Medical Residency Timeline for International Medical Graduates

Medicine 2.0 : Applying what has been learned

It has been a long time since my last post. I have been busy working in different personal things. But a post by Bertalan Meskó make think about something that I realized long time ago. The key for a development of a culture of Medicine 2.0 is education : Health Digital Literacy.
Each one of us can help to make this possible. I am participating in a observership with a group of International Medical Graduates (IMGs) at UCLA. We have developed a web to share our experiences in the process of getting involve in the American Health Care System.
In the process I am also teaching my fellows all what I know about Medicine 2.0 .
Please Visit us:
UCLA International Medical Graduate (IMG) Program.

UCLA International Medical Graduate (IMG) Program Participants' BLOG.
Your feedback is always welcome.

Medicine 2.0 : Copyright or Creative Commons ?

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AWiki is an useful tool in the Web 2.0 environment. We can use it to collaborate with our colleagues to create knowledge online. Some days ago I read a post about Wiserwiki, a new project launched by Elsevier. This is not the only medical wiki that exists. Actually exists a long list of medical wikis. What is different with this wiki is the fact that the information created here for the medical community belongs to the publisher that owns the wiki. It means that if you want to use the information that exist in this wiki, you have to ask permission to the owner in order to do that. This fact is not new, it is how the industry of information has been working since the invention of copyright. When we write a medical article, we sent our work to a medical journal. They review it, and if they think that the article is good, they publish it. They copyright our work, they become the owners of our work. But do we have to copyright everything that we create? is this the only option that we have? The answer is no. We can make our work under a creative commons license. For long time we have depended on publishers to diffuse, distribute, collect, circulate and propagate the information we create. But nowadays do we need publishers to do these? The answer is no. What we need it is to learn how to use the web 2.0 in medicine.
We have to work really hard to spread this concepts, it is still not widely known for the health care community and sometimes you feel lonely in a digital world. Finally what you are going to do with your work will depend on each one of us. We can do what ever we want with our work. Some people will prefer to reserve the rights of their work, while others will share their work without restrictions. What could be the consequences of this changes in the mentality of the people? Can you understand the possibilities it has? Karina Descartin says : " I understand the possibilities better than ever: broader knowledge, wider accessibility for medical students and professionals, and more exchange of vital information among peers than ever before". What do you think?

Web Conference in Medicine 2.0 : Tool to Connect Doctors

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Two days ago I received an invitation to try the Beta version of DimDim. This is a free web meeting conference tool. It is not the only one that exist, but this is free, open source, with a general public license. After I tried it, I can say that I am really pleased with it. It still has some bugs, but you can work with it pretty well. Previously I wrote bout Yugma, but DimDim I think it is better. What is interesting about this service is the fact that anyone can use it from anywhere. You only need a computer and good internet access. There is no necesity to upgrade your computer system. I have used it with my two years old laptop, an Acer Aspire 5000, AMD Turion 64 (1 MB L2 cache), 1.6 GHZ, and 1 GB DDR of RAM with Windows XP. I was looking for medical schools that offer this service for their students, an it was really interesting to read all the rules you have to follow to access this service, for example you can read the Stanford School of medicine video conference services page, to have an idea of that. This is a tool with a lot of potential to connect doctors that work in rural communities with those who work in urban communities, but not only that, the potential use we as doctors can give to this service is just amazing. Check out the video from the DimDim creators.

Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival

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I want to start this post by saying that all the articles I have received to make this blog carnival are excellent. All of them have made me think deeply about the fact that knowledge begins with conversation. Being informed is so important and we have to be aware of that. Thirteen years ago when I read The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler, I did not get the real magnitude of the changes that will occur in our time. Now here we are seeing how things are happening in front of our eyes.

User generated content is something we read all the time, Bertalan Meskó recommends us to take a look to Radiopaedia 2.0 Update, GooMedic gives as a link to Family Practice Notebook with lot of information available to anyone of us. But not only independent persons can generate content, hospitals can do it too. Health Care Law Blog points an important question: Should Hospitals Blog?.

With lot of information that is created second by second, it is important to create a way to determine what is good and reliable and what is not. Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting (BPR3 ) are working hard to do that. In a post How BPR3 could work with other sites they explain us what they are doing. Credibility is important, check this presentation about web credibility.

Because lot of information is available, we have to learn how to recognize what is being read by others and for that there are many tools we can use, David Rothman gives us a tip with PubMed Citations (Greasemonkey Script).

We want the information no in our computers but in our hands, Clinical Cases and Images posts about Kindle e-book reader by Amazon: you can have 200 (medical) books on one device. I have not tried it. But if I were asked I would prefer a ultra mobile PC. We all involved in the Web 2.0 and Medicine environment realize that anywhere and free access to the information are the key. Huge companies are interested to control the market( and the information), the better way to do that is by controlling the market with their devices that only allow you to use their products, good examples of that are the ipod and the iphone

Information is out there and not only doctors can access it, our potential patients too. eHealth writes about Patient as Googler. A good example of how well informed a patient can be is Jmday, she describes really well her bad experience she had with a flu shot in The flu ep(idem)ic.

Medgadget writes about new services like iMedicor Portal for Medical Professionals to improve interaction between doctor and patients. Information is power, of course it is, that is why Constructive Medicine 2.0 writes about the efforts big companies such as Microsoft are doing to develop projects like Personal Health Vault

Medical 2.0 points something important about The influence of the Health 2.0 trend, but are we doing something to avoid the cannibalization of the medical sector. The future is now as Patient's Doctor tells us about Virtual Office Visits: A Reachable and Reimbursable Innovation.

The next edition of blog carnival will be at Medical education. Please submit your blog article to the next edition of Medicine 2.0; use our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Web 2.0 and Medicine: It is about having Digital Creativity

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In the previous post I wrote that to learn about Web 2.0 and Medicine is as important as to learn how to write. But the main idea here, it is to realize that with the technologies we have on our desks, we can express our ideas and share our knowledge in many different ways, not only by writing. We can use sounds, images, videos, animations, we can talk to others, we can discuss with others, we can share screens, edit documents at the same time, create communities, etc. There is no limit. Just use your imagination and be creative.

Digital Creativity

"New technologies give us the ability to represent so many different kinds of object in the same standard digital format (text, layout, image, sound, 3D object, moving image, etc.). They also provide us with the mechanisms to capture, store, manipulate and output these representations to produce objects we can experience through our senses. This unity of underlying representational form and technological processing provides the foundations of a convergence."

   Recommended links:
   Pictobrowser
   Web 2.0 : Imagine the Possibilities
    Digital Creativity

Why is Important to Learn About Web 2.0 and Medicine ?

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have been learning about the Web 2.0 for more than a year. Since February I have been writing about it in this blog. The purpose is to share with others what I know, to get more and more people involved with it. Not all my colleagues I have talked to about it really understand the concept or why it is so important to learn about it though.
That is why I have been thinking how to teach my colleagues in the health care community about the importance of Web 2.0 and Medicine. But without complicated terms or definitions. Why is important to learn about it? For me it is really clear that these concepts and technologies of the web 2.0 applied to medicine are going to change how the flow of medical information is created. With the use of these "new" tools we are going to go back to basics, and we will have the chance to learn medicine in a Socratic way again. We will have more time to spend with our peers to talk about the humanistic side of medicine. Learning about Web 2.0 and Medicine is as important as to learn about writing. All of us recognize the importance of knowing how to write. I think all of us can recognize the importance of writing in the mankind history.
I going to quote The British Library Board. Why to write: "For thousands of years human beings have used marks, symbols, drawings and signs to communicate with one another. In order to share knowledge, we need to be able to store information and pass it on to future generations. Memory is our first resource, but, over the centuries, we have developed many other ways to store and transmit information."
You know how to write in paper format and you know all the advantages it has. But do you know how to write on internet ? How much do you know ? Can you imagine all the opportunities the learning of these technologies can generate? That is why to learn about Web 2.0 and Medicine is important.