Normally I access and read a dozen articles a week, all of them in PDF. I used to save them on my hard disk, by using a predefined naming system for the folders and articles.
Then I tried Mendeley for some while but I found it a little slow and heavy. Two days ago, I performed a small research on how to organize my personal library of science and then I found out Papers, from Mekentosj.
In a simple way, it’s just the software I’ve been looking at: organizes all the papers I have at my computer, renames them, saves them at a specific folder, matches the PDF with PubMed (merging all the info from the database), and much more.
If you think you could need something like this, just give it a try.
YouTube video from iKutticom “It’s like iTunes for your papers”
Today, I’ve read the article “Long Live the Database State”, published in July 2009 at the Prospect, after a twit from @Richard56. Although this was published almost a year ago, its content is nowadays even more updated and relevant. This article mainly focus the limited access to the enormous amount of data that is generated everyday in the British National Health Service, data that has been kept away from providers and end-users, hence impairing the main core of the system to adapt to the needs and to evolve by itself.
Every time we interact with a public service we leave a record—a medical report, perhaps, or an exam result. Those records should be the lifeblood our public services. If shared and analysed—securely—they can help services to improve the quality of their performance. They can also help to prevent problems: identifying, for instance, those at risk from diabetes or even child abuse. And the economic downturn brings new urgency: if public services don’t improve productivity they will soon be unaffordable. (…)
If we want to have good public services, we are going to have to trust them with our data; and if our public services want us to pay for them, they will have to show us that they are using our data effectively and securely. But armed with the type of data created by Brian Jarman, and the tools built by Richard Webber, we can build safer, cheaper public services that know their users better.
Leaders and stakeholders all throughout the world should realize that data sharing and analyzing is the next step for the healthcare systems survival and sustainability, from global to local settings. More than never, we need an effective, statistical, secure and responsible interpretation of the information that is being collected by healthcare providers.
In summary, only knowledgeable healthcare systems are capable of becoming true complex adaptive systems. Only then, they will face effectively the increasing needs and demands of the future.
Mayo Clinic is highly dedicated to the use of social media in health care.
This is a video from Tweetcamp II, a course that occurred in April 2009 focused on providing teaching and training for the staff on using Twitter on health care.
Transform to a medical home — with a little help from your friends
We learned from the National Demonstration Project (NDP) that transforming to a patient-centered medical home (PCMH) isn’t easy — it actually IS rocket science — and it requires meaningful change throughout all aspects of a practice.
We also learned that medical practices can be lonely places: physicians and staff often feel isolated. What they want and need are opportunities to communicate, collaborate, and learn with other practices in order to maintain the momentum of change.
And lastly, we also learned that some practice leaders have a DIY attitude (Do-It-Yourself). They were not interested in having a consultant or practice coach in the practice; they just wanted useful information, some accountability, and connections with other practices to learn best practices.
TransforMED’s Delta-Exchange provides all of that in an online, social networking platform.
With the cost of 30$/month per user, this is an interesting solution for knowledge sharing and collaborative virtual work among family physicians.
