Informatics Association), while JMIR is pretty much a one-man show on a shoestring budget. Anyone still not convinced about the open access advantage (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Medicine 2.0 Congress. Toronto, September 4-5th.
posted on 20 Jun 2008Medicine 2.0™ is an international conference on Web 2.0 applications in health and medicine, organized and co-sponsored by the Journal of Medical Internet Research
(...read more)from Drupal blogs
An Evaluation of the Five Most Used Evidence Based Bedside Information Tools in Canadian Health Libraries
posted on 20 Jun 2008Farrell, Alison. “An Evaluation of the Five Most Used Evidence Based Bedside Information Tools in Canadian Health Libraries” Evidence Based Library and Information Practice [Online], 3 17 Jun 2008
Abstract
Objective – This project sought to identify the five most used evidence based bedside information tools used in Canadian health libraries, to examine (...read more)
from davidrothman.net
IMIA Yearbook 2008 selects 3 JMIR papers as "best papers"
posted on 19 Jun 2008The IMIA Yearbook 2008 has just been published [Accessed: 2008-06-19. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5Yh9tkUTQ)].
While I have some issues with some of the editorial policies of the yearbook and its lax or non-existing peer-review policies for its original content (which recently lead to an embarrassing plagiarism case (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Medical Librarians in Computers, Informatics, Nursing
posted on 19 Jun 2008Bill Perry’s Notes from the Net Nomad column in the May/June issue of Computers, Informatics, Nursing (PubMed) is pretty much about MedLib blogs.
Excerpts:
I think nurses are missing something if they haven’t investigated blogs written by medical librarians. Experts in finding and asse (...read more)
from davidrothman.net
PubMed Faces, Chernoff Faces, PHR 2.0
posted on 19 Jun 2008Through Euan Adie's blog on the Nature Network site I learn about a fascinating visualization technique - Chernoff Faces.
Pubmed Faces is a fun application that illustrates the power of this visualization technique.
The following screenshot shows Chernoff Faces for some of my papers (though the citation counts seem way off compared to Google Scholar counts).
(...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
ContractionMaster.com
posted on 19 Jun 2008Reminder: Liz’s due date is July 10th. Please forgive my one-track mind.
Wanting to track labor (or false labor) contractions, I made an Excel spreadsheet. The first two columns record the time a contraction starts and the time it ends, the third and fourth columns (duration and frequency) calculate automatically.

I thought this was fine until Liz discovered ContractionMaster.com (...read more)
from davidrothman.net
The UK Biblioblogosphere
posted on 18 Jun 2008The UK Biblioblogosphere is a blog by Keir Hopwood. From Keir’s announcement:
I wanted to announce my new blog, which details my MSc ILM research project on UK academic (i.e. university) library blogs:
http://ukbiblioblogosphere.blogspot.com/
On this blog I will
a) detail the progress and any interesting milestones in the research andwriting process itself
b) keep a list of relevant online resources, including openly available scholarly literature and related blogs
c) keep an updated “directory” of UK academic library blogs at http://del.icio.us/ukbiblioblogosphere (...read more)
from davidrothman.net
Open Peer Review 2.0 vs traditional blind peer-review: A head-to-head comparative experiment
posted on 18 Jun 2008The Medicine 2.0® conference in Toronto is currently conducting a unique experiment, comparing the traditional method of peer-reviewing submitted abstracts through invited experts, head-to-head with a "Digg"-like open peer-review mechanism to vote for submitted abstracts using a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system, with the additional ability for anyone to sign up as a peer-reviewer for a submitted abstract (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
e-LiSe
posted on 17 Jun 2008Been meaning to post about e-LiSe since I saw the article about it in March.
“e-LiSe (e-Literature Searcher) is an easy-to-use web-based application which finds biomedical information truly related to English words provided by t (...read more)
from davidrothman.net
MedLib Blog Badge at Health, Science & Libraries
posted on 16 Jun 2008For a while there, Jane Blumenthal had me worried that she was going to quit blogging.
Jane is the Director of the Health Sciences Libraries at University of Michigan and I’m really glad she changed her mind- I’d like to see more directors following her lead and blogging.
(...read more)
from davidrothman.net
Friday Fun: The Placebo Journal
posted on 13 Jun 2008Dr. Doug Farrago is a board certified family practice physician in Maine who happens to publish my favorite medical journal, the Placebo Journal.
For the uninitiated, it might be fair to say that the Placebo Journal is sort of like The Onion, but all about medicine.
Here’s an example parody advertisement from PJ for the Drug Rep Piñata:

(This and other sample pages from PJ available here (...read more)
from davidrothman.net
Another study on 404's / link rot / broken web references in scholarly publications
posted on 12 Jun 2008The following is from URL:http://7thspace.com/headlines/284227/an_update_on_uniform_resource_locator_url_decay_in_medline_abstracts_and_measures_for_its_mitigation.html. Accessed: 2008-06-12. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5YWTVdl20)
For years, Uniform Resource Locator (URL) decay or "link rot" has been a growing concern in the field of biomedical sciences. This paper addresses this issue by examining the status (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
PubMed Faceoff
posted on 12 Jun 2008PostGenomic’s PubMed Faceoff is the first 3rd Party PubMed/MEDLINE Tool I’ve looked at that really made me chuckle.
This site applies a simple, photorealistic variant of the Chernoff Faces visualization technique to impact factor data for papers in the PubMed database of biomedical literature.
Basically it allows you to search PubMed and have the results represented as a set of human faces.

Each paper is represented as a face. The ethnicity and gender of the face is selected at random for visual interest - you can turn this feature off if you so choose.
The age of a face correlates with the publication date of the paper. Younger faces are more recent papers.
A smile means that the paper has been cited more times than expected (based on its age). Larger smiles mean more citations.
A frown means that the paper has been cited far less than you might expect.
The raised eyebrows correlate with the impact factor (sort of - actually the Eigenfactor) of the journal in which the paper was published.
Some example search results:

I absolutely appreciate the concept (potentially being able to estimate several properties of an article at a glance)- it’s just that some of the facial expressions crack me up.
(...read more)
from davidrothman.net
From Patient Needs to Personal Health Applications
posted on 4 Jun 2008Last week, I had the honor to deliver the PHR track keynote at the AMIA Spring Conference, May 29th-31st, 2008, in Phoenix/AZ, which I just uploaded to Slideshare.
The Keynote covered: An international perspective on the importance of PHR/PHA development & research; patient needs (and other drivers of Personal Health Records); Emerging technological trends, with an emphasis on what I call PHR 2.0 – impact of Web 2.0 approaches e.g. to reduce attrition in ehealth applications.
(...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Study on PatientsLikeMe: Benefits of PHR 2.0
posted on 3 Jun 2008The Journal of Medical Internet Research has published the first paper in its forthcoming Medicine 2.0 Theme Issue (see also Call for Papers [Accessed: 2008-06-03. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5YIpGexZx)]).
The study, entitled "Social Uses of Personal Health Information Within PatientsLikeMe, an Online Patient Community: What Can Happen When Patients Have Access to One Another’s Data" (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Worlds colliding…industry vs. academia
posted on 13 May 2008It’s interesting to see how differently ehealth is viewed by academics and industry. To one, ehealth is the potential of using new mediums to explore ideas and possibilities, while to the other, ehealth is more of a means to an end.
For the past few years, I’ve been in the academic world exploring the limits of our existing evaluation theory as applied to ehealth innovations. As a researcher (or perhaps more aptly, ‘would be’ researcher), I focused on the co (...read more)
from Hans Oh's eHealth Blog
An update
posted on 9 May 2008I know I haven’t written anything in quite some time. I’ve been caught up in a few projects that have been taking up my time, but I plan on posting some thoughts based on the recent experiences I’ve had.
I hope to do some posting about my experiences with my dentist and how technologies are being used in that area of health care. Some thoughts about the dichotomy between industry and academia in terms of the outlook of ehealth Some thoughts on recent developments in the mobile/handheld world. By this, I mean specifically Apple’s iPhone and some of the potential implications for health carePowered by Qumana (...read more)
from Hans Oh's eHealth Blog
Human Factors Group receives funding from CPSI
posted on 8 May 2008The Healthcare Human Factors Group has received funding for three projects from the Canadian Patient Safety Institute.
from Drupal blogs
Frontline Docu: Sick Around the World
posted on 17 Apr 2008I watch Frontline's Sick Around the World documentary last night and really recommend it to all as a sober examination of the healthcare issues that are such a high priority in America today.
Here's a preview below. You can watch the whole program online.
What I found most insightful about T.R. Reid's reporting was the clear and practical way he looked at the pros and cons of the national healt (...read more)
from HealthNex


