“Diabetes in a Tech World” Community Presentation

Last Saturday, I had the wonderful opportunity of presenting at the Diabetes University, “Get Fit and Stay Healthy” on October 1, 2013. The  Diabetes University has been held in Columbus, Georgia, for 16 years. It is presented by the Southern Diabetes Foundation and Columbus Research Foundation. It is great to see this type of event has been offered to the community for so long. The event is actually a two day conference with the first day focused on professionals in the health care field, and day two focuses on those in the community. Additionally, many physicians took time out of their Saturday to present about diabetes and health to the community. I think though, I was the only one tweeting the event.

For me, it was a great opportunity to discuss how technology can not only be fun but help people stay fit and healthy. Of course, I couldn’t present about technology and health without talking about NLM, MedlinePlus, and the local library. I was also excited that I did not go over my allotted time! I said I would post the presentation so here it is:

 

The slides are mostly screen shots of various apps, websites, tech, etc. I think it shows kind of how the flow went. I had about 20 minutes to run through all of this and discuss how technology can help people stay fit. I also had to break down a few things to explain “the cloud,” “apps,” etc. as I was talking to an audience with mixed levels of tech experience. It certainly kept me on my toes.

I think the presentation went well overall. I had a few people asking me to come back to speak to the health professionals, which is great. I saw several people in the audience writing down some of the apps, especially the fun apps. Any time we can get out in front of the community to talk about health, fitness, tech, and the library is IMO always a good thing.

Twitter Chats This Week

Link

Well, even though we have all been caught up in the government shutdown discussions, the twitter chats will continue this week. There are actually two chats going on this week that caught my interest.

#Medlibs 

1. When: Thursday, October 3, 9:00 PM (EST) (Typically weekly on Thursday at 9:00 PM EST)
2. Topic: Autumn App Harvest
3. Suggested Topics:
   1. FDA Press Release regarding Medical Apps
   2. What medical apps are you, physicians, residents, nurses, medical and nursing students using?
   3. Are there non-medical apps that you’re recommending medical staff to consider using?
   4. How are you sharing app reviews to library users?
   5. How are you promoting apps to your library users?

Last week’s medlibs chat was awesome. It combined the #medlibs and #meded twitter chats, and we had more clinicians participating in the discussion. I hope we continue to have clinicians participating in the discussion as we discuss apps this week.

When I present to patrons, I always include information about at least 1 app I’ve been using. I could present a 15 minute session, and I still squeeze in time to discuss a new app. You could say it is the geek in me, but it is also noticing the trends in the field at this time.

As I see each new group of students and residents start, I notice each group, for the most part, seems more tech savvy than the group before them. We have some students right now who code to relax and take a break from medical school.

So I am excited to discuss this topic this week.

#mladisparities

1. When: Wednesday, October 2, 8:00 PM (EST) (Typically 1st Wednesday of every month at 8:00 PM EST)
2. Topic: Health disparities
3. Interviewing: Myrna Morales, Technology Coordinator at the NN/LM New England Region

I am curious what will be covered during this Twitter Chat. I have seen several people discussing lately the difficulty of living on food stamps.  I wonder if this trend of people doing the “SNAP Challenge” or “Food Stamp Diet.” Even Panera Bread Company’s CEO has been doing the “SNAP Challenge.”  Join the chat tonight to find out!

 

Other Twitter Chats

If you are curious about other health related twitter chats, then please check out the list on Symplur.com. There are multiple Twitter Chats on various subjects throughout the week.

MLA Webcast Leveraging Technology

I have been so wrapped up with work projects and preparing for the upcoming MLA Educational  Webcast Leveraging Mobile Technologies for Health Sciences Libraries, April 18 at 1pm central, that I just realized that I have not even blogged about it yet. Thank you Michelle Kraft for posting about the webcast.

Michelle lists all of the important details for the webcast, which can also be found on MLA site, so instead I plan on posting about how & why I got involved, and my geeky humorous bio?

How did I get involved. I was asked by Gabe Rios who was interested in the work I’ve been doing at my organization with the iPad and EMR. How did Gabe know? Well this blog and Twitter.

People actually read my posts! This only encourages me to post more.

For the bio in MLA I took a cue from David Rothman and Bart Ragon and injected a little humor and a little less mini resume. Why? Well I have this information posted on LinkedIn, here in this blog, and many other places. A short bio is also included as part of the presentation slides.

Really when you get down to it the humor is just the geek in me. Ok maybe I added a little drama to it to bodly go where not many #medlibs have gone before (if you watch tomorrow this wil make sense…. Hopefully).

What will this geeky feature include?  I will specifically discuss some of the activities I have been involved with at my organization including the EMR & mobile apps series. As a solo hospital librarian I could not let the opportunity to discuss how hospital librarians can get involved. So I spent about 3 minutes of the 5 minutes (actually I went over the time, so it is really 6 minutes) talking about getting involved and how this can be done.

So join me and the other presenters (Heather, Molly, Kimbreley and Colleen) to learn more about leveraging mobile technology for medical libraries.

Fact check: Apple iPad use in hospitals

Back at the beginning of October at Apple’s ‘Let’s Talk iPhone’ keynote, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, announced that over 80 percent of hospitals in the US are now testing or piloting the iPad. The problem is, as iMedical Apps and Krafty Librarian noted, there has been no release of data to support this claim. None despite iMedical Apps and others stating they would dig to see if the claim had any validity.

I am not arguing whether there are more iPad in use than other tablets. Although I am an android fan even I have to admit it is probably very true. Physicians love their iPad like they love UpToDate and there is almost no way of convincing many of them to use something else.

My issue here is that the cult of Apple is so great we take their word for something without finding out the truth. Sure we may point out the questionable data but that’s it. It reminds me of the episode of the Simpsons.

Why should we care? Let’s think about this for a minute. If Apple says 80% of hospitals are using iPad and your hospital isn’t then there is a HUGE chance this will influence your future purchase and may even convince many hospitals to go ahead and buy iPads– even if they do not integrate with their systems. It might also convince individual physicians who actually don’t need much convincing, to buy an iPad. The one good thing that might come from individuals purchasing the iPad is the possibility they could influence their institution to use tablets, which will probably turn out to be iPad.

I am not saying iPad are bad. I actually like mine even though I love my Android phone. I just don’t think a company should be allowed to make blanket statements without facts.  When pharmaceutical or food companies do this the FDA makes them remove the statement/ad and issue a ‘correction.’ When will this be done for other industries including the tech industry?

What do you think? Are Apple statements taken as fact? Should we even care?

Why the two month delay in posting thisyou ask? I had hoped to see someone corroborate the statement with facts and details but I have not. If there was something posted please let me know in the comments.

Micromedex finally available in the Android Market

As I was drinking my coffee this morning and skimming my email I saw some good news:

Micromedex Drug Information Application Now Available in Android Market

Yeah! This is great news for me and all of the other Android users. Sure, I have other drug databases on my phone; however, pharmacist always ask if Micromedex is available on Android. Until now wasn’t so this is great news.

It is always great to have multiple drug database accessible on your phone. I have been waiting for Micromedex for a while now so it can serve as one of my additional mobile drug databases.

I won’t go into a detail review of the app here. Instead I’ll leave that to iMedical Apps, plus I haven’t had a chance to fully review it yet. Micromedex provides drug information on the go, has information on 4500+ search terms and the best part is it’s free! So what are you waiting for? Go download and enjoy.

UptoDate on iPhone for some

A recent post on iMedical Apps alerted me to the latest highly anticipated medical app:

UpToDate

Normally when you say this name among medical librarians it brings cringes of pain, bad memories of fee negotiations, and overall frustration. I admit when I saw this post my immediate thought was this will never be available in an institution that does not pay for remote access to UpToDate. Or it will be an additional charge such as the remote access charge.

I know, UpToDate does provide free integration with EMR systems; however, it still will not work remotely without the extra fee and I have heard rumors & stories of price increases after implementing.

Now with all this being said I still think this is great news. As, Dr. Mistakes, the writer, stated on iMedical Apps  UpToDate is one of the most used resources of students and residents. When I have rounded with a team there were many times that UpToDate offered answers where other databases did not. But alas, the new app will not be available for institutions yet:

However, institutional subscribers (myself included) have a longer wait ahead of them. There is not a clear timeline yet for launch of mobile solutions for institutional subscribers. The problem, according to Ms. Brown, is significant variability in how UptoDate is implemented. For example, in some institutions, it is integrated into an EMR, which raises issues regarding data security. There are additionally uncertainties about the process for deploying across an institution as the enterprise component of mobile health is still in its early stages.

Very interesting. Yes institutions have different contracts with UpToDate but if I am not mistaken even with EMR access it still requires and means you have access online from UpToDate’s website. The EMR access is an add on to your subscription. So why the delay?

My guess is to figure out the price increase for this new feature. Plus I cannot see this app being available for institutions that do not have remote access to UpToDate.

Dr. Misra says institutions with big pockets will be able to afford this new app. I am not sure I agree. At a time when many institutions are cutting their resources as a result of economic issues and also dealing with changes from HITECH (meaningful use), I see few being able to afford an increase. I also think more institutions would opt for the EMR integration.

Yes vendors need to offer more Apps and mobile resources for institutions… the question is can institutions afford new fees for new services?

I often prefer a good mobile website over an app anyway. Why? It means you can use the institutions’ WIFI to access creating less of a licensing headache or fee increase, and it works for all devices. By the way, where is the Android love UpToDate?
  
Please note the above post are my, Alisha Miles, comments and opinion.