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Google Suggest and Healthcare
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Joshua Schwimmer, MD, FACP, FASN
When you type a search query into Google's web search, a feature called Google Suggest will offer searches that other users have typed that are similar to the one you're typing. Sometimes, this can provide an eye-opening view of how the Internet — or at least, the people who search Google — feel about a particular topic.
For example, here are the Google suggested searches for "Doctors are..."
In case you were wondering — no, thousands are people aren't all searching for "doctors are sadists who like to play god and watch lesser people scream" because they necessarily feel that way — it's a quote from the movie Juno.
Here are some other similar searches from Google Suggest.
Nurses are:
nurses are great
nurses are angels
nurses are mean
nurses are heroes
Medicine is:
medicine is keystone of the arch of socialism
medicine is working but u.s. economy isn't healthy yet
medicine is an art
medicine is not candy
Hospitals are:
hosptials are generally categorized as nonprofit for-profit or governmental
hospitals are cold
hospitals are challenged by competition for paying patients
The study's aim was to better understand how physicians use the internet in their clinical practices. As you'd expect from a study sponsored by Google, it was particularly focused on how physicians use search.
The study surveyed 411 physicians from a range of specialties (PCPs, endocrinologist, cardiologists, psychiatrist) and with a range of experience (2 - 30 years in practice) on their use of the internet in clinical practice. Additionally, various clinical scenarios were presented designed to mimic actual situations the physicians might encounter.
Here are some of the findings. All these percentages seem low to me.
86% of physicians have used the internet to gather health, medical, or prescription drug information.
Only 21% of physicians who use the internet in their clinical setting access the internet for medical information in the patient exam room.
58% of physicians access the internet more than once daily.
Only 81% of physicians use search engines. Of these, 92% use Google (naturally), but only 13% use Google Scholar. (I'm not certain where Pubmed fits into this — I presume it falls under "search engine.")
Physicians most commonly searched online for general condition information and specific drug information.
As a result of online research, physicians made a change in medication or initiated a treatment about 30% of the the time.
78% (only 78%?!) believe the Internet has made practicing medicine easier.
8% of all physicians clicked sponsored links, but21% of psychiatrists clicked on sponsored links. (Analyze that.)
92% of physicians clicked on the first search result.
To delve further into the summary PDF, click here.
Lots of new health care apps for the iPhone. Among them is "Quitter," an app designed to help smokers quit.
Should the medical profession regulate medical bloggers? Dr. R. W. Donnell weighs in here. American Medical News discusses the issue here. A paper in the Journal of General Internal Medicine sparked the controvery with these conclusions:
Blogs are a growing part of the public face of the health professions. They offer physicians and nurses the opportunity to share their narratives. They also risk revealing confidential information or, in their tone or content, risk reflecting poorly on the blog authors and their professions. The health professions should assume some responsibility for helping authors and readers negotiate these challenges.
MedicalPlexus is a new professional network for physicians founded by a group of Harvard residents and MIT graduate students. Medgadget has a review.
As expected, medicare has expanded the list of "no-pay" hospital conditions. The Wall Street Journal comments.
Ozmosis compares Medpedia and Google Knol, both new Wikipedia-like environments aimed at the creation of authorotative content.
And finally, from MAKE Magazine: The Heart Robot is an "emotive puppet" that is designed to "investigate the effects that a seemingly emotional machine can have on humans."
My goal in Tech Medicine will be to explore the intersection of medicine, new technologies, and the Internet. This is a purposefully broad topic. Several times weekly I will post focused reviews of issues interesting to health professionals and nonprofessionals alike. Posts may include examinations of medical devices, pharmaceuticals, scientific advances, internet services, and other technologies involving health care and the practice of medicine. Mirroring as it does the nature of the Internet and the sometimes surprising nature of new technologies, the content may also include topics that are wonderful, unusual, hilarious, or strange.
I'm trained as a nephrologist (a kidney and blood pressure specialist). For the last two years I've written Kidney Notes, a blog designed to filter and process medical news. Most recently, Kidney Notes has become a collection of links, commentary, and scraps of information -- a reference database of interesting things with the help of a popular social bookmarking service called del.icio.us. While I will continue posting to Kidney Notes, several friends have asked me to write longer posts of original content -- and this is what I will be writing on Tech Medicine. Recently, I have also written a blog on personal productivity called The Efficient MD (in association with the American College of Physicians).
There are many topics I plan to cover, but I'm also open to suggestions and tips. Please email them to techmedicine@gmail.com.
My Interview With Google Discussing Google Book Search
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Joshua Schwimmer, MD, FACP, FASN
Google interviewed me a few weeks ago about Google Book Search -- why it's innovative and how doctors can use it. The 2 minute video is posted on The Efficient MD.
In part 1, I introduced ways of searching for health information online and discussed Healthline's approach and the use of HealthMaps. In part 2, I discussed MedlinePlus and the individual web pages of physicians. In this part, I'll compare three other methods of searching for health information: UpToDate (a "top-down" approach), Google Search (a "bottom-up" approach), and Google Co-op (a "hybrid" approach).
UpToDate is a popular, frequently updated, online textbook of medicine for health care providers. It's unparalleled at giving a quick, high-level overview of many frequently encountered clinical situations and is widely used by physicians. UpToDate also offers a section of information designed for patients (which is less well-known). This information for patients on UpToDate is typically written by the same experts that write the reviews on the main site for health care providers. You might consider this a "top-down" approach to providing health information -- the site itself provides reviews of topics written by respected experts.
For example, our patient in part 1 with a kidney stone might navigate to UpToDate's "Table of contents for patient-level information," choose "kidney disease," then choose the section on "kidney stones." The reviews for patients on UpToDate are detailed and written at a high-level (which some people might find appealing and others might dislike), which reflects the main focus of UpToDate as a source of information for health care providers.
In contrast to the "top-down" approach of UpToDate, the search engine Google provides a "bottom-up" approach. Rather than producing it's own content, Google provides a list of links chosen based upon an automated method which provides a ranking of quality. If the patient with a kidney stone in part 1 searches for "kidney stones" in Google, the first link provided is a review from the National Institutes of Health. The second is the review from Wikipedia (a public encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute). While Google typically provides relevant, high-quality results, the links provided are not necessarily the most authoritative (take Wikipedia, for example) or safe (see McAfee Siteadvisor's analysis of the Safety of Internet Search Engines).
Google Co-op, a "hybrid" approach, is an attempt to address these concerns. Google Co-op combines the "bottom-up" search results from Google with the "top-down" expertise of various organizations and individuals. For example, the Google Co-op Health Section lists contributors such as the Centers for Disease Control, the National Library of Medicine, and the Cleveland Clinic. When searching for various health topics, the "labels" from these contributors are included as part of the search under the "Refine results" section. Searching for "kidney stones" on Google, for example, displays the following additional links:
Clicking "From medical authorities" provides only links that have been labeled by the contributors as being from reputable medical authorities. This is one way of combining the expertise of health care organizations with the results from Google's search engine.
In part 4, I'll conclude with a look at searching for more detailed health information using Google Scholar and PubMed.
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